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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