Vintage Vending continues, with ROCKS. This is not going to be my most popular review.

I ain’t gonna front. I love this. I love, love, love this. Polished stones always thrill me, even when they’re presented as tacky jewelry. I would’ve been all over these prizes as a kid, and probably still now.

I’m immediately struck by how high-end they are, at least in comparison to most other vending machine prizes. I could see any of these things in a museum gift shop, and I’d expect to pay more than five bucks for some of them. That would be too much, but I don’t have a say in their prices.

With the known prizes being so good, there must’ve been a hundred unseen duds hiding in the machine. Of course, this does raise the question of what could be lower on the gemstone totem pole than a half-inch flawed quartz wrapped in a five-cent bead cap. I don’t have answers.

Viewed from just the right angle, the teaser card looks like a raceway, filled with speeding rocks that leave trails of metal and string in their collective wake. But good luck finding that angle. Read More…

I hadn’t intended for this to become an ’80s week on Dino Drac. It just worked out that way. And now I shall make it official by opening a box of cereal from 1986.

I don’t know exactly when Rocky Road Cereal went out of production, but it did, and people miss it. Not all people, but some people. I can’t honestly count myself among them, but that’s only because I grew up with too many other favorites to make room for this. From all accounts, it was a good little cereal. It deserves one more day in the sun.

So, here’s a video of me opening a vintage box, and trying to figure out how to make that interesting without actually eating it:

I don’t know if I succeeded, and I misspoke more than once, but I can guarantee that this will be your only shot at seeing a 1986 Rocky Road Cereal unboxing video. So there’s that.

From kindergarten through the third grade, I don’t think a school day went by that I didn’t see at least six dozen of those plastic “charms.” You know, the ones with the little bells attached, typically clipped onto long neon chains?

This photo tells the story better than I can:

These things were everywhere. The girls wore them as bracelet, necklace and earring ornaments, but even if they were more popular with females, it’s not like the guys were totally cut out. We just had to choose charms that were a little more macho. Toilet bowl charms, and charms that looked like tiny cans of Pepsi. Macho stuff like that.

From what I recall, there was no standard “way” to get these charms. Vending machines were the safest bet, but for a while, they were pretty much everywhere. No one company had “majority control” of ‘em, but it’s also true that some charms were much better than others.

Like, if you had a charm that was based on a real life food item, that was gold. If your charm was a fully-functioning miniature version of some everyday appliance, that was silver. Then there was the sea of bronze, filled with everything from animals to tennis rackets to baby bottles. Read More…