I haven’t published a new edition of Five Random Action Figures since last June, because the remaining bits of my collection are stuffed into storage bins so extremely buried that I’d have to tear this whole place apart to get at ‘em. Luckily, life threw me a bone:

As part of our pre-Endgame festivities on Thursday, we dropped by a Jersey comic shop. There I discovered this insane bin filled with still-packaged ‘90s action figures, each for the low price of $2.99.

I easily found enough for another edition of Five Random Action Figures, though in retrospect, I should’ve cleaned the guy out and gotten enough for the next three editions. Guess I gotta go back. There was a pizza parlor across the street that looked like it hadn’t been renovated since 1985, so that’s hardly a cross to bear.

Below: Five action figures from the 1990s, freshly freed from their cardboard prisons.

The Conqueror!
Total Chaos (1996)

I know as much about this “Conqueror” guy as I do the Total Chaos line at large, which is to say… nothing. He’s from McFarlane Toys and in the same roundabout scale as that company’s Spawn figures, which by their era’s standards were pretty damn high-end.

I bought him because he looks like Green Arrow mixed with Pumpkinhead, and especially because his monster face resembles a chunk of fake jade.

The appeal of action figures you knew nothing about was that YOU could make up their origins, powers and allegiances. I see this Conqueror as an interstellar bounty hunter who only takes contracts to retrieve supernatural fugitives. Like Boba Fett if Boba Fett was also a Ghostbuster. Without knowing anything about Conqueror’s true motives, I stand confident that my version is better. Read More…

Below are five ridiculous movie-themed junk foods that I’ve collected over the years. They were pulled from storage bins that I wish were airtight, but definitely aren’t.

Hostess Snoballimus and Chocwave Cakes!
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

I still rate these as the weirdest snacks Hostess has ever produced, and also the most beautiful. They’re out there by today’s standards, but they were impossibly strange in 2011. I’d say they were some of the first junk foods that seemed designed for hyperbolic reactions on social media.

The “Chocwave” cupcakes were severe, but nothing beat those “Snoballimus” monsters, with their blue coconut capes and blood red filling. They were admittedly more fun to look at than eat, because while many artificial food dyes are technically flavorless, using THAT MUCH DYE was gonna impart something. As I recall, the flavors seemed chalkier than usual, while the texture was oddly mealy.

Even so, they were gorgeous, and I will never knock an attempt to transform a Hostess Sno Ball into Optimus Prime. Even if said Sno Ball looked more like Man-At-Arms chewing Bubblicious.

Nabisco Royal Ooze!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (1991)

It was no big leap to go from mutagen ooze to Jell-O, or even Nabisco’s underachieving version of Jell-O. A tie-in with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, Nabisco’s Royal Ooze came in an assortment of colors and flavors.

The lime green and strawberry red versions were canonical enough, but once you got up to the orange ooze, you had to start thinking about offshoot mutagens with alternative properties. Like maybe orange was the antidote? Mikey could help transform Splinter back into Hamato, and follow it up with some “orange ya glad” joke? No?

The best thing about Royal Ooze was the packaging. Each box featured a different Ninja Turtle, and none of them wore expressions that were in any way suitable for product shots. In particular, Leonardo seemed to suggest that Royal Ooze was loaded with tryptophan. Read More…

Ohhh, man. Gonna be honest, I can’t get a feel for how this month’s Funpack looks on paper, but I can promise you that it’s one of my ultimate favorites in all of the years that I’ve been doing this. When you get these babies in the mail, your socks will be rocked.

AVAILABLE FOR THREE DAYS ONLY! UNITED STATES ONLY!

By now you’ve all seen me gush about old school geek magazines, and how important they were in nurturing (if not outright shaping) our hobbies during pre-internet times. I’ve even worked geek mags into a few older Funpacks, but never quite like this.

This month, you’ll each receive FOUR different vintage geek magazines, each individually bagged and boarded. I’ll tell you more about this in a minute, but first, here’s the usual Funpack spiel:

Funpack subscriptions are $25 per month, and that price includes shipping. For as long as you remain subscribed, you’ll keep getting new boxes filled with old awesome nonsense each and every month. (Well, boxes or envelopes, as the case is this month!)

Scroll to the bottom for ordering info, or keep reading to learn about everything you’ll receive in this month’s Funpack! Read More…