Dino Drac’s December Funpack!
(NOTE: Available in the United States only!)
Okay folks, I’m ready to plug the hell out of Dino Drac’s Funpacks again! For those who don’t know, for 25 bucks each month, you’ll get a new box of random junk sent straight to your door, every month! (And yes, you can cancel at any time!) Subscriptions keep this site alive, and in return, you’ll get a package full of insanity each month.
Check it out… the December 2014 Funpack HAS LANDED!
It’s a hot hot ho ho holiday extravaganza! Read More…
Old Junk Food, Revisited!
As you’ve probably surmised, I collect old food. Old food packaging, and actual old food. I don’t know how this became my thing, but that’s the hand I was dealt, and tonight, I’m gonna play it.
So behold! Old junk food from my personal collection! You’ve seen a few of these things in previous articles both here and on X-E, but, well, what can I say? When you have an empty box of Oatmeal Swirlers, ya gotta brag.
From 1990, here’s one of the crown jewels of my collection. Even people who never ate Oatmeal Swirlers remember it fondly, thanks to its awesome TV commercials, which alternated between the use of a catchy jingle and the use of a goddamned anthropomorphic strawberry stickman.
If you’re too young to remember this stuff, I call bullshit, because there’s no way you could stomach me without the constant notions of “I did/saw/ate that too!” But, for the sake of argument, I’ll explain.
Oatmeal Swirlers was oatmeal with a gimmick. In addition to the everyday packets of everyday oatmeal, kids were provided with smaller packets of… uh… what can I call them? LIQUID FRUIT ROLL-UPS. Yes, liquid Fruit Roll-Ups! With those, you could literally draw on your bowls of oatmeal with a variety of fruit-flavored slimes.
If there was anything that could make oatmeal even more exciting than little dinosaur eggs that hatched into little candy dinosaurs, Oatmeal Swirlers was it. The packets of fruity goo didn’t allow for quite the same level of artistic finesse as promised by the commercials, but so long as you stuck with simple shapes, you’d finish breakfast feeling like da Vinci.
(And hey, even if your pictures came out messy, you could at least feel like Wassily Kandinsky.) Read More…
7UP’s Countdown to Christmas Posters!
Just when you thought Dino Drac couldn’t get more obscure, here I am with a tribute to those old 7UP posters that let us glue cotton balls over Santa Claus’s face.
During various holiday seasons of the ‘80s and ‘90s, people who bought enough 7UP soda scored free “Countdown to Christmas” posters, right from whatever supermarket they were shopping at.
Now, these weren’t normal posters. There were several variations over the years (you can see another here), but the main bullet points were always the same. The posters always featured Santa Claus’s enormous head, and the posters always came with a truncated December calendar, stamped right over his beard.
But wait! It gets better! Read More…
Weird TMNT toys from the late ’90s!
While scouring ancient and loosely archived versions of Playmates Toys’ website, I found a goldmine of late ‘90s Ninja Turtles crud. What an interesting time for those guys!
Many of us stopped collecting TMNT toys years before the line died (if it ever truly did), so if you’re like me, you missed some incredible stuff on the tail-end. If you think about it, lots of lines hit their creative peak too late for it to really matter. Arguably, Kenner’s best Star Wars figures were the ones nobody had. Arguably, Mattel’s best Masters of the Universe toys came out long after He-Man lost his cool.
It was the same with Playmates’ Ninja Turtles collection. No longer guaranteed strong sales on brand name alone, the toys grew weirder and more intricate, with the kinds of goofy special features that aren’t seen in toy lines until they hit their seventh string. If you never gave up on TMNT, you were rewarded in a big way.
Below: Tons of Ninja Turtles figures that some of you never knew existed!
TURTLE-IN-A-TURTLE FIGURES!
Holy hell, I WANT THESE. I was aware of the “micro” line of Ninja Turtles toys, but I had no idea that there were corresponding playsets shaped like Ninja Turtles!
Here, our four heroes start off as “complete” action figures, each with exclusive weapons and accessories. They would’ve been interesting enough even if they didn’t fold out to reveal two miniature Ninja Turtles living inside!
The “base” figures doubled as playsets, with a flavor akin to Mighty Max toys. Every part of them popped up, down or sideways, creating whole little worlds for your mini-figures. As expensive as they’ve become ($60 and up from what I see), can any true TMNT fan resist something called a Turtle In A Turtle? Read More…