Saturday 25 May 2019

Examples of Crap I Waste My Money On: Bootsale Report 24!



So this would have been written and posted earlier but I went on holiday within a few hours of getting home from the bootsale and had to sleep, eat, pack and crap in that timeframe and there just wasn’t any room to squeeze in writing and posting a crappy blog post about old toys. Sorry everyone.


This bootsale was a resounding success, far better than last week’s dalliance and proof that a small bootsale doesn’t necessarily equal an unsuccessful one. check it out ^, vintage Real Ghostbusters, vintage Pokémon, vintage VR Troopers and how old does it make you feel to know that there are such things as vintage Pokémon and VR Troopers? Because it makes me feel roughly kill myself years young!


Anyway…

Detective Comics Annual 7!
£1 ($1.27)
Ohshitohshitohshit – this issue! Look at that cover and guess what it’s about.
Did you guess ‘pirate Batman’?
You’re absolutely right!
Written by right-wing twat but Batman writer extraordinaire Chuck Dixon this one issue has pirate Batman (Captain Leatherwing) fight pirate Catwoman (Captain Felina) AND pirate Joker (The Laughing Man) and it is wonderful. In fact it’s such an obvious way of making something completely unceasingly awesome you wonder why it’s not done more often, but this came out in 1994 and we’d only see a smattering of pirate Batman, mostly Captain Leatherwing in back-up stories, until The Return of Bruce Wayne in 2010. Why hasn’t there been a 50-issue ongoing series written by Dixon and drawn by everyone who isn’t stupid enough to turn down the assignment ‘draw pirate Batman’?
‘Fun’ fact; Kenner made figures of Captain Leatherwing and Laughing Man and threw in a pirate Two-Face too, the thing is I don’t think many people really knew they had their basis in the comics (the Egyptian Batman and Catwoman they made in that line did too) because Kenner made so many mental variations of Batman that Pirate Batman only stood out because it wasn’t neon.

Loadsa TMNT Shit!
£6.50 ($8.26) for it all, approximately
Ninja Turtle stuff is…uncommon at bootsales, which is a pain because I always NEED TMNT things the way a junkie NEEDS heroin. But sometimes you apparently end up with a ton of it, yeah I know some of those are from fast food promotions and thus not exactly special but it does mean that I ended up with a set of toys that represent all of the major incarnations of the franchise – the original era, the early 2000s revival, the CGI movie era and the recent Nicktoons era – and as a massive Turtles geek that makes me so. Fucking. Happy.
Though the Movie Foot Soldier is probably more desirable from a collector’s perspective, the pièce de résistance here is easily the Tricera-Tanka, that big fuck-off truck in the back. The highlight of the Paleo-Patrol sub-line from the early 2000s 4Kids era of TMNT and I’m saying that about a line where they gave the Turtles bone armour and had them come with armoured dinosaurs and Savanti goddamn Romero who, if you missed him, is a time travelling monster-man who looks like a cave-Muppet from the fiery pits of hell. it’s one of the few vehicles from the 2000s line to really match up to the creativity of the original 80s-90s toyline, what with it being a camouflage-cum-turtle shell attack wagon armoured with weaponized fossils but it’s also exceptionally dark when thought about – this vehicle belongs to the Turtles and has ‘Tricera’ int it’s name, and when that that huge triceratops head is taken into account the only logical conclusion is that the boys had killed a Triceraton and mounted it’s skull on the front of their van to cause yet more deaths. That’s gruesome even for Mirage.

 
Squeaky Mickey Mouse!
£4 ($6.36)
Your guess is as good as mine with this one, despite being hopelessly weak for older Disney toys, and by that I mean pretty much anything that came out before Pocahontas and anything that feels like it did, I am not that knowledgeable on them, this could be a dog toy for all I know. This seems like an official Disney product, it’s stamped with ‘Walt Disney Productions’ but no other makers mark which would imply that it was made by Disney themselves, or it was made by someone who didn’t care to put their name on the toy itself (not as uncommon as you might think) or it’s a complete knock-off and the stamp is bullshit. Given it’s from the time when Disney were insisting that merchandise dress Mickey like a middle-aged white man going golfing if it is official it’s probably from the sixties or seventies.
I wish I could say that Mickey looks less like a deranged escapee from The Krusty the Clown Show in real life but I’d be a liar, and yes that is why I bought him.

Doctor Who Season 1!
£2 ($2.54)
Firstly, a preface: dear all Rose-haters:


Now, on with the bullshit: it was David Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor that actually got me into Doctor Who after years of shunning it for personal reasons so when is started buying DVDs of New Who it was with him where I began (specifically Season 2) and carried on from there, buying the next season once it was out so I just never went back and bought Season 1 with that bloke from Cracker in it and sorry no matter what he does, no matter what ridiculous role they give him for the MCU, that man will always be D.C.I. Bilborough first and foremost. He had one of the best death scenes in all of television and you want me to associate him with fucking Malekith? That twat from a filler arc in Walt Simonson’s run? No. This is a dying man’s statement! This is evidence!
So I’ve never actually owned a copy of Doctor Who Season 1, I’ve seen it, and seen several episodes many times, but I’ve always *ehem* watched it on the computer. This is fine but I saw this on a tarp, all cheap and covered in Billie Piper and her hotness  and I thought ‘I really would much prefer to cry my eyes at Father’s Day in the privacy of my own bedroom where no-on can see, judge and obviously mock me’ and ‘An Unearthly Child would just be so much better in the dark on your own hiding under the covers’ and ‘I could fast forward through as much of that twat from Coronation Street as I like if I had this, without having to guess with the little bar at the bottom, that does mean I’ll have to look at the prick, but it does mean I won’t miss any of Billie Piper, her hotness, or Bilborough’ and so I finally have a copy.
Yes that is what I’ll be doing later.

A Little Jerk!
£1 ($1.27)
Well I didn’t know this existed, I knew they made a plush because I thought it was quite strange that people would want to cuddle up to a traumatised, prepubescent Macaulay Culkin that talked to you even when I was 4 but I was unaware THQ put out a Kevin action figure. This figure is called ‘Screaming Kevin’ and…and…everything about it and everything I’ve written so far is just screaming for Michael Jackson-based humour isn’t it? 
I swear I didn’t highlight this just to imply that a dead singer was horrendously inappropriate with children (allegedly) mostly I wanted to highlight how obsessed the marketing team for Home Alone were with Macaulay Culkin screaming, especially the scene where he tries on aftershave. If you haven’t seen Home Alone you’re probably a newborn and can’t read this but lets go with the hypothesis that you don’t watch any television in December and don’t even know what a television even is and have not seen Home Alone: there is nothing about that scene, or Culkin screaming, that means it should be the signature scene of the movie nor even a passable representation of the film’s content. Kevin does not spend the whole film in screaming terror, he spends most of it happy, depressed or in complete control of the situation nor does he spend most of the movie trying to act like an adult but marketing seemed to build most of promotion around Culkin’s screaming face and him trying on poxy aftershave. There is a scene where Joe Pesci’s head is set on fire by a blow torch and they go with that? Weird.
Anyway this figure is eerily accurate in the facial department but mixed with a cartoon body it just makes everything else feel a little off, but appealingly so, like the Dick Tracy and Flintstones figures.  

Zodiac!
20p (25¢)
This has very little to do with the figure itself, not that finding a Hornby Gladiators figure and certainly one that isn’t Jet, Wolf, Cobra or Shadow anywhere – let alone a bootsale – isn’t a cause for celebration, I’m just highlighting it because I want to laugh at someone for not knowing anything and acting like they do.
I bought Zodiac here from your standard ‘normal person stall’ at a bootsale – a pasting table covered in all kinds of assorted junk run by the sort of person I wouldn’t want to be stuck with on a night out. Don’t take that to mean I don’t appreciate bootsale sellers but a lot of them are, it must be said, the sort of people I’d never want to hang out with for more time than it takes to haggle over the price of old Kellogg’s prizes, they’re just not ‘my sort of people’. Today’s example was our typical drippy Essex Bird and she was…persistent with her misconception that a fairly modern, completely worthless McDonald’s toy of The Beast (from Beauty & The Beast) was ‘the collector’s item’ (not ‘an’, ‘the’) and so was more expensive (she wanted £2). I ask about Zodiac and get an answer that includes information about how The Beast is £2 because he’s the collector’s item and then from then on every reply to whatever I said including this information ‘yeah, but [The Beast] this one is £2 because he’s the collectors item’ ‘yeah but as I said this one is £2 because [The Beast] is the collectors item’ ‘thanks, sorry this one was the collector’s item’ and did a small monologue to me about Beast being a collector’s item while I was fishing 20p out of my jacket pocket. I had not at any point inquired about The Beast (I already have one) or even looked at it, and did not bring it up at any point, reacting completely uninterested every time and yet she kept on bringing up this thing that is, just to make this clear, NOT A COLLECTOR’S ITEM IN ANY WAY. Maybe it was some kind of weird passive-aggressive way of trying to make me buy it?
Whatever, it created a delightfully ironic scene where she was continually talking about how a common, worthless item was worth £2 while selling a genuinely uncommon item that could be sold for far more than £2 – for a quarter.
Moral: know what you’re talking about, because if not you will fuck up and some prick will snort about it online.

 
Cho Chang!
50p (64¢)
I’m highlighting this solely for a very small number of people I know IRL in case they read this and because they WILL see this figure in the ‘Haul Photo’ (why can’t I think of a better name for that?). Basically, like the fat kid in the group who makes the fat jokes preventatively to spare their own feelings I’m making the jokes now: Yes I bought a figure of Cho Chang. Yes I am a massive perv. No I have not done anything remotely inappropriate to it – well I did look up its skirt but I had to to clean it – to be more specific: no I haven’t licked it, no I haven’t rubbed it, no I haven’t balanced it anywhere no toy should ever be balanced. No I am not sleeping with it on my pillow. No I can never remember what accent her actress has. No I have not used it in some kind of horrendous dark ritual to summon her actress and make her into some kind of concubine. Yes I do own other Harry Potter figures so I’m not weird at all, unless you count an adult buying children’s toys of teenagers to be weird in which case…ok that is a little weird when you think about it.

I’m going now, I’m going to sob as things that will never be mentioned in the series again mean that Billie Piper’s dad has to die (again), then I’m going to eat chocolate.
Ta for reading, all.

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