After Work Finds at Wal-Mart

Yesterday, I decided that I was going to return the bin of bottles and cans behind my apartment after work today.  I should have done this weeks ago!  I got 9 dollars from this and decided I would hit up Wal-Mart to check out the toy aisles.  I mean, I just got a couple of extra dollars, right?

I spent less than $4.00, and got two very nice toys.

I have been reading about people finding Back to the Future “time machines” Hot Wheels cars in their areas, so I checked out the selection, specifically for that.  No luck.  But I was able to find the ’81 Delorean DMC-12.  Ever since I saw Back to the Future back in the day, I have always thought Deloreans were some of the coolest looking cars.  If I had the money I would definitely look into buying one.  A couple of years ago, a local car dealership had one of these displayed next to the entrance with the gull-wing doors up.  While it was very nice to see in person, the pricetag was a little too rich for my taste, at $15,000.  This one set me back 98 cents!

Venturing towards the bicycle section, and past the Lego selection, I found a small assortment of Mega Bloks.  Nothing caught my eye until I looked at the Halo mini figures and there were a couple packages of these mixed in.

These are kind of like the blind bag Lego mini figures, except that these guys have a little more articulation.  They peaked my curiosity, so I grabbed one.  Looking at the package, I was hoping to get the black costume Spider-Man.  But I would have settled for the regular Spider-Man, Armored Spider-Man or Venom.

I got Venom!!  You get all of the limbs needed to make a figure, as well as a Mega Blok brick for a display stand and a little flyer showing you the figures and their rarity.  Venom is a common one.

Green Goblin is the super rare one of the series.

I guess the accessories are supposed to be webs, because the other Spider-Men have them as well.  The guys are pretty poseable, and they twist at the waist(actually the sockets the legs go on, spin 360 degrees).  Overall, they’re very nice figures for their size, and worth the $2.50 they sell for.  I hope they keep this as an ongoing line, because I’d like to see a wider variety.

It looks like they even have vehicles and mini playsets.

Very cool!  I’ll probably get a few more.  🙂

Jboypacman is the Epitome of Awesome!!

Today, I was expecting a package from Ebay, and was pleasantly surprised to also find a package from Jboypacman(see his blogs here and here).  I originally planned on doing a quick post of the little item from Ebay, but the contents of the box Jboy sent, totally eclipses it!  I was expecting the package…I just wasn’t expecting a toy lot of this size.  I’ll let the following photo do the talking.

So much awesome was packed into that box!  I broke it up into a few pictures, so we can get a better look at my Christmas in March.  We’ll start with Lt. Ripley(with face hugger) from Kenner’s 1992 Aliens line, Iron Man from Hasbro’s Marvel Universe line, a T-700 from the Terminator:Salvation line and Dr. Claw and MAD Cat from Tiger’s 1992 Inspector Gadget line.

And that’s just the beginning!  As you know, I’m a huge TMNT fan, and Jboy sent me not only a Raph PEZ dispenser, but he also sent 4 Turtle figures.  Three of which I didn’t have!!  We have Wacky Action Michaelangelo, 1988 Raphael(hard head), one that I believe is a Wacky Action Leonardo(I thought he was the only one without a Wacky Action figure, but I could be wrong), and a Leonardo figure(with arm action at the press of a button) from 2004.  Looks like I’ll be ordering more pizza.  🙂

But, wait there’s more!  He sent 4 sweet Transformers!  First, There’s Electrostatic Soundwave, with Ratbat.  Then there’s Decepticon Bludgeon(I just bought one this past weekend!  Now I’ll have one MIB).  Standing next to Decepticon Bludgoen(damn copyrights), is Tracks(1984 Takara).  And lastly we have Snapdragon, who is a 1987 Headmaster(missing his nebulan component, Krunk).  He also sent a Thor comic book that I forgot to photograph.

As I said when I opened the package, WOW!  Thanks again Jboy!  You put a big smile on this big kid’s face!  🙂

On a closing note, here’s what I got from Ebay.

It’s Cool Cat from the Puppetland Band, you may remember from Pee Wee’s Playhouse!  I would like to get Chicky Baby and Dirty Dog as well.  These guys don’t come up loose, often.  Pee Wee’s Playhouse is one of my absolute favorite toy lines, which explains why I paid $4.69 + shipping for this little guy(I wasn’t losing this time!).

I still have a bunch more stuff to talk about this week(as well as some packages on the way).  I’ll get another post up in a few days.  With the exception Cool Cat, Tracks is my favorite addition to the collection.  Which figure is your favorite?

A Great Weekend-Part II

This is the continuation of the little spending spree I had this past weekend.  Yesterday, I revealed my finds from non-retail establishments(thrift-type stores).  Today will showcase my retail findings(with reviews of some of the items soon).

I’m not going to list my finds in chronological order, but I will list the toys last.

I took the requisite trip to Wal-Mart on Saturday so we could do some grocery shopping, checked the toy section, and would you believe it?  There was nothing I really wanted.  So, I decided to see what graphic t-shirts they had.  There were quite a few more I’d like to pick up.  I had a black Bullet Bill shirt in my hand ready to go find my wife, until I looked down and saw this.

I had to get this shirt!  It exudes all types of awesome!  On a side note, I also needed new pajama pants, and they are of the Pac-Man variety as well(I’m wearing them right now).

On Friday, after exiting the movie theater, we decided to hit up the Barnes & Noble right next door(well, in between the movie and Barnes & Noble, we had a few drinks at The Cheesecake Factory on the other side of the theater.  We only had about 15-20 minutes, as it was around 10:40pm.  I stumbled across 2 books in the heavily marked down clearance racks.

The Far Side is one of my all-time favorite comic strips(?).  I have about 4 other collections of The Far Side.  As you can see, this was released for the strip’ 10 year anniversary(published in 1989).  Inside tells you the story of how The Far Side came to be, as well as the short lived strip that Gary Larson did before The Far Side.  I think the cover is sweet looking.  I can’t decide which is cooler, the T-Rex skeleton or the 3-D rendering of Larson’s classic nerd kid.  I also picked up a new Bathroom Reader, as I recently finished reading the one I got for Christmas.  I had a different one in my hand when I saw this one.  But this one was marked down to $6.98.  This series has great facts as well as plenty of useless trivia, and is just a very interesting read.

Now we’ll get to see the toys I ended giving a home to.

Toys R Us was our first stop upon hitting Albany on Friday night.  I was disappointed with their selection and some of the prices.  The first one we’ll look at was purchased more because of it’s clearance tag, rather than being a toy I would purchase even at full price.

Jurassic Park must be a hot license if they’re making toys for them in 2009(that’s when these were released).  There was a good selection of this line, priced to go at $3.98.  You had the choice of getting a figure and a dinosaur, or getting a two-pack of dinosaurs.  This one has a launching projectile with it, and you can’t go wrong with a dinosaur and a shooting projectile in a toy(review coming soon).

The Toys R Us I went to still had a huge amount of figures from the Transformers-Revenge of the Fallen, and they were selling them at full price.  There were no recently released figures(Generations, Reveal the Shield), but I did manage to find a decent figure that was marked down.

Decepticon Bludgeon!  This guy(voyager class) was going for just about a dollar more than the deluxe class figures from the same line.  I couldn’t turn it down.  This will also be reviewed in the near future.  I hope my next trip to Toys R Us is a bit more fruitful.

We’ll end with the last find of the weekend.  I stopped by the local comic shop after we left Wal-Mart on Saturday, and picked this up.

It’s Landfill.  After I brought this home, I did a little research, and found out that I over paid for this, and the guns he came with aren’t correct.  He is clean and the stickers are in good shape, so I don’t mind, as this is for my collection anyway.

Stay tuned for another awesome acquisition post, as well as some toy reviews.

A Great Weekend

I had a fantastic weekend!  Quite a few additions have been made since Friday.  We got our tax refund this past Wednesday, and most of it was put to good use(paid off our cars).  This was actually perfect timing.  Since January, the “Battle in Space” Rodimus and Cyclonus were the only toys that I bought.  So this past weekend I got to have a little fun.  Today I will detail the haul that I got from non-retail establishments.  Tomorrow I will detail the my findings from retail establishments.

My wife and I had a movie gift card that we still had from Christmas.  We knew we were going to Albany to go shopping, so we figured we would go see the movie “Paul”(it was quite funny and I would recommend seeing it).  My acquisitions from Friday were all retail, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see them.

We’ll start off with the package from Ebay that I received yesterday(the first of a few that I won).

The California Raisins sticker album with ten packs of stickers included!  I’ve actually been looking to find one of these for quite a while now.  I’m not going to say too much about it right now, as I plan on doing a full review of this later this week(I’ve already taken all of the pictures for the post).  I love The California Raisins, and I have a special place in my heart for this sticker album.

We hit up a few local, thrift store-type places yesterday, and got a few good deals.

The first place we stopped at was Richie Rich’s Place.  I’ve wrote about a find or two from this place before, and he always gives us good deals.  We’ll start with the movies that we got.

These movies ran us 3 bucks a piece, for a grand total of 27 dollars!  We got Caddyshack, Cobra, The Shawshank Redemption, Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The Beginning, The Karate Kid, Beyond the Law(one of Charlie Sheen’s best movies), Kick-Ass, Dirty Love and Halloween II(Rob Zombie).  I had some of these at some point, but they either got lost or I got rid of them for some reason.  I know a lot of people didn’t care for the Halloween remakes, but I thought they were good for what they were.  Caddyshack was still sealed.

Next are a couple of SNES games that I found at Richie’s as well.

Cool Spot is a game that was on my “to get” list.  It’s a great fun game.  I think the graphics are vibrant and colorful, and generally fun.  It’s your run-of-the-mill platformer with “Spot” from one of 7-Up’s old ad campaigns.  I love advertising mascots, and Spot was one of the better ones(in my top 3, with The California Raisins and Domino’s “Noid”).  The second game is King of Dragons.  It’s not a game that I see often, and it’s by Capcom, so it should be decent.  Cool Spot was marked at $6 and King of Dragons was marked at $8.  I got both of them for $12.  These will go into my collection, but for fun, I looked up current selling prices for these on Ebay, and I think I did quite well.  Two Buy-it-Now auctions for Cool Spot were $9.99 + $3.99 shipping, and $15.00 + free shipping.  King of the Dragons had listings for $23.95 + $2.95 shipping, and $34.00 + $4.99 shipping.  Pretty good deal if I do say so myself!

Next I hit up the “Red Barn”, which I have wrote about in a previous post as well.  I ended up spending less than 2 dollars here, but found a few cool items.

First is this guy that I found for a quarter.

When I bought this, I thought it was John Candy form the “Camp Candy” cartoon.  But I think this guy is from a more recent show, who’s name I can’t recall.  But at 25 cents, I can’t say it was a waste of money.

This next item I bought for my wife.

When my wife was younger, she loved these Troll dolls.  This guy was 25 cents, while all the others were $2.  There are hundreds of different Trolls out there.  When my wife was younger, she would twist her troll’s hair like it is in the photo, and if her dad saw it, he would shake it up and blow on the hair, thus “messing it up”.  She would then twist it’s hair back to the way she originally had it.  This guy is dressed up as a pizza chef, and looks adorable.

Last up, for a dollar we have…

Mig-29 Soviet Fighter for the NES.  This is an unlicensed game released by Camerica.  Camerica’s games have gold or silver casings, their labels are upside down and have dipswitches on the reverse side of the cart(to be able to play in different situations).  I only have one other Camerica game(Ultimate Stuntman), and the only cosmetic difference between the 2, is that Ultimate Stuntman’s casing is gold.  As with the SNES games, I researched Ebay to see current selling trends.  Two Buy-it-Now’s were, $5.95 + $2.99 shipping, and $5.94 + $2.99 shipping.  Not bad, not bad.

That’s all for today.  Tomorrow I’ll post my retail findings.  I will also have another “finds” post later this week because…before I started typing this today, one of my friend’s stopped by and gave me a big tackle box full of figures and accessories(I have to sort through a lot of stuff), and another video game.  See y’all tomorrow!!!

“Reveal the Shield” Revealed My Weakness

Since I started to keep track, I went 39 days without buying a toy, a comic book or video game.  The fortieth day happened to be a pay day, so I decided to hit up Wal-Mart to browse the toy selection.  I was hoping that I would find the Transformers Generations Wheeljack, but that didn’t happen.  It was the same sorry selection since after Christmas.  A couple of  Thrusts, Cybertronian Bumblebees, 1 Cybertronian Optimus Prime and about 3 pegs worth of the line that came before Generations. 

To tell you the truth, I would’ve bought Red Alert or Dirge, if they were available.  I NEEDED to buy a toy!  Right before I was going to admit defeat, I saw two of these on a lower shelf.

There was no thinking required.  I thought $19.97 was a good deal, and made my way to the checkout.  Actually, I stopped to check out the $5 DVD bin, grabbed National Lampoon’s Vacation(I don’t know why I didn’t own this already), and then made my way to the checkout.

I have been really looking forward to the Reveal the Shield line.  A majority of the older figures were equipped with this feature, which might have something to do with my anticipation of the line.  From what I have seen, the first wave looks to be very G1 oriented.  Here’s a few more shots of my new addtions.

The Reveal the Shield logo that you see behind the figures, is actually on the back cover of the comic book.  In the second shot, you’ll see more of the selection for this line, which I’m sure you’ve already seen on other sites.

Three figures and The Autobot Matrix of Leadership for $20.

The gimmick of this line is the rub signs(Battle Beasts used these as well) on the figures.  Rub the shield on the figure, to reveal the robot’s allegiance.

Before rubbing.

After rubbing.

First, we have Rodimus and The Autobot Matrix of Leadership.

He’s very reminiscent of G1 Hot Rod, which is a plus for me.  And The Autobot Matrix of Leadership is made of metal(die-cast?), and not plastic, another plus!  The transformation isn’t all that hard for a level 3(though Cyclonus was a little challenging).   And you get 2 choices of how he should look in his alternate mode.

This way…

Or, this way…

Just like the G1 figure, Cyclonus comes with his Mini-Con, Nightstick(who transforms into his weapon).

While Cyclonus looks great in his robot mode, I can’t say that I’m a fan of his alternate mode.

The light pipe eyes look nice(you can see an example in the “before rubbing” photo 6 pictures back).

I am very impressed with this release, and look forward to seeing what else Hasbro has in store, as well as looking forward to adding more of this line to my collection.

Random Quickie #3- 1990 TMNT Postcard from Branded in the 80s

Wow!  Really?!  This is the third straight day I’m posting something, and it’s my fourth post in those three days!  It’s actually quite refreshing.  I hope I can keep up this momentum.

So last week, Shawn over at Branded in the 80s, posted about a book of TMNT postcards(from 1990), that he had come into his possession.  He stated that he wanted to use these postcards for their intended purpose, and mail them to the first 24 people that responded.  I’m a huge TMNT fan, and this was an item that was right up my alley.  Before we go any further…if you haven’t checked out Branded in the 80s, please do so now(or after you finish reading this).

I love getting mail(and this is the first piece of mail that I’ve received from Georgia).  As Shawn said on the back of the postcard, “this postcard has finally fullfilled it’s postcard destiny!”.  While these are officially licensed, the artwork is different from the usual licensed stuff.  No matter, I think Mikey looks decent.

I love the way his tongue is sticking out, looking over his shoulder.  Like there’s a delicious pizza pie behind him.  Mikey’s my second favorite Turtle.  When the cartoon first aired, Michaelangelo was initially my favorite,but Donatello has held my number one spot for more than 20 years since then.

I just had to show the back, so you know that this is legitimate(and plus, who doesn’t like more pictures).  Thanks again Shawn, this is one of the coolest pieces of mail that I have ever received!

The Mist

A week or two ago, I finally watched The Mist.  I thought it was pretty good and I totally didn’t expect the ending.  But I’m not posting a movie review.  In the movie, this mist seemed like something plausible, like a thick fog.  Well, this past weekend we had a mist of our own in our area.  I grabbed the camera and snapped a bunch of pictures.  The whole time letting my mind imagine if something like in the movie was about to happen.  Here’s what it looked like.

It weirded me out a little, having seen the movie so recently.  But it was also pretty cool to see such an occurence.

Transformers “Hunt for the Decepticons” – Tracker Hound

35 days, and I have not purchased anything for my collections!  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have stuff to talk about.  I have a bunch of toys that are just begging to be opened, so, I reached into “The Vault” today, and pulled out this little guy.

I bought this guy some time last Summer at my local Wal-Mart.  I can’t remember the exact post he first appeared in, but I do remember saying that Tracer Hound “would have his day in the sun.”  But I have to tell you that while you are seeing him today, my statement, isn’t exactly true.  You see, as I type this, it is snowing like a son of a bitch right now!  So, to rephrase myself, today he will have his day in the spotlight.  Hard to believe that it was in the mid-fifties yesterday, and everything was melting(as it was today), yet the snow is now quickly accumulating.

Hound is a classic character from the G1 era.  He is reminiscent of the G1 character, which is what led me to purchase this figure.  These smaller figures don’t have a ton of articulation or detail, but for less than five dollars, they’re a decent buy.  He’s classified as a Level 1 transformation, and just as you would suspect, he transforms in a snap.

Here he is straight off of the card.

And in his alternate mode.

I don’t know what else to say, except that he was worth what I paid for him.  It’s a nice looking figure and I would say, if you see him for retail price to pick him up.  I have a bunch of posts lined up, with the next one up tomorrow.  Comic books and trading cards among other things.  Check out the first post I put up today, which has some items I’m looking to part with.  See you guys tomorrow!!

For Sale or Trade

Well, The 28 Day Challenge has been over for almost a week, and I still haven’t bought anything.  I’m at 35 days and counting.  Taxes will arrive soon, and the end of the drought will be here.  This will be a showcase of toys that I have for sale or for trade.  You guys know how it is.  You buy a lot off of Ebay, or a bag of toys for a couple of bucks at a yard sale, or just have some toys you don’t want anymore.  I will consider any offer.  Leave a comment and I’ll shoot you an e-mail.  A toy review will follow this listing(in a new post, of course).

First up we have nine different Marvel Universe “Miniature Posable Action Figures.  The following are available…

Thing

Human Torch

Dr. Doom

Doc Ock

Beast

Captain America

Magneto

Hulk

Spider-Man

Here we have

Complete “Kid Vid Voice Module”

Gayla “Baby Bat” 42″ kite(1975)

Video Game Instruction Manuals

Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt Manual(NES)

Super Mario Bros. #(NES)

Bases Loaded II(NES)

Sim City(SNES)

Sonic the Hedgehog 2(Genesis)

World Series Baseball ’95(Genesis)

Madden 2001(PC?)

SEGA Game Gear Poster

Random figures…does anyone know if the first 2 of manufactured by Takara?

Robot #1(Japanese text on the bottom of the feet.Japan)

Robot #2(Japanese text as well.Japan)

Cyclops(splits apart to reveal ?)

Rumpelstiltskin(Shrek)

Tech Dech Dudes-  Cool dude(?), Crash Test Dummy(?), Metal Head(?)

Shaggy(limbs attached by string)

She-Ra Action Figure(1984 Mattel)

And lastly…

Computer Joystick(I have no idea what this goes with)

Bootleg(?) and Broken Transformer

 

I will add new items if there are any, and will update as items get sold/traded.