Awesome & Expensive Junk on eBay.
I’ve been keeping an eye on a few eBay auctions despite having no plans to actually bid, out of sheer amazement that people have such rare stuff to sell. Like, how the hell do you end up with 59 Fireball Island board games?
Most of these treasures will ultimately make quiet exits, remembered only be the few who were lucky enough to stumble upon their auction listings. So you can consider this post my way of making sure that certain items of the “holy shit” variety have a forever home on the internet.
Store Display of Masters of the Universe Slime!
Asking Price: $1249.00
Photo by great-items | Auction Link
The auction listing is presently inactive, but I’ve been tracking it for months, and I’m sure the seller will give it another go sooner or later. What a find! A complete store display of Masters of the Universe Slime!
Next to Modulok, those cans of Slime were probably my favorite items from the vintage MOTU line. Most of us associate them with the legendary Slime Pit playset, but Mattel was just as interested in selling them separately. (I have such fond memories of this exact display being right beside the register in our mall’s long gone Kay Bee.)
The cans were also used a promotional device, given away free to anyone who bought two He-Man figures over a certain time period. Of the 28 cans in this display, 9 of them have stickers for that very promotion.
According to the seller, less than a third of the cans have dried out. At around 45 bucks a can, this actually isn’t too bad of a deal! (While sealed Slime cans have been sold for cheaper, it’s pretty tough to find them with still-gooey contents.) Read More…
The Christmas Fallout, 2014 Edition!
Happy 209th anniversary to the Treaty of Pressburg!
I hope everyone had a great Christmas. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you had great Chinese food. Mine was the usual two-day marathon of TOO MUCH EVERYTHING. The holiday season was a little rough around the edges, but it ended strong with family and friends and triple-spiked eggnog and the Bumpus hounds.
This is the annual Christmas Fallout post, where we swap stories about our holiday celebrations. More accurately, it’s where we tackily compare our new loot!
Considering that I couldn’t have cared less about what I got from Santa, I made out like a bandit this year. The one benefit of having to give out so many presents is that I get almost as many. I’d also like to think that I’m fun to shop for, because there aren’t many thirty-somethings who get excited about Freddy Krueger candy holders and gaudy statues that seem to blend giraffes and zebras into whole new animals.
I’ve collected some of my favorite NEW THINGS down below. Feel free to talk about your NEW THINGS in the comments. After all, we get so few opportunities to act like classless children. Revel while you can!
Funko Pop Slimer Figure!
Perhaps the most creative Pop figure to date, Slimer is also one a very few that I had to have. (As awesome as that line is, it’s something I’ve chosen to admire from afar. This was an obvious exception, since no other Pop figure uses ghost slime as a stand-in for legs.) Read More…
The 1982 Sears Wish Book!
It’s almost Christmas Eve, and I have so much left to do. None of the presents are wrapped. Half of them haven’t even been purchased. There are mushrooms to stuff, clothes to wash, cookies to bake and hair to cut.
So, like a big dumb idiot, I made one more Wish Book review the first priority.
Hot off the heels of yesterday’s post, today we’re going back even further. Below are eight highlights from the 1982 Sears Wish Book, and oh my God are they good ones. I know “1982” sounds too long ago for some of you, but a lot of this stuff is downright timeless.
Get ready for He-Man, Glo Worm and Frankenstein’s Monster. I wish I could introduce all of my posts that way.
Star Wars AT-AT!
($49.99)
If you’re not big on Star Wars, AT-ATs were skyscraper-sized robot “dogs” used by Imperial forces to attack the Rebel Alliance’s base on the ice planet of Hoth. Granted, saying so has just made you more confused.
I have firsthand knowledge of how incredible it was to get one for Christmas. I believe it would’ve been 1983. Our family celebrates on Christmas Eve and opens presents at midnight. Even at that late hour, nothing could stop me from immediately opening the box, and immediately dragging all of my Star Wars figures out of the bedroom. I was up until dawn with that thing!
Towering over the line’s 3¾” figures, the AT-AT had battery-operated lights and sounds, and a neat little compartment where several Snowtroopers could gather to make “nyah nyah” faces at the poor suckers down below.
It was the largest toy I’d ever had up to that point, and believe me, size mattered. AT-ATs are big, but in the cradling arms of tiny kids, they seemed enormous. Read More…
The 1985 JCPenney Christmas Catalog.
Oof. Christmas caught me by surprise this year, and I didn’t write nearly as often as I would’ve liked to. Can’t do anything about that now, so I’ll just try to make this an extra good one!
Today we’re gonna look at some highlights from the 1985 JCPenney catalog, which was basically another Sears Wish Book, serving as a veritable bible of that year’s hottest toys and games.
I actually covered this exact same catalog way back in 2007, but it seemed criminal to stop at a mere twelve items when the book had hundreds of things worth celebrating. 1985 was an absolute banner year for toys, as I think these seven selections will prove!
Gobots “Mobile Command Center” Playset!
($26.99)
Remember the AT-AT from Star Wars? This was like the its rad kid sister.
The Mobile Command Center was easily the crown jewel of Tonka’s Gobots collection. Starting off as a four-legged transport not unlike those behemoths from The Empire Strikes Back, the playset then transforms into a multi-level headquarters that doubles as a giant robot. TOO COOL, and not in the Brian Christopher way.
Oh, and speaking of Star Wars, one neat thing about Gobots playsets is how they worked just as nicely with those figures. (Same with G.I. Joe, or any of the other 3-4” lines.)
I’d like to say that I used the Mobile Command Center for that purpose, putting Darth Vader in charge of a futuristic apartment complex with a loft shaped like a robot head. The truth is, I never had one as a kid. A friend of mine did, and I was so jealous. He was one of those friends that I only had scattered after-school play-dates with, while our mothers forced awkward conversation over cups of bad coffee. That guy had everything. His bedroom looked like Toy Fair.
Through him, I saw enough of the Mobile Command Center to know that I was seriously deprived. This as close as we’ve ever come to the fictitious skyscraper robot from Big. Read More…