The 10 best “Carnival Mirror Prizes” on eBay.
Here I am, ready to do my best with the blogger’s version of a dead man’s hand.
The situation: I have not slept. I don’t know how it happened. I was in bed in the dark and it was all very sleep-encouraging. Somehow, no sleeping occurred. Now I’m about to write an article with more than a day’s distance between me and my last slumber. Don’t bet on good jokes!
The situation, made a billion times worse: This post is about carnival mirror prizes. 99% of you have no idea what I even mean by that, and I’m in no position to explain it. We’re totally fucked here, and I haven’t even started.
I’ll do my best.
“Carnival mirrors prizes” are those square pieces of mirrored glass, blessed with images of our favorite cartoon, movie and beer commercial characters. Shoved inside crude cardboard frames, they were (and to some degree, still are) common prizes at carnivals and amusement parks. Like, if you hit the three pins off the Lazy Susan or whatever, you went home with a carnival mirror prize.
So, in the spirit of those Jaws and Shamu articles, I collected the ten best carnival mirror prizes currently on eBay. That’s why the photos look so terrible. I done stoleded them. Read More…
Deadsites #5: Pokemon World, from 1999!
Today on Deadsites: A whole lotta Pikachu. If you don’t care about Pokemon, you uh… may want to pick a different article to read. I wrote two yesterday, if that helps?
Technically, this isn’t as much a “Deadsite” as a changed site. Pokemon.com is still active, obviously, but it’s changed quite a bit since 1999!
Yep, you’re looking at the official Pokemon site from around fourteen years ago. It was called “Pokemon World,” and it was old school in all the best ways.
I didn’t catch Pokemon fever until early 2000, but since its universe moved more slowly back then, everything on this site is familiar territory. There isn’t much on here that I didn’t live and breathe. If you were a Pokemon fan during this era, you’re about to get a fiery missile of Pika nostalgia up the nose. Hopefully, that’s your idea of fun. Read More…
14 Photos of Snakeweed.
I took fourteen photos of Snakeweed. See below.
Photo #1:
This is Snakeweed, one of the evil mutants from the new TMNT series. Which I suppose isn’t all that “new” anymore. The figure came out a while ago, but I normally only see the four Turtles in stores – never their assorted friends and enemies. So yeah, this was my first crack at Snakeweed. A fucking giant plant monster. Bonus. Read More…
1990s Comic Books Ads!
A week or so ago, I bought a big pile of old comic books. Since I have little interest in what Ghost Rider was doing in 1994, my purchase was mostly made to find more of those great old ads. Here are five, at random!
Bic Wavelength Pens
Fantastic Four #67 (2nd printing, 1994)
I’d completely forgotten about these! Bic’s “Wavelengths” were regular pens with plastic “wrappers” around the bodies, or shafts, or whatever you call the stick-like parts.
Rods? Batons?
Many Wavelengths had distinct themes, but there seemed to be even more with completely abstract patterns in crazy colors. It’s hard to believe in 2013, but pens with wacky wrappers really were a big deal.
If you were a chewer like me, you could easily bite the wrappers off of the shafts (or rods, or batons), which revealed normal Bic pens underneath. I did this with virtually all of my Wavelengths, no matter how great the designs were. I dunno, man. Destroying them with my teeth just made me feel so accomplished. I say this not with pride, but with confidence that thousands of you also chewed them, and felt exactly the same way when you did. Read More…