It’s bloody hot, I can
barely keep my eyes open I’m so tired, I’m listening to a playlist that jumps
between Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ to Junior Brown’s ‘And My Wife
Thinks Your Dead’ via ‘My Boy Lollipop’: what better time could there be to
talk about other people’s old crap?
Just getting to the
botosale this week was a pain, there’d been an accident on the roundabout the
bootsale lies off of and this combined with perfect weather and a bank holiday
the next day meant we queued for nearly half an hour just to get near enough to the field for me to get out and walk across to the bootsale itself. The end result
was me being later than usual to start looking and being beaten to the punch by
at least four bastard dealers who were hoovering up anything remotely collectable and action figure-y and had a serious effect on my self-worth, when
you always feel third place you don’t need something as insignificant as
bootsales confirming things for you. Here’s their leavings, delightfully posed
on my worktop by the Coke bottles and my medication:
Now I know what you’re
thinking (if you were real anyway) so you might as well say it: “dwitefry, you
have two of the same dinosaur monster” – YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW?? YOU THINK I’M
STUPID ENOUGH TO BUY THE SAME THING TWICE AT THE SAME PLACE WITHIN HALF AN HOUR
OF EACH OTHER? If you answered 'yes' to that then you’re correct. No joke, I
seriously bought the same dinothing twice by complete accident, I was very tired. They are actually different
versions in different rubber from what seems like different time periods but
yeah, I still bought the same thing twice.
Anyway are you sitting
comfortably? Then I’ll begin:
Trevor!
£1 ($1.35)
When you’ve got a T-Rex
like this you just gotta brag. Trevor is actually mildly collectible – he’s a
Dormei model from 1986 – but that’s just the icing on the ridiculous dinosaur
cake for me. Some toy dinosaurs just call to me, they have this certain
something that makes them something I need to own, I think I know what Trevor’s
certain something is: it’s the fact that he’s posed like he’s been caught
sneaking into the kitchen in the middle of the night.
I’m going to put Trevor in
my loft, right by the light switch so he’ll look guilty every time I turn it
on.
X-Men Comics!
£2 ($2.70) the
pair
I don’t buy many back
issues nowadays, I think these are the first I’ve bought in over a year but they
were just far, far too good a pair of stories in far, far too good condition
for far, far too cheap to pass up. What we have here are Uncanny X-Men 205 and
Annual 9, the Annual is the second part of the ‘Asgardian Wars’
pseudo-crossover with New Mutants, both drawn by Art Adams and written by Chris
Claremont, this is the issue where Loki falls in love with Storm (because Chris
Claremont loves her and may or may not have paid prostitutes to dress up as her
and do things that involve lots of lube) and she gets to become Thor and fight
Hela and is just about as awesome as you’d expect Storm being Thor to be. I had
the other part (New Mutants Special Edition 1) but not this. Uncanny X-Men 205
is the real winner though, a brilliant one-off story called ‘Wounded Wolf’ by
Claremont and Barry Windsor-Smith. This issue has
Wolverine and (of all people) Katie Power from the Power Pack trying to survive
a battle with Lady Deathstrike during a snowstorm in the middle of Manhattan,
it’s one of the best Wolverine stories every published, one of Claremont’s best
fight scenes and Lady Deathstrike’s finest outing, this amount of white per
panel never looked so good. In fact - stop reading this stupid blog post and go
and read Wounded Wolf now.
Half a
Goldberg!
£4 ($5.41)
Man Goldberg was awesome,
yeah he couldn’t wrestle a technical match, or a 10 minute match, or a 5 minute
match really, but it was somewhat irrelevant when every episode of Monday Nitro was showing you he was an
unstoppable squash machine who could’ve jackhammered a tag team of Godzilla and
King Kong into submission in under 2 minutes if given the chance. It’s been a
decade since Kevin Nash ruined Goldy’s winning streak just to make his balls
feel big and I still see Goldberg walk out and think ‘shiiiit, that guy is
fuuuucked’. And there’s no better way to pay tribute to this man, surely, than
with Bop It!.
I got this from a regular
stall, the only regular toy stall we have at the bootsale at the moment, run by
a skatty woman and her long-suffering husband. The husband showed it to me with
a mix of delight and befuddlement and perhaps a hope that I’d know what the
fuck it was. I didn’t but I shared his mix of delight and befuddlement, this
thing makes noises – you can push his head, twist his arm or press that big
panel on his chest and make ol’ Bill shout a catchphrase! I had to have it,
weird wrestling toys are always an easy way to get me to part with my money,
even if I wasn’t sure if it was complete (theoretically it could have had a
base or something, maybe legs). It then made noises the whole way ‘round the
rest of the bootsale (which was about 2 thirds of it) I would have been less
conspicuous to have walked ‘round with the actual Bill Goldberg.
I have since found out what
it is, and it really is Bop It: The Goldberg Edition, well unofficially
speaking. It’s from Tiger Electronics (and is complete) and it works in the same
fashion, the correct name of for is the WCW:
Goldberg Smash & Crash Game. It’s fairly addictive actually - JACKHAMMER! FEAR THE
SPEAR! JACKHAMMER! FEAR THE SPEAR! FEAR THE SPEAR! BOP IT! TWIST IT! BOP IT! FEAR THE SPEAR!
Marvel
Legends!
£2 ($2.70) for
all 3 plus a bag of little Spider-Man figurines that came with a book
Holy shit, how’d the
dealers miss these?
Hasbro’s Marvel Legends is not my favourite
toyline ever, in fact I think they don’t deserve anywhere NEAR the praise the
adult action figure collector’s community heaps on them buuuuuuuuuuuut…it’s a
figure of Machine Man for 50p. This bag of figures seemed to have been put
there by god just to please me, all three figures are Marvel Legends I’ve
passed on in stores for just being too much (£16-20) for their sculpt quality
but that I did still want for one reason or another, and then some woman just
has them on her tarpaulin with a bunch of Ben 10 shit and the only accessory
with them is one of Machine Man’s extendable limbs, the only accessory that
either one of these three actually NEEDED to have. Is there a toy god? What am
I saying, of course there is! He’s Mel Birnkrant (Google him). I respect that
this is a bit similar to the X-Men paragraph but I really wanted to post a picture of X-51 with an Extended Kirby Fist™.
Picture
Discs!
£2 ($2.70) for
both
Well technically I paid £2
for one and the other was free, can you guess which one it was? This is a great
mini-study of ‘worth’ and ‘value’ and how despite the accepted concept of items
having an agreed on value and resale price it’s really all bollocks: the bloke
who sold me these two records, who had a box of them including many copies of
that Kate Bush single (it’s This Woman’s Work, being a proper rock snob like I
am I bought it for the B-Side) amidst mostly old trophies and novelty items
(because of course) saw no worth in a My Little Pony single, to him he couldn’t
imagine a My Little Pony single being worth anything because it’s fucking My
Little Pony. To me it was the one record in the box that I had to have, a piece
of My Little Pony merchandising from 1985 is worth a hell of a lot to me and
would certainly have been worth the £2 per record he was asking. The
collector’s market agrees, this is worth about £25, more than any copy of
This Woman’s Work that hasn’t been used as a masturbatory aid by Kate Bush
herself (and as far I know Kate Bush has never wanked with a record, her’s or
anyone else’s) but I certainly wouldn’t pay £25 quid for it, it’s not ‘worth
that much’ to me, so how much is it really ‘worth’? As things only maintain
their ‘value’ for as long as people are willing to pay that for them, what I’m
saying is ‘value’ is as arbitrary as what is or isn’t art and you should all refuse
to pay no more than £3 per Real Ghostbusters figure so I can get the few I’m
missing cheap and the dealers can be punished for that one getting to all that
Manta Force stuff before me this Sunday.
Teenage
Mutant Porcelain Monkey!
50p (68¢)
Honestly I just thought I
should spotlight this because anyone who comes across that haul photo up there
would want some context or at least confirmation of what the hell that this is.
It’s a knock-off Ninja Turtle money bank from around 1993, there’s no maker’s
mark (because that would allow the lawyers to find them quicker I assume) and
the reason I bought it was…because it goes with my other one. Yeah… I’ve got
two strangely simian knock-off china Turtles:
Well kind of, as you can
hopefully see they’re completely different sculpts (honestly, how can you NOT
see that, GOD!), ‘Raphael’ has far less definition and is clearly based on the
Fred Wolf cartoon while ‘Leo’ is mirrored, actually decked out with all four
Turtles’ weapons and looks to be based more on the live action movies. This
means that it’s very likely that someone saw one of these abominations and
thought ‘yes, we’ll knock that off and make a few quid’. If I was The Doctor I
wouldn’t be running around alien planets, I’d be spending my time with the
TARDIS’ translation circuit on, secretly listening into the decision making
conversations of dodgy eastern knock-off toy manufactures: it’d be just as
strange.
These Fucking
Annuals!
£5 ($6.76) for
all 7 plus a whole box more
I’ve never wanted to nut an
old man for giving me a sweet deal before.
Right, I like me some
British comic book annuals, I’m fairly picky because I have limited space and
limited funds and if I wasn’t I’d have a room full of them and no money as they
are exceptionally common at bootsales. This old boy who was selling off half
his house had a box of them that he’d clearly found in his loft, all I really wanted
was the Vulcan annual. Vulcan was a short lived companion series to
Valiant but like most its name got used to churn out annuals years after it was
cancelled merged. This one is
magnificent, it’s just a collection of reprints of British superhero comics
(yeah we had those once upon a time): Kelly’s Eye, The House of Dollman, Mytek
the Mighty, Robot Archie, The Steel Claw, The Spider and Robot Archie all feature
and there’s even a full-colour reprint of a Trigun Empire story in the centre
(which is where that super-happy dragon from the cover comes from). The old boy
informed me (before I’d asked, which bugs me: if I want something that isn’t
priced I’ll fucking ask mate) that they were £2 each or it was £5 for the box.
I thought that was a fine deal (as well as these there was a bunch 70’s Beano,
Beezer and Topper) but decided it was more trouble than it was worth to lug a
box as wide as me ‘round in the blazing sun. So I just decided to buy the one I
really wanted, reluctantly passing on the Tarzan and Lion annuals.
“Didn’t you hear what I
just said?”
“Yeah but I only want the
one”
“Five pound for the whole
box, I need to make space, come on”
“What would I do with
them?”
“Sell ‘em, you could make your money back easy with them” (which was more than true)
“Sell ‘em, you could make your money back easy with them” (which was more than true)
This jolly passive-aggressive exchanged lasted for what seemed like an hour with little variation in
what was being said until it became very clear that this old sod wasn’t going
to let me go with my Vulcan annual unless I bought the whole box, and my desire
to read about superheroic puppets and giant robot apes was just too strong, so
I gave in. Fucking idiot.
I had too: carry the box
until I could get in touch with the other people I was at the bootsale with, a
box that was heavy, wide and falling apart by the step (it collapsed just as I
put it down, having met up with the others); get them to bring me bags that I
hoped they had (they did), pull the annuals I wanted to keep (pictured) and transfer
them to the bags right in front of a burger van while completely disrupting their
queue because that was far as the box would have allowed me to go and I was
knackered from carrying the box in the heat; then get rid of the other annuals –
which no-one would take! No one wanted free annuals to sell! I was sweating
hot, I’d had no sleep so I was tired and irritable, I was feeling completely inferior,
I wanted to go home and have an anxiety attack and sleep until Wednesday and
was only staying at the bloody bootsale because I’m addicted to acquiring old
toys (actually I use it as a form of therapy but that’s not as funny) and now I
have to convince someone to take 15 quid’s worth of stock for free??! The actual
fuck? In the end I casually left them amid the other toot on a large junk stall
without asking, I imagine about 9:15am some bloke asked how much their
Topper annuals were and confused the hell out of the old couple running it. Hopefully
they just mentally shrugged and gave him a price.
Still the Pippin and Lion
Annuals have a great variety of strips in them (Pippin has Sooty, The
Woodentops, Trumpton, Camberwick Green AND the Poggles of Poggle Wood in it! TV
puppet joy! The Lion Annual was worth the effort just for the Adam Eterno and
Robot Archie strips) but what a bloody pullava. I was knackered and even
further behind the dealers in the end, I had to stop and have a five minute
chat with Trevor about the purpose of it all (his reply was ‘stealing lasagne’).
And after that rant I’m mercifully
finished. Thanks for letting me vent about something unimportant, see ya later
all and remember FEAR THE SPEAR!
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