Just a quick stop off at
one of my most over-used post types, I sold the Masters of the Universe
Classics Roton because it was just too big for the pathetic size of my living
quarters and thus I had an eBay spend-up, no doubt buying enough stuff to equal
if not overtake the mass of the thing I sold – I’ve never claimed to be
sensible. This also coincided with some fruitful Charity Shop and Cheap Shop
trips so are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:
Mr Cadbury’s
Parrot(s)!
£8 for all three
These little grape
flavoured nutters, well technically it’s just one grape flavoured nutter as
they’re all of the same character, was the mascot for Cadbury’s Mini-Eggs,
supported by madcap adverts featuring an uncontrollable puppet and a variation
of Mr Slater’s Parrot by the Bonzo
Dog Doo-Dah Band sung by their actual lead singer, ginger geezer Viv Stanshall
(an eccentric delight who died after he fell asleep and set himself on fire,
there could be no better choice). Cadbury’s AND the Bonzos? Is it any wonder I
was a fat child? Not only did I have to save up proof of purchases but Viv
Stanshall was telling me I should eat more chocolate – in song! Anyway these
were made by Ideal (yeah, THAT Ideal) and you had to send off money to get
them, they came individually carded and you could get one or the whole set, as
they were doing the same offer for the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny – perhaps my
favourite mascot – at the same time mum only let me get one of the four parrots
(the one that’s not pictured, funnily enough), I’ve now finally rectified my
mistake and completed the set, the wonders of having your own money.
The Toxic Sludge
Dump!
£20
When I was wee, but not
really wee, semi-wee, about 8 years wee, there were two things that were in
every cheap shop I ever went in, all marked down to silly prices for what they
were – one was the Swamp Thing Swamp Trap playset from Kenner (which I bought in a mini-online spend-up and was going to post a post about but have now lost) and the other was this,
Captain Planet’s Toxic Sludge Dump from Tiger Electronics. Alias the Toxic
Trap, this thing is pretty simple, fill up that red thing with slime, have your
good guy knock on the door but! The door is not a door! It’s a vat to drown
that ginger prick Wheeler in! The Captain Planet & The Planteers towline
really shouldn’t have been as awesome as it was, it was based on a preachy
eco-warroring tv show and produced by a company that usually made handheld LCD
games, which you may have worked out are not action figures, and later went on
to produce the utterly horrible Game.com handheld, but it was awesome, it was a line of big chunky colourful eco-villains,
spot-on Planeteers and Captain Planet in all number of ridiculous, Kenner-level
variants, one of which included the wonderfully ironic action feature of using
water to make Cap look dirty. The only let-down in the whole line for me was
All-American Captain Planet, not because it was disgustingly American but
because they didn’t go far enough, he should have been covered head to toe in
the American Flag and come with an eagle that shot an Abraham Lincoln shaped
missile – Kenner would have done it. Oddly this didn’t come with a can of pot
of ooze like we were used to via Real Ghostbusters, He-Man or TMNT (or Slime
itself) but ooze you had to mix up with water first like some kind of horribly
unpleasant (but non-toxic) icing.
A Special
Force!
£2
This was my big bargain,
the person selling this didn’t know what it was and had it listed as ‘unknown
paratrooper’ or something similar, and I was only looking through her items
because I wanted to buy the TMNT Movie storybook and wanted something else to
make the postage seem less horrible. What is this little chap? He’s from
Sungold’s Special Force, a half-arsed
attempt to knock-off G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero from the company that made
Galaxy Warriors and Monster, they are not usually £2 including postage but
funnily enough the only other one I have (who looks like Shipwreck merged with
every Mexican villain in every movie ever) I got for 50p from a bootsale (he
was utterly filthy though so I probably spent a good £5 on Fairy washing up
liquid cleaning him). I’ll tell you what, as these are lesser known, here’s my
little index for them, all four figures came in either predominantly blue
(exemplified by the latter two figures) or predominantly green (as exemplified
by the first two figures) and were sold either single carded or two-to-a-card,
none of them had individual names:
Grown Up
Action Figures!
£20 for both
This is just here to prove
that yes, I do in fact buy serious adult collector’s figures on a regular basis
even if I’m not at all serious about the term ‘adult collector’s figure’ – I
know it serves a purpose for the product manufacturers (“this isn’t for
children even though you’d think it was”) and I get not wanting to be looked
down on, I get that people who turn up their nose or giggle at adults buying
things aimed for kids is unnecessarily judgemental and flat out hypocritical
when these ‘normal’ people casually collect junk like gnomes or Buddhas
(despite not being Buddhist) or plates or snow globes or whatever else and this
is considered so normal it’s not even worth thinking about but it’s the
combination of ‘adult’ ‘collector’s’ and ‘figure’ that just sounds completely
ridiculous to me, and like you’re hording sex toys. I also think it does us no
favours to insist on using terms like it, it doesn’t make us sound like we’re
trying to legitimize the things we like; it makes us sound like the
out-of-touch freaks people think we are. Well that went off somewhere, what was
I talking about? Figma! These are two Figma figures for Sword Art Online, which
is very possibly my favourite anime, I’ve got Sinon on the way too. Kirito’s
leg falls off fairly frequently, I find it too amusing to get annoyed at,
you’ll shift him a little and PLOP his leg’ll be off again, “Kirito” I sigh in
a way similar to how I’d admonish him if he’d knocked some books off a shelf,
and then I ram his appendage back up him with just a little too much glee.
Frankentrolls!
$10 the pair
Well, one’s a Frankenzelf
technically because the copyright finally returned to Dam Things. I honestly
have nothing interesting to say about these, I just wanted to post a picture of
two monster trolls, one of whom looks suspiciously like Allun Armstrong. Ooh I tell you what is mildly interesting;
you see the swirl that Frankenzelf (that’s his actual name by the way) is using
like an effect piece? That’s actually a small rubber device that allows you get
perfectly pointed troll hair, how cool is that? And why did it take this long
to devise it?
Super Robotic
Ranger!
£4
I saw this on a completely
unrelated search (I think it was for Ninja Turtles) and for a moment I think I
understood collectors who like their stuff on the card. My nan and mum used to
both work at a cheap shop called Saint’s in the early-to-mid 1990s, it was a
real classic cheap shop, a mix of cheap porcelain, copyright infringement and
three year old toys where every space was filled, I fucking LOVED it and used
to ‘work’ there during the holidays, where I just hung around, marvelled at the
stock room and carried stuff for its owner, Sue Saint, whose husband the late
Ron Saint, was the primary stockists of the UFO machines at Southend-on-Sea
(and the man responsible for stocking Saint’s itself). While I couldn’t say for
certain this particular knock-off Power Rangers line was sold at Saint’s if it
wasn’t its very similar to the various lines they did stock and seeing it
transports me back to Saint’s in an instant, but I know if it took it out of
its packaging (which has seen better days) it wouldn’t have the same effect. Oh
well, it’s not like I don’t have a selection of loose knock-off Power Rangers
from this (or like I’ll stop buying loose knock-off Power Rangers from this
era), Kimberly, sorry, Bimberly, can stay
in her plastic prison.
Turtles in
Sandals!
£8 for the two
I fucking hate sandals,
they’re like thongs for your feet – impractical, uncomfortable, cover nothing
and do their job terribly, in fact, in Australia they’re actually called
thongs, but you know who doesn’t hate sandals? Feudal Japan! Feudal Japan
was all sandals, grunting, beards and giant rabbits, my knowledge of this time
period may be entirely based on the third TMNT movie, The Seven Samurai and
Usagi Yojimbo, but I can’t see why any of those things would be inaccurate. Do
you know who else doesn’t hate sandals? Four foot talking reptiles, at least
when they’re being dressed by Playmates – think back, you probably had at least
three Turtles in sandals, still I suppose their feet were the right shape to
accommodate sandals perfectly and what the fuck am I talking about? I looked
after most of my action figures, mostly because I’d get so upset if one got
broken (I got attached very easy as a child), but I’m not perfect and some got
broken over the years, my wave 1 Raphael and Michaelangelo got crushed under
the weight of snow, for instance, and when I sorted through all my toys a
couple of years ago I found that in the time between childhood and then my
Donatello from the third movie had lost an arm and my Sewer Samurai Leonardo
had lost most of his plates. These are the replacements, I thought the initials
‘disguised’ Turtles from the second wave were so cool, it was like they all
went off to college and had separate careers – alright, those careers were
astronaut, surfer, spy and samurai but I wouldn’t expect Ninja Turtles to have
regular jobs. I never found the arm, by the way.
Melting
Mervin!
Free!
The first wave of Fiendish
Feet is getting their own post someday but Mervin here is from a much latter
wave of yoghurt pots so he won’t be in that. Rather than refund me some
postage, and by that I mean rather than figure
out how to refund me some postage, the bloke I bought the rest of the
Fiendish Feet off of asked if I wanted this slightly battered chap instead. He
then devised the most ingenious way to send these pretty fragile containers to
me – turns out they’re the perfect size to fit in tin cans, so I got three tin
cans covered in brown tape through the post and was most confused. I had a
parcel ‘broken into’ recently and a DVD nicked from it, I had this lovely
vision of the same turd trying it with this parcel and being utterly baffled -
then having a non-fatal heart attack because they’re severely allergic to tin,
yoghurt and monsters.
Sabre!
You don’t want to know
End with a bang. This was
the most expensive thing I bought this spend-up; this is Zabre Fang in its
Zoids 2 form, a Europe-only Zoids line where Tomy released a bunch of old kits
in beautifully garish colours under odd names. Zoids 2 has cropped up a couple
of times on here because it’s one of my favourite toylines and responsible for
some of my favourite toy memories. For instance: I found my first lot of Zoids
2 at a garden centre called Springtime, yes a garden centre, the place you buy
plant pots and stone animals from and where old people eat cake. I dunno what
it’s like in America but our garden centres sell everything from toys to koi to
imported American sweets and have wicked seasonal sections for Halloween and
Christmas, which is why we were at Springtime the time I found the Zoids. I was
so happy and the Zoids were so cheap my Nan bought up one of every one they had
including the big ticket items Ultrasaurus, Iron Kong and Zoidzilla – they were
like £10 each. But it gets better, Zoids are not built for play really and they
gradually fell apart so a few years later I went back to Springtime secretly
hoping they’d have Zoids 2 again, but knowing they probably wouldn’t because it
had been so long – nope, they still had all of them, so nan bought me them all
again! I have no idea where that second set went, I know the Ultrasaurus fell
apart under my bed despite not really being touched that much (such is the way
of Zoids) so now I have to pay extortionate eBay prices for something that got
a completely standard release in the UK and could be bought at fucking garden
centres for pennies because they weren’t released in America. Sabre’s second
only to Iron Kong in my affections, Zoids 2-wise, I was actually hoping to use
what was left of the money I got for the Roton on getting a half price ‘Kong
but there wasn’t any up on eBay so instead I got a silver-purple sabretooth
tiger with more guns than The Punisher, while it’s not quite as cool as big
gold and black gorilla I’m sure you’ll agree that’s still bloody sweet. Also I
had a really nice artistic picture of Sabre for this post but because I’m a
terrible photographer none of them were in focus so instead enjoy this regular
boring photo.
I was pretty unhappy with
selling the Roton but it easily turned out for the best the end, I got some of my big ‘wants’
from the 1990s and a spattering of random other shit to keep it interesting. Now
all together: when Mr Slater’s parrot says “hello!” – a geezer likes to get one
on the go!...you’v never head of this song have you? Or The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band, or I’m the Urban Spaceman, or Viv Stanshall, or Mr Cadbury’s
Parrot…I’m so alone…
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