I wanted to sneak in one last catalog review before Santa makes his magic, so here I am, blithely ignoring the dozen Very Important Things that I must get done in the next 36 hours, all for you.

This time, I’m pulling pages from the 1994 JCPenney Christmas catalog. I believe I would’ve been a high school freshman or possibly even a sophomore by that point, so my own experiences with these items were more of the cursory or “admire from afar” variety. It’s fun to see what I missed during that literal one year gap between when I was “allowed” to play with toys and when I discovered the “yo I’m a collector” loophole.

Below are a thousand words about eight things from the 1994 JCPenney Christmas catalog. Enjoy them.

Top-Loading Nintendo!
($46.99)

I’d already moved onto the Super Nintendo when this came out, but even if I hadn’t, my original NES still worked fine. To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen a top-loading NES in person.

Also known as the NES-101 or NES 2, the system retailed for a modest fifty bucks — mainly by necessity, since it was “competing” with 16-bit systems. The system’s design lacked bulk and arguably seemed “cheaper” than the original Nintendo, but the truth was that the changes were largely improvements: The top-loading design made the system both easier to clean and not as apt to break.

From what I see, these top-loaders now fetch more money than the original systems, I think owing as much to their comparative rarity as the technical improvements. (There are gamer collectors much the same as there are toy collectors, and one needn’t necessarily “need” a top-loader to “want” it!) Read More…

I must’ve handled more than 200 Christmas tree ornaments over the course of my childhood, but I only distinctly remember a select few.

There was the candy cane that I made out of glitter and construction paper. Then the too-heavy Santa with the missing foot. And who would forget our old pinecone, covered by what was supposed to be fake snow but more closely resembled snot?

Above them all, though, was that cheap plastic Energizer Bunny.

Back in 1992, Energizer gave away four Christmas tree ornaments. While I initially believed that these were widely available across the country, further research indicates that they may have only been released regionally. If you’ve never heard of these, sucks for you, but I think you can see why applicable kids went wild for ’em!

The commercial embedded above — not my upload, by the way — goes a long way in explaining how silly plastic rabbits could’ve caused such a stir. You’ll notice that it aired during children’s programming, sandwiched between Charlie Brown and an advertisement for a LEGO set. It wasn’t hard for kids to put 2 and 2 together: These were the tree ornaments that we could own outright. Us, ourselves. Not our moms, not our dads and not our siblings. None of that “communal” bullshit, either. Read More…

It’s a Christmas miracle! The Purple Stuff Podcast has returned!

For those who don’t follow me on Twitter, yeah, we decided to take it easy with the schedule this month, because December is riotously busy and something had to give. We didn’t want to miss our chance to do at least one holiday-themed episode, though, so here we are!

This week, me and Jay from The Sexy Armpit tackle twelve awesome Christmas songs. For the record, I am a major Christmas music fanatic, and so is Jay. This ridiculous topic means the world to us. Lord knows if it’ll mean anything to you, but, whatever… listen to us anyway.

You can hear the new episode by clicking on that obnoxiously large button, or download it directly by clicking here. The Purple Stuff Podcast is also on iTunes, Stitcher and Podbean!

Thanks so much for listening! We’ll figure out a regular schedule for the show once the holidays are through. Read More…