Matt’s Medium Adventure!
A few weeks ago, Ms. X and I agreed to help a relative get to and from the hospital for a minor surgery.
Yesterday was the day. There were no complications, but the procedure ended up taking four times longer than everyone expected. That left us with several hours to drive around the area, desperately searching for time-wasters that would limit our minutes in a stuffy, overflowing waiting room.
We found a bunch! Read More…
THE ULTIMATE TERMINATOR.
[stextbox id=”alert” caption=”Stop Right There!”]There’s a new feature up! It’s about a Kenner toy catalog from 1992! Read it here![/stextbox]
Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the biggest movie of 1991, ushering in a new generation of kids who were maybe-kinda-sorta interested in Terminator toys.
Kenner held the license and gave it a good shot. Though the standard-sized action figures are probably the ones you remember most, the collection’s best figure stood over a foot tall!
It was called… THE ULTIMATE TERMINATOR.
Can I start by gushing over the box? Because this really is a gush-worthy box.
It’s just so ‘90s. From the torn metal graphics (appropriate for Terminator toys, but by no means exclusive to them) to the use of 87 different fonts, the box was more a product of its time than the actual thing inside it. Read More…
Watermelon Oreo Cookies!
I’ve received no less than two dozen messages from readers eager to hear my thoughts about Nabisco’s new Watermelon Oreos. And if we remove the word “dozen” from the preceding statement, it’d actually be true.
Behold, Watermelon Oreo cookies. On one hand bizarre, yet still perfect for summer. I’ve become so desensitized to Oreo upgrades that nothing surprises me anymore, but for those who haven’t closely studied Nabisco’s obsession with freaky Oreo flavors over these past many years, I concede that this may be big news. If you’re wondering why I’m writing like this, I finished reading A Game of Thrones literally fifteen minutes ago.
(Biggest differences between that and the TV show? I guess I can’t mention them here without being spoileriffic. I will say that the Eyrie sounded a hell of a lot more impressive in the book than it looked on television. I was especially fond of the mules!) Read More…
Vintage Vending #14: Magic Tricks and Jokes!
I don’t know why I’ve waited so long to feature this set. It’s one of the best Vintage Vending collections yet!
The “Magic Tricks and Jokes” assortment is like an old Johnson Smith ad come to life. The collective charm far outweighs the fact that every item on the card is a hunk of junk, at least in the practical sense. (Even the truly neat items were miniaturized to the point of pointlessness, unless your head really is tiny enough to don Groucho glasses with a three-inch diameter.)
The set is from 1987 – right within the era of the legendary “50 cents each” ads that waited inside so many comic books and kiddy magazines, offering the full-sized versions of these tiny treasures.
I don’t know if I can truthfully say that squirt flowers and phony vampire fangs were ever “all the rage,” but if you were going to pick a year to turn them into vending machine fodder, you could do a lot worse than 1987. Read More…