All BB guns have an implied promise of great prestige for the lucky boy (or girl) who buys one or has one bought for them. That a new respect will follow them around, and that bands of villains will be repulsed from the family homestead by hot pellets fired from its long muzzle. You know, pretty much the Christmas Story dream sequence, with Raphie shooting outlaws in the ass with his Red Ryder.
This post isn’t about to bury the Game Boy, which was a quantum leap forward in handheld video gaming back in its day. Anyone who had one in the early 1990s knows of which I type, that that little screen was a window into new worlds.
But come on, ad. I mean, really.
Coin collecting, a wonderful hobby that turns kids into wide-eyed zombies! For all eternity!
Coin collecting is a great hobby, one that’s perfect for youngsters. All you need to get them started is a pocketful of loose change, with maybe a wheat penny, a Mercury dime and a buffalo nickel thrown into the mix to spice things up — and then they’re off. I had a coin collection way back when, and I remember it quite fondly, especially one Christmas when a got a little tin box filled with currency from around the world. Sure every denomination in there was probably in a strict sense worth less than its face value, but taken together it was all more than the sum of its parts. A boy hasn’t lived until he’s held a weird dime-shaped thing with strange letters and a hole in the middle — and to this day, every wandering foreign coin that gets dropped into my palm at the grocery store, Chipotle or whatever gets stuffed into a box in my desk. For old time’s sake.
But I was never ever as excited as those kids you see up there. Coin collecting was apparently a potent enough force to freeze their awed visages for all time.
The olden times of multimedia were just as vibrant and diverse as today’s. While we have properties crossing over from print, television, film and beyond, the first half of the century had a different mixture, one with radio thrown into the mix. In fact, radio was the prime mover for a good long while, as theater of the mind enjoyed its heyday with everything from the Shadow to soap operas. Radio was the launching pad for any number of successful, long-running characters — the days of Star Wars films being reverse engineered for the radio was a long ways away. The audio airwaves were the primordial goop from which many — though not all — superstars crawled.
Casey, Crime Photographer was one of those crossover stars. He had radio plays. He had TV shows. He had books. And yes, he had comics. But one thing he didn’t do was take a lot of pictures, because by God he had his fists to do the talking!
Press your own dopey records with this ancient vinyl kit
As we spiral further and further into our self-absorbed Instagrammed culture, with people kind enough to share endless photos of the meals they’re eating and the aching, mind-numbing minutiae of their family lives, we can look back to the quaint days of home-made vinyl records and sigh. Sigh and admire this largely vanished technology that was the previous century’s most enduring method of preserving audible crap by physical means. Baby’s first words? Your terrible, terrible singing? Clunky piano playing that sounds like the keys are being struck by cloven hooves? You could preserve it all on the venerable successor to Edison’s cylinder, only to have it thrown out years later by your children and grand-children as they clean out your dusty, cobwebbed basement. Handy!
So Dubble Bubble wasn’t just a gum with anti-bullying properties and an ability to make a Thing with Two Heads — it was also the preferred gum of tree-dangling tomboys named, of course, Tommy. (A veritable suburban lady Tarzan is this Tommy.) Who ever knew DB was so versatile, the MacGyver of chewy sugar products?
Street Fighter 2010. In 2014.
One of the many means of making a person feel old comes from fictional titles and any “far future” dates found therein. 1984 was once so remote it could be the setting for a war-torn dystopia, one that would make “Orwellian” an adjective. 2001 was once the province of twirling space stations, moon bases and manned missions to Jupiter and its moons. And 2010 was even more remote than that, remote enough for a sequel in which the USA and the USSR — the latter a nation strong as iron and incapable of dissolution, natch — would send rival missions to Europa.
Dog training, the senses-shattering 1950s way
Should you ever be in need of a program to hone your dog’s skills at rescuing long-limbed young girls (seriously, look at those things!) from oncoming traffic, this old-timey obedience kit is right up your alley.
Christopher Columbus discovered Honey Nut Cheerios? (Also, Buzz the Bee is an ageless vampire)
Even if university Native American Studies departments and pent-up Euro-American guilt have ensured that Christopher Columbus’s trans-Atlantic voyage of (accidental) discovery is no longer as celebrated as it once was, he at least has his relationship with Honey Nut Cheerios to hang his goofy hat on.
It’s been a while since we had a Trading Card Set of the Week feature here on the site, as it hasn’t yet been resuscitated after the blog-wide hiatus the first couple months of this year. I couldn’t even remember the last set cards that we looked at, and had to dig back in the archives to find out. (It was the European Kojak set by Monty Gum, if you’re curious. Of all things.)
Of the crop of superhero movies ripening this summer, none is more intriguing than X-Men: Days of Future Past, which has a two-fold deeper significance not possessed by its peers.
Is the LaserScope state of the art early 1990s video gaming technology, or complex orthodontia in disguise?
Just as today’s unmedicated schizophrenics can mask their affliction by pretending the voices they’re arguing with are actually on the other end of a Bluetooth connection, teens of yesteryear could disguise their orthodontic headgear by calling it a LaserScope. Read more…
I know that when I’m ripe after a hard days work or a sweaty, stinky workout, and I desperately want to get clean and feel human again, there’s no one whose advice on cleanliness I’d value more than Mario’s. Read more…
Schroeder’s first piano?
This ad was pulled out of an early 1960s comic, and the clothes found in and general tenor of the other ads made me read the “11 popular color songs included!” copy as Read more…
Barbie is such a merchandise force of nature, so synonymous with little girlhood, it’s hard to believe that she spent the bulk of her 20th century stomping grounds without a comic book title. Read more…
Jared
blog into mystery 