Thrift Store Finds: Rejected Finds!

Most of the time when I buy stuff from thrift stores, I manage to squeeze a couple hundred words out of those purchases for a Thrift Store Finds post on Saturday mornings. Sometimes I’ll buy things and… I don’t know, it’s just not meant to be. Here’s a couple of rejected (but hopefully still interesting!) finds.

This was perhaps my favorite find in awhile: A plush ALF toy manufactured by Coleco in 1987. You all know I’m a big ALF fan, so of course I owned one of these in the Eighties… although I owned the Wisecracking ALF which included a voice box. This is just your standard stuff animal, although it’s in pretty great shape for being over twenty years old. I scooped this up for $4 bucks and I consider that a bargain. I rejected this for a longer post because… man, it’s just a stuffed animal of a beloved 1980’s icon. There’s really nothing much to say about this beyond “I found it and I’m happy with it.”

Another square-sized collection of For Better or For Worse I found for fifty cents, Pushing 40 collects a bunch of FBoFW strips from the late 1980’s… so Michael Patterson’s just starting puberty and there are lots of armpit hair jokes. I rejected this find for a longer post because I already wrote about Lynn Johnston’s work back in 2011 when I looked at It’s All Downhill From Here. I was pretty thorough in that post about how much I like FBoFW and I remain fairly proud of that piece.

Finally, TWO Nintendo GameBoy finds: 1992’s Looney Tunes for the GameBoy and 1999’s Looney Tunes Twouble for GameBoy Color. Two licensed games featuring many of the same characters separated by almost a decade; if I asked you to pick which one of these two games was the better, sight unseen, you’d probably pick the one made in ’99, right? You probably would and you’d be DEAD WRONG because Twouble is HORRIBLE. It makes a stab at being sort of a three-dimensional puzzle games and it just bites. The ’92 Looney Tunes cart however, is a completely solid and fun side-scroller. I haven’t played all the way through but you start as Daffy Duck, making your way through several other characters.

I rejected this find because, as always when it comes to GameBoy games, I don’t have a great way to show you the game I’m writing about.

HPB Black Friday finds

 

I hit up the Half-Price Books Black Friday sale every year. My main goal is to pick up stocking stuffers for Ellen and the boys but I have to admit, I indulge pretty heavily in some buying for myself. This year, although they stuck with the standard $5 gift certificate for early bird shoppers, HPB switched things up a bit. Whereas the store normally offers a blanked percentage off your entire purchase, this year you could either get 40% off one thing… or $15 bucks off of a purchase of $50 dollars. I went with the latter sale and above are a few of my purchases.

Elektra Lives Again is an out of print hardcover; although the material has been reprinted in some Daredevil collections, it hasn’t been presented in this original, oversized edition since 1990. That was good enough for me. Although Miller’s Batman work remains some of my favorite superhero comics, I have to admit, I haven’t read much of his Daredevil run – an isolated issue here or there is about as far as I’ve gotten. I will say this: the book is absolutely GORGEOUS. This was right before Miller started working primarily in black and white over at Dark Horse and as such, the last time Lynn Varley’s coloring really did anything for me. Super glad to have this big book in my collection.

I was excited to locate a copy of Spaceballs: The Book published by Scholastic Press under their Point imprint in 1987. The book was written by “Jovial Bob Stine” who we all know from my previous Thrift Store Find post on movie storybooks, is in fact Goosebumps writer R.L. Stine. I especially wanted a copy of Spaceballs: The Book because it’s clear the people behind this effort were completely in on one of the biggest jokes of Mel Brooks’ send-up… the omnipresent marketing machine behind Star Wars. This paperback looks like it came straight from the scene on Yogurt’s planet (“Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower”) and that’s kinda cool.

Finally, I picked up Batman: Chaos in Gotham for the GameBoy Color… although I’ll be playing it on my GBA:SP. Batman’s weathered some fairly awful games over the years but most of his carts for the GameBoy system are surprisingly solid… and Chaos in Gotham is no exception. It’s a side-scroller with puzzle elements and it’s clear the design team went the extra mile on this one. The animation of the Batman sprite is fluid and appealing. He has a variety of moves and weapons and although I haven’t played very far into the game, there’s apparently a great level variety, with driving stages added into the mix later on.

Half-Price Books finds

Not exactly a thrift store find this week, I’ll admit. Where I live in Southwest Ohio is within a twenty mile radius of three Half-Price Books. Four times a year, HPB sends out these great coupons where, during a week of sales, you can get 20%, 30%, 40%, and on Sunday a whopping 50% off one purchase. It’s perhaps a bit gluttonous of me, but on those 50% Off Sundays, I hit all three stores and these are my finds.

Thrift Store Finds: August’s Half-Off Sale

On the first Monday of every month, our thrift store marks everything in the store down to half off. During summer vacation, Ellen and I make a point to go to the store first thing on these Monday mornings, so as to have full range of choice in whatever secondhand wares that strike our fancy. Although we’re about out of August now, I thought I’d rundown our last half-off sale of summer 2013.

BOOKS –  Lover Boy by Stan and Jan Berenstain was one I grabbed because I had already talked about the sequel to this book, Office Lover Boy, in a previous post. Seeing the husband/wife duo behind the wholesome Berenstain Bears work blue was something of a shock back when I wrote that post… and it’s still a little strange to see now! This book’s falling apart but for a quarter, I figured it was worth it. I also found The A-Team 5: Ten Percent of Trouble, the fifth in a series of novelizations adapting episodes of NBC’s 1980’s action series. I collect novelizations when the mood seizes me and… c’mon! Mr. T! George Peppard! The guy who originally played Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica!

VIDEO GAMES – I picked up four GameBoy cartridges for $2 bucks apiece: Terminator 2: Judgement Day (LJN), Top Gun: Guts & Glory (Konami), Bugs Bunny – Crazy Castle 3 (Kemco), and Pokemon Pinball (Nintendo). This was a mixed bag of carts. I don’t know why I picked up Top Gun; the Nintendo game was awful and this just seems to follow suit. Crazy Castle 3 is fine; it’s just an incredibly boring game. Terminator 2 is (quite surprisingly considering it was published by LJN, purveyors of the worst licensed games ever) the most fun out of all these, however it’s wicked hard. They only give you one life and I can barely make it to the second board without dying. Pokemon Pinball… I haven’t tried yet. I want to wait until I can scrounge a AAA battery for the Rumble Pak.

COMICS – Paul Dini’s run on Detective Comics yielded some fun Batman stories but his work was  overshadowed at the time by Grant Morrison’s Batman work. I’ve been going back and checking Dini’s Detective Comics’ work and it’s about as solid as you’d expect from one of the main architects of Batman: The Animated Series. The best of these are a two-parter featuring Scarface as the main baddie and a team-up with Zatanna (one of Dini’s favorite DC characters). The next few issues dovetail with Grant Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. storyline. Dini’s stories are aided by Dustin Nguyen’s capable artwork. I got these for fifty cents apiece.

VIDEO CASSETTE – I have the first ten seasons of The Simpsons on DVD and watch them on an endless loop. I probably don’t need a VHS cassette collecting the first two episodes of the first season of the series, which is lucky because despite what the colorful box says, that’s not what I got here. The Best of The Simpsons Volume 1 includes “There’s No Disgrase Like Home” and “Life on the Fast Lane” but the cassette here includes “Bart the General” and “Moaning Lisa.” It’s a weird mistake and a little Googling reveals that the cassette I have is The Best of the Simpsons, Volume 2.

Thrift Store Finds: Rummage Sale Bonanza!

I did a video this week!

Finds include: Avengers vehicles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures, GameBoy games, Muppet Babies jigsaw puzzles, vintage Star Wars 12 inch dolls, and much more! I paid $8 or $9 bucks for everything in this video!

You can check out last year’s rummage sale finds here.

thrift store finds: another round of rejected finds!

…that’s right y’all. Most of the time I buy stuff from flea markets and thrift stores and manage to squeeze a couple of hundred words out of them for this weekly post… but sometimes, it’s just not meant to be. Here are a couple of TSF I couldn’t quite work up into a full column.

As previously documented, I pick up classic GameBoy cartridges whenever they come up for sale at our St. Vincent dePaul; the store sells them for $4 bucks apiece and on the first Monday of every month, that price is halved.

A James Bond fan recently divested himself of two 007 games which I scooped up: 1998’s James Bond 007 for the Gameboy and 2001’s The World is Not Enough  for GameBoy Color. I would guess both of these games were released in the wake of 1997’s Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64, one of the most popular games made for that particular system.

The World Is Not Enough is kind of a pain in the ass and no fun but James Bond 007 is surprisingly awesome! It takes a lot of gameplay cues from The Legend of Zelda which… y’know, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. Although it was released during the Pierce Brosnan era, James Bond 007 more often tips its’ hat to classic Bond adventures. So far in the game, Oddjob has been used as a boss and I know Jaws is later used as well. There’s a variety of gameplay, from typical fights with villains to casino games of chance.

It’s not a game that’s going to change the way you look at action adventure, but James Bond 007 is solid. It’s also one one the last traditional black and white GameBoy games ever made for the original system. It was a good find!

I thought I’d have something to say about this cassette tape soundtrack for the TV series My So-Called Life. I’m a huge fan of the show and thoroughly documented that love when I did a TSF on the novelized sequel My So-Called Life Goes On. Cassette tapes are such a document of the time MSCL came into the world… if I could have found a working Walkman to play the thing, it could have been a fun post. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be.

The track list is pretty true to the show, I will say. The first cut is Juliana Hatfield playing Make It Home, the song immortalized in MSCL’s holiday episode, So-Called Angels.

They got Buffalo Tom on here which is good. They figured into this episode:

…of course, they used “Soda Jerk” on the soundtrack instead of “Late at Night” but minor quibble, minor quibble.

The soundtrack also features Sonic Youth, Daniel Johnston, and Afghan Whigs. It’s a pretty robust collection of performers who made their names in the 1990’s. Would that I could dig into this further.

chalkboard photo posts: the all nintendo edition