The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., what can I say?  If you've read either of my blogs, I'm sure you've heard me complain time and again about this DVD set, most notably because of the absurdly high MSRP of $100.00.  This set is one of those examples where the studio producing the DVD set leverages it's production costs and expected niche market with a high enough price tag so that they will be certain to make a profit.  To their eyes die hard fans would slap down that C-bill if only because the studio decided to grace them with a release.  But a $100 for what basically amounts to one season is crazy.  Back when DVD was first hitting it was common for TV shows to be in this range, the X-Files, Monty Python (which at least had 4 seasons worth of shows, even though the running time is about the same as on the Brisco set), and more recently the various Star Trek shows.  I'm not positive about this, but it's pretty peculiar that all three of those examples have recently cut their prices in half if not more.  I mean, I just don't think people were rushing out to spend $150 on the Monty Python DVDs.  But $75 for what breaks down to about $1.50 an episode which is a much more reasonable price and close to the industry standard.



So, to beat a dead horse, I was upset that a series that I loved in it's initial run and have been waiting for on DVD was just too damn expensive to own.  Of course right about now it sounds like I don't own it.  Well I do, but damn if I was going to pay $100.  I waited, and waited and waited some more until I found one used on Amazon for under $50, and I finally did (consequently at the same time that Amazon had a 50% off sale on the title) so the one I got was actually new, and I'm very happy with it.  Rant, rant, rant.

I first got into this show in high school during a time when Fox was pumping out great fun shows like the X-Files, the Simpsons, Alien Nation and 21 Jump Street.  TV used to be a lot more fun then. I hadn't gotten into the Evil Dead films yet, so this was my first exposure to the great chinned one and his awesome delivery of one liners and slapstick comedy.  This is also another example of a show, like Alien Nation that I could have sworn was on the air for at least a couple of seasons, but it's was only on for one which was stretched out of a year or two.  Also like Alien Nation and other more recent Fox shows like Firefly it was pulled before it had a chance to breathe and get a large enough audience to sustain it.

The woman and I decided this past weekend to "do it up right", by which I mean that I practically forced her out of the apartment on an adventure to a flea market in the middle of nowhere followed by her choice of fun eating establishment, namely Stevie B's pizza buffet (which is like the unloved smaller cousin of Chuck E. Cheese with a lot less games and a lot more weird pizza toppings.)

I sought out the flea market in hopes of finding some fun gems from the 80's but didn't really find anything. There was one stand that had a bunch of comics and a few magazines. The comics were so mixed up that it was way too much of a chore to look through them, though I did find an issue of Marvel's Alf for $0.50, so I snagged that. I found a couple Starlogs from the early 80's with articles on the Dark Crystal and V, so I'm sure I’ll be sharing those in the coming months. Other than that it was a bust though, so I left feeling like I'd never find anything cool from my childhood, at least not this particular weekend.

When we hit Stevie B's my only expectation was weird ass pizza and some ghetto skee ball. As far as pizza goes, we hit the jackpot. On the buffet were no less than five weird ass pizzas including, baked potato pizza (slices of baked potato, bacon, and cheddar cheese with a sour cream-esque sauce), taco pizza (slasa base topped with ground beef, cheddar cheese, black olives and lettuce), nacho pizza (same as the taco pizza with no lettuce and a lot more corn tortilla chips), mac & cheese pizza (think pizza crust topped with mac & cheese and then topped with mozzarella cheese), and for dessert, Boston cream pie pizza (let your imagination run wild.) Definitely cheered me up.

I was coasting on semi-terrible yet amazingly fun pizza when we hit the tiny game room in the back, hoping that the Galaga machine was at least still there, when I saw them. Two boys were cashing in their meager strings of prize tickets for these little red and yellow envelopes that contained a blast from my childhood. Power Prop Flying Gliders. The day was now complete.


I must have won a hundred of these fragile Styrofoam WWII gliders from Chuck E. Cheese, Showbiz pizza, and the couple of arcades I went to as a kid. Out of all the bins of plastic spider rings, crayons, little plastic jumping frogs, super bounce balls, fake plastic moustaches and pixie sticks, the Power Prop Flying Gliders looked like the best possible option, the winner of the beauty pageant that was cashing in tickets for prizes. It was like the Wheel of Fortune back in the 80's when you'd spend your loot on the crap residing in the rooms on the spinning platform, and the gliders were always the first choice, with a spider ring thrown in to spend out the ticket change.

As you can see from the scan above, they really are simple as hell. One body with two slits punched in it for the wings and tail rudders, one plastic weight (and propeller holder), and one propeller and pin.

I managed to get enough tickets on crappy skee ball and this weird "shoot a token into a hole via a ski slope" game to get three of these gliders. These are exactly as I remember them, down to the styles and packaging. I'm not sure if these were a product of the 80's or if they were gliding through parking lots and crowded birthday parties in the 60's and 70's as well, but I haven't seen on in almost 25 years.

I left it up to the lady at the ticket counter to pick out my three gliders because I wanted to be surprised, and she did a pretty good job picking. Not only did I not get a duplicate, but I also got one of three different WWII factions, America, Japan, and Germany. She also managed to pull out one of my favorite designs, the EOCKE Wulf TA 152H, better known in my simple mind as the purplish, blue-red one with the German symbol on it.


After a quick scan of the available designs on the back, the Wulf is the one I'd choose first every time. So yea, me. When I got home and constructed them I went through the same range of emotions that I probably went through as a child, that it felt too light and skimpy to actually fly and then the amazement of watching it soar along my apartment hallway when it did in fact fly very well.

When I was a kid I always wanted one of those large sturdy Styrofoam airplanes that people were always demo-ing in the mall, the all white ones with the blue and red stripes down the side and a penny inserted into slits on both sides of the nose to give it weight. They would always do these awesome loop-de-loops in the open air of the mall and it fascinated me, though they were a bit steeply priced for what they were and I invariably ended up with the flying gliders that I'd score at Chuck E. Cheese instead. In the end, I'm glad I did.


All in all it made for a nice capper to a fun weekend.

For this week's Peel Here Column I've decided to bust out my favorite acquisition of my recent insane sticker buying frenzy. While I was looking up various 80's cartoons on eBay to see if there were any available sticker products I stumbled up a few buy it now auctions for some awesome unapplied stickers from some Aladdin Industries plastic lunchboxes. I'll be honest, though I've dabbled in lunchbox collecting, I never dreamed that there were any unapplied stickers circulating around on the secondary market.

When I thought about it though, it started to make perfect sense. One of my biggest complaints about plastic lunchboxes growing up was that after my mom would wash them (as she would invariably do in the dishwasher) the sticker would soon fall off. Then I'd be stuck for a whole year with a plain lunchbox with a huge unattractive white fuzzy mess on the front. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of parents called in and complained and were issued replacement stickers, and it makes sense that a lot of these are probably still around. Also there are probably old production rolls that employees took home and stuff, but when I first saw these my jaw dropped. I managed to snag three pretty nice stickers, well, two nice ones and one that'll make your eyes bleed, but I'll get to that one in a moment.

I was kind of hesitant to write about these yet because I'd really like to get a few more to share, but after scouring eBay for two months and losing four or five auctions to crazy people who are willing to pay upwards of $30 for an unapplied lunchbox sticker I had to quit looking. So without further ado I present some fun lunchbox sticker-y fun:


I was really excited to find this Masters of the Universe LB sticker because initially it was pretty slow going trying to find any other stickers with the MOTU branding that were affordable. I remember having a MOTU lunchbox, but I think it was metal because I don't remember this picture at all. I want to say that the plastic ones might have been a little more rare as He-Man was exiting stage left when the plastic lunchboxes were bursting on the scene. I really dig this picture though because it's kind of odd. First of all it's an amalgamation of separate pieces of art from various places. The Evil Lyn image is from one of the earlier production paintings, as well as the He-Man image. In fact these might all be from the same series of paintings (we'll find out later in another sticker set.)

I also like it because outside of including Merman, this has all of my favorite characters, all doing weird stuff. Stratos looks like he's about to fall out of the sky (with a falling arm gauntlet feather no less), Ram-Man is fighting Skeletor instead of He-Man, Evil Lyn is using her magic on nothing in particular (except maybe that oddly, almost implausible, rock formation they're all standing on), Orko is running away from the good guys towards the bad, and He-Man is almost not existant in the background. I'm sure most kids that had this lunchbox were looking forward to a dishwasher washing or two.

Our second sticker comes from a cartoon that I have some really odd memories of, Voltron.


I never managed to catch the cartoon on TV while I was growing up; none of the local affiliates seemed to carry it. That doesn't mean that I was a novice in the way of Voltron though. I developed a major crush on the toys after taking one glimpse of the remote controlled robot during a Toys 'R' Us commercial and thereafter asked for it for Christmas three years running. I never managed to get that remote controlled one, but my father found a cheapo plastic set of the lions at a local Florida flea market that I played with to pieces.

Voltron was my first merging robot crush, and ended up being just as unrequited as my love for Devestator would become a year or so later.  I'm still kicking myself for not picking up the toys that were released in the 90's, but I had a Magic the Gathering habit to support at the time.

This sticker is pretty cool, though it's kind of weird how it shows both the fully formed robot as well as the individual lion robots. You'd think that who ever designed it would have had the human characters instead of the lions, but then you'd also figure that whoever mocked up this image cared one iota about the cartoon which I'm sure they didn't.  I'm also missing the badass sword, but that's just a nitpick in an otherwise awesome sticker.

The last sticker that I'm going to talk about today would have been my favorite if not for the horrible double printing that it suffered from. That's right, it's not my scanner, or your eyes, this is just one hell of an ugly sticker. It's the kind of sticker that makes you want to keep rubbing your eyes so you don't get a migraine looking at it. I actually had this lunchbox growing up and it would have been really cool to get a copy of this sticker, but it's just my luck that the only one available makes me want to poke my eyes out so I don't have to try to focus anymore. Oh well, can't win 'em all the time.


The image on the sticker is one of the great examples of Transformerdom where impossible things happen that make a fanboy want to cry. Well I say that, and I'm probably wrong. For instance, Ultra Magnus and Blur are flying. I always thought that outside of the Aerialbots and a few other exceptions that none of the Autobots could fly (except maybe in space.) I'm probably wrong about this, but it bugged me as a kid, and it bugs me now (though I'm a rational adult and I'm sure I'll be able to get over it, at least without crying.)

Of the lunchbox stickers that I didn't manage to acquire, the one that really roasts my goat is a Goonies sticker. I did not realize that there were Goonies lunchboxes. I was so sheltered as a kid.  I wanted to win that auction pretty bad, but it ended at like $40 or something stupid crazy like that and I am just not that dedicated.  I guess that means that I'm maybe not as obsessed as I thought I was.  Huzzah.

Anyway, next week on Peel Here Lea Thompson, Jeffery Jones, Tim Robbins, and Chip Zein? You betcha.

See Hoov, I learn from my mistakes eventually...

Nala over at Plastic Crack tipped me off to a new line of G.I. Joe Classics 3.75� 25th anniversary figures that Hasbro will be releasing soon. On the tail of the Transformers Classics line this is both cool and probably a hazard to my bank account. I especially dig the Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes figures, but the basic Cobra Trooper and Scarlett are pretty bad ass. Here's a load of pictures from the new line…










The Baroness is pretty good, but glasses just look awful. Maybe on the actual figure they'll look a little better…


The Destro figure is pretty awesome too. I love that the guns fit in the holsters and junk.


Dukes pretty boring, but then again, Duke is pretty boring, so no surprise there.






So what's next, a 20th anniversary edition of the Masters of the Universe flick and an uber cool toy line to go with it? Nevermind…

Man, this year already feels like it's flying by. I keep turning my head and it always seems like it’s just about to be a different month. Sheesh. Anyway, I was pretty proud of myself last week because I finally got off my lazy ass and made a banner for this here Peel Here column that I'm pretty happy with. If you click on said banner it'll take you to the Peel Here archives, so, um, there's that. I'm also pretty happy because I've finally received most of the stickers that I've been buying on eBay, so I can get a better feel as for what's coming up and where I'm going with this column. Again, anyway…

So for the first double digit Peel Here, I decided to showcase some more Panini stickers (and this time there are official with the logo and everything, as opposed to the Diamond stickers, which I'm still not sure if that's a different company or a subsidiary of Panini), as well as tying the stickers in with a new DVD release that I'm excited about for the Original Ghostbusters Filmation Cartoon.


I always really dug the little knight with the lance; it's just a neat looking logo.

Unfortunately, like the Jem set I talked about earlier, I don't have the book for this set of the Original Ghostbusters stickers. It seems like there are basically three types of auctions on eBay, ones for completed books with all the stickers that sell for god awful amounts of money, auctions for just the books and no stickers that aren't very fun and seem to also be books that stickers aren't readily available for, and last and most pertinent to this column, auctions for lots of the stickers themselves. Maybe down the road I'll be able to update these with some scans of the books if I can find them cheap enough.


Overall, these have been my favorite example of the Panini stickers I've managed to track down because the film stock that the company had to work with for the images was of a nicer quality, not to mention the design work on the actual stickers what with the nice black border and all. Most of the other cartoons that got the Panini treatment seem to have an abundance of stickers that either have the character's backs turned to the camera, the stickers are just hella blurry, or they are of just  something irrelevant like pointless landscapes. These on the other hand have a lot of great screen shots as you can see in this first set of stickers (which is mostly made up of shots of the main Ghostbusters characters including Jake Kong Jr., Eddie Spencer Jr., Tracey the Gorilla, and Ghost Buggy their talking car/jet thing.)


I always liked that the characters had a cool logo (though it’s not quite as cool as the “no ghosts�? logo from the movies), though it does go to show that there was precedent for Filmation to sue the films produces for rights credit, as the logos are pretty similar. If nothing else the logos make for neat backpacks for the cartoon characters and as a face for the car.




There's a lot of cool stickers in this set of the villains as well, led by Prime Evil (the red caped evil robot looking dude) there's also Fangster (the werewolf), Scared Stiff (the golden C3PO like robot skeleton), Haunter (the safari hunter looking guy), a Medusa looking woman, Brat-a-Rat (the flying rat thing), and Long John Scarechrome (the pirate looking dude) just to name a few.




There were also special clear character only insert stickers in this set, which probably filled out a removable poster, which was common in Panini sticker books. I know that there was one for both the Thundercats book and the various Baseball annuals they did at least.


Like I mentioned in the DVD release post, I'm not completely familiar with this show, only having a few vague memories of catching it on the USA Cartoon Express and stuff. I really can't wait for the DVD set to come out so I can refresh my memory.

Anyway, next week on Peel Here I'm going to take a look at some seriously rare stickers, well rare at least in the condition that I have them in. Here's a hint, most kids of the 80's couldn't help but take them to school with them.

The mid 90's were kind of a weird time for me.  I was still sort of obsessing over vampires (after getting into the Vampire: The Masquerade role playing game, reading Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite for the first time, and getting into flicks like Blade and Dracula), I was just graduating high school, and I found myself with a job and actual cash to spend on stuff like comics and videos.  I had just stared putting together my first movie collection when I began to realize that a lot of the flicks that I loved growing up were out of print or on the verge of becoming that way.



One of these flicks was a little known gem of a film (at least in my circle of friends) Near Dark.  I had seen it on HBO about a million times in the late 80's and it was by far my favorite vampire story with realistic blood suckers in a realistic environment.  I was getting pretty sick of the lacy, frock wearing vampires in period pieces, or the goth obsessed depressing whiners that I kept seeing in films.  Jesse, Severen, Mae, Homer, and Diamondback were exactly what I thought of when I was thinking vampires, no huge fangs, bat-shit crazy from being alive too long, drifters, and pretty much punks.  You don't even hear the word vampire uttered in the flick, it's just understood, which is awesome.  I also love that the cast is almost entirely stolen from the cast of Aliens because Kathryn Bigelow was with James Cameron at the time and loved the work they were doing in that flick.  It helped a lot I think because they already had a rapport going off of that flick and thus they could just jump right into these new parts.

I bought my first copy of this flick in 1996 or so, ordered it special from a Media Play in my home town.  I was told that I got the last copy in their warehouse which was pretty cool as I soon found out that it was out of print.  Later when I switched over to DVD I was pretty bummed to find that it wasn't being released.  It was one of those flicks (like the Monster Squad) that I was considering buying on bootleg because I just didn't think it was near popular enough to garner a release, but I was surprised in 2002 by a 2 disc special edition in a nice slipcase and everything.  My friend Daniel at work bought me a copy for Christmas that year.

To this day I still think this is the closest thing to the perfect vampire film, if nothing else one that a lot of other filmmakers could stand to learn from.  Lance Henriksen in particular is pretty darn intense in this flick.  According to the extras on the DVD, Henriksen had these gnarly thick fake nails glued to his fingers which he tore up and cut at weird angles and stuff.  He then got into character and pretty much stayed in it until the end of filming, going so far as to drive out into the desert in his off time and fuck with cops as if he was the character he was Jesse.  It's also some of Bill Paxton's more lively work which is really fun.

The only thing I don't really care for is the weird blood transfusion stuff at the end.  It's just a little too much of a storybook ending. Part of the attraction of vampires for me is that it's permanent.  You're either a vampire or you die.  But that's just me.

Hot on the heels of the 20th Century Fox announcement of the Night of the Comet and Solarbabies DVD releases (both for March 6th), Universal has announced that they will be releasing a Harry and the Hendersons special edition DVD on April 24th.  There's also the beginnings of a rumor about an official Monster Squad DVD release floating around as well.  Slap my ass and call me happy.  All the pieces are coming together now...

Jolly Rancher sodas, who'd thunk it. I keep meaning to write about these, but I keep putting it off and I don't know why. So here it is. Jolly Rancher Sodas. I came across these during my Christmas 2005 visit to my family in Florida. They were in all the 7-Elevens and pretty much nowhere else.  I was so excited because the Slurpee crop for that year was pretty piss poor.

Growing up I was a huge Watermelon Jolly Rancher fan; I loved the JR sticks and stuff even though they taste nothing like watermelon, so when I saw that these sodas came in a Watermelon flavor I was pretty darn excited. I expected the soda to taste pretty shitty and nothing like a Jolly Rancher because seriously, who in their right mind would think drinking liquid candy would be a great idea. You can't see me now, but I'm raising my hand. Seriously though I figured these were just branded with the Jolly Rancher logo like the Minute Maid sodas of the 90's and the Tropicana Twister sodas you can sometimes find in Pepsi machines, just a name brand for a basic fruity soda. But then again these do come in some non-traditional flavors. I picked up one of each available, Watermelon, Blue Raspberry, Green Apple and Grape (not pictured.)  There's also an Orange flavor but I have yet to find one.

I got out to the car, twisted off the top, and took my first sip of liquid gold. Ho-lee crap nuggets. This stuff tastes exactly like the candy, spot on, and no matter how gross that may sound to you it's pretty darn heavenly to me.


Out of the rest of the flavors, the Blue Raspberry is probably the best, though it's very rich. In fact all these sodas are pretty rich, enough so that you could probably only drink one every couple of days at the most.

I also really dig the bottles and stuff because they're super-clear so the vibrant colors are the soda, not the plastic.


I'm not a big fan of Green Apple to begin with, but this flavor isn't bad. If you like Green Apple then this is probably a good version for a soda though it's a little on the tart side.


I found these bottles at a local Shell station this past winter so I'm glad they finally managed to make their way up from Florida to Georgia, though after I bought out their stock of Watermelon they didn't replenish it, so it might not really be here yet. If nothing else, I have to give the company that makes these (Elizabeth Beverage Company of New Castle, Delaware) props for sticking to the actual flavors instead of just using the branding.

As an added bonus I've also got a snapshot of another soda that I found this past Christmas in Florida, Bubble Yum Soda. Let me just say that these are freaking awful. I think I might have mentioned this, but the clerk at the 7-Eleven I found these in tried to haggle with me to get me to buy the entire stock of these he had. They were marked down to $0.50 each and there's a reason for it. They taste like death warmed over.

For this week's Peel Here, I decided it was finally time to break out the Puffy Stickers. I remember having a serious love/hate relationship with puffy stickers as a kid. On the one hand it was the only format that I could find some of the cooler stickers in. On the other, they seemed to be inherently girly, though why I'm not quite sure. I mean it's just a silly 3-D effect, but I guess because they were soft and squishy they seemed closer to a plush doll than an action figure on the toy charts, so thus, girly. Now that's not to say that there aren't more boyish puffy stickers, take for instance the Transformers lenticular stickers that I wrote about at the beginning of this column. It's also not to say that I didn't have my fare share of plush dolls, but they were manly plush dolls like Wicket the Ewok and the uber manly, faux leather E.T. doll. Okay, I actually had the regular plush E.T., but I wanted the faux leather one, and as we all know, there is nothing in this world manlier than faux leather.

Anyway, I digress; I was talking about puffy stickers. Though I don't remember having a ton of them, I did have a few sheets and of those I remember ending up doing some minor surgery on them, either out of boredom or to satisfy my "What do the innards of a puffy sticker look like?" curiosity. So most of the ones I had were picture-less, only in the shape of the original sticker with a patch of thin foam to remind me that they were puffy.

For this week's example, I present to you two packs of Blackstar puffy stickers. Because of an odd trick of light in my scanner, these stickers appear to be inverted as far as puffy-ness goes, but I assure you it's just an optical illusion. These stickers are just as puffy now as they were 24 years ago. Holy crap. 24 years. These things are a quarter of a century old. This is insane, I swear to god I just graduated high school a few years ago and was watching Saturday morning cartoons just a couple of years before that.  Remember, you can click ont he stickers to enbiggen them for viewing purposes.


I don't know all that much about Blackstar other than some basic knowledge. It was a cartoon show created by Filmation, supposedly based on the popularity of Thundarr the Barbarian (which in turn can be traced back to various incarnations of Conan) and was a precursor to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (whose cartoon was also produced by Filmation.) After the success of the He-Man toy line and after the Blackstar show had already been cancelled, Galoob decided to release a couple lines of action figures based on the series. I remember getting a couple of these figures in the midst of collecting He-Man stuff.


Each Blackstar figure was packaged with either an alien demon (see top right sticker above) or a Trobbit (the pink Mario looking dude in the middle.) That's mostly want I remember about these toys because I really dug the little alien demon toy, which lasted much longer in my toybox than the Neptul figure that it came with.

I thought these stickers were pretty cool because, much like the Transformers lenticular stickers, these images are actually photos of the toys and not scenes from the animated series. It seems like this was pretty common during the 80's, both on toy packaging and on licensed products like stickers and party supplies.

Is it just me, or does the Warlock dragon thing that Blackstar is riding look a lot like the dragons from Willow? If so, then since the design of the dragons in Willow were based on Clint Howard (according to Ron Howard who directed the movie) then it's kind of weirdly Clint Howard-esque. I don't know why I find this interesting...


Anyway, on next week's Peel Here ... I have no idea what I'll take a look at, but I promise it'll be fun. For me at least.

My friend Kevin and I watched this flick last night for our regular movie night, so since it was fresh in my mind I thought I'd talk it up.  This is the film that cemented my man love for John Cusack back in the early 90s.  See I'm not gay, but if I were, I would be searching the world for my own Lloyd Dobler, that's all I'm saying.



I think I first saw this flick on cable after I started to develop my healthy man-crush on Cusack (I was in love with One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead at the time) and it very quickly made it's way into my "must learn from this movie", adolescent, "oh crap, I'm in high school" movie rotation.

Over time, what I've ended up loving most about this film is how "on the head" Cameron Crowe hit with this story.  It used to seem kind of unrealistic (well the tax stuff still does to an extent) but after I met and started dating my girlfriend Carrie my life played out almost exactly like this film for a couple of years.  Carrie's mother (who is single after a later in life divorce) was the picture of John Mahoney's character, though she managed to take to possessive craziness to a much further level.  There were insane curfews and family destroying fights simply over us dating.  I never had to fight so hard just to go out on dates, and we weren't even teenagers, this was post college.  It was pretty crazy for awhile and I kept hoping she didn't pay her taxes or something so she'd get thrown in jail and I could convince Carrie to give her a pen and be done with it.  So at the time this film sort of become really important to me and my now fiancee, and still is sort of a symbol for our relationship.

In this week's edition of Peel Here I'm going to take a look at some stickers that truly aren't stickers, even though they're called stickers. They're really stamps masquerading as stickers, which isn't all that far off, but for kids with chronic sandpaper tongue, well it just can't be as fun. So what is this outcast of the glue on paper clique that wants so badly to be part of the sticker-y fun-ness? Why it's the Go-Bots Sticker Fun Book brought to you by the same company that printed most of the coloring and activities books for the last few decades, Golden Books.


Unfortunately the Golden Books logo is half missing on this book, but I was a cheapskate when it came to procuring one of these for review so that I could cost effectively feed everyone's 80's sticker obsession hunger. Or maybe it's just my 80's sticker obsession hunger. Someone is hungry for stickers damn it, and I aims to please, but only if it costs less than a soda. Anyway, back to this lovely sticker book that doesn't really have any stickers in it, but it has a lot of stamps that would love you to believe they were stickers.


See, the Sticker Fun books, for those who never had the pleasure of losing hours of enjoyment to one of these, are basically slimmed down coloring books that have a bunch of missing images on each page that the intrepid reader/colorer can fill in with the supplied pages of "stickers" like these above. Like the instructions illustrate, you punch them out, lick the hell out of the back and stick 'em in the appropriate voids within the book. They've even handily numbered, though it ends up pretty meaningless as the voids in the rest of the book aren't. Hey, is that one on the bottom right a Russian Faberge ice cream cone or the top to some strange Go-Bot infested building?


I think it's kind of funny that the designers of this book tried to throw kids a curveball by supplying a sticker (the yellow VW Bug Bumblebee rip-off on the sticker page above) that is the exact same as one of the drawings on the first coloring page. How many kids stuck the sticker-stamp over the image and then crapped their pants in anger when they got to the next page...


I guess that's what they get for not flipping ahead. So, maybe I'm just dense and don't remember this, but when the hell did the Go-Bots get human brains? I so need to see that cartoon again.


Man, just look at Cy-Kill shaking his fist in anger over that inane football playbook attack on that nameless chunk of land.


I never had that one giant Go-Bot command center, the one that looks like the equivalent of an AT-AT's robo-dog, if giant imperial troop transports had dogs. I did have a couple different Leader-1's that I loved.


It may just be me, but having one of the sticker voids as Cy-Kill's shoulder/wheel just seems kind of lame. I don't know. He sure is sweating that missile blast though, phew!


I wonder how many kids bucked the system and just stuck these in their sticker collection books. I'll be honest, I'm tempted to do that right now, but I'm not sure if I'm bucking the system or just super curious what 20 year old dried stamp glue tastes like.


This trip though the Go-Bots Sticker Fun book wouldn't be complete without a thumbs up from that one gimpy good guy Scooter, a hoity toity Go-Bot with a top had getting some sort of crap thrown on him Three Stooges style (the blue disc in his hand is a plate, the corresponding coloring book page has him in the middle of a food fight, you know in a battle for the planet and all), and an awning sticker that says Swank.


More sticker/stamp goodness. I used to love that flying saucer Go-Bot, mostly because I never got the Cosmos Transformers figure that I really wanted, and it was the closest thing to it.


You know, that has to be the worst maze coloring book activity I've seen since that one lame connect the dots I reviewed a few weeks ago. If robot monsters eat Scooter because he can't find his way through that, he truly deserves it.

So thus ends another riveting entry in this in depth series on 80's stickers. Won't you join me next week when I take another dip into the shoebox full of 80's sticker-y goodness.

I wanted to illustrate my inability to pass up good deals, so today I'm gonna talk about a weird little part of my DVD collection, The Dukes of Hazzard, seasons 1-4.  See, I truly have a sickness or obsession when it comes to buying DVDs and one of the hardest things for me to pass up is a deal that's too good to beat.  When the Dukes of Hazzard movie was about to come out in theaters a couple years ago I found myself browsing through a local Target.  Well there was a whole end-cap devoted to the second season of the Dukes TV set, which was already on sale for like $20.  Well all the sets also had those free tickets to see the movie stuck inside and since Carrie and I had planned to see the flick anyway (I figured it would suck, but it was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, he of Broken Lizard and Super Troopers awesomeness so we thought we'd give it a shot), I figured that that would take another $8 off the price.  So Season 2 for $12, hell yes I was going to buy that.


If course that led to wanting the 1st season seeing as I hadn't been able to bring myself to actually buy it.  See though I grew up on the show and love it dearly, I think I love the memory of the show a lot more than the actual show itself.  There are a lot of shows that I'm on the fence about buying like this, Charles in Charge, Gimmie and Break, Soap, shows that I remember watching a lot as a kid but I'm just not sure I need to own.  Even with my current nostalgia obsession I have a hard time spending hard earned cash on stuff that I'm not sure if I'm going to watch all that often.  But when a set is discounted down to the price of say dinner out on the weekend, you can bet your ass I'll go hungry on Saturday night while watching Bo and Luke Duke jump ponds for no apparent reason what-so-ever.



I ended up waiting on season 1 even though that hole in my collection burned into my soul like so much hellfire.  I guess the only thing I hate more than movies and TV shows not being available on DVD is buying TV shows out of sequence season-wise.  It's illogical, but I'm kind of anal that way.  I've had season 2 of 21 Jump Street for two years now and until I can find season 1 for under $15, I won't buy it, and it's bothering the piss out of me.



Well I ended up waiting until Christmas of last year when season 5 came out, and all the others were on sale for like $15, so I ended up picking up 1 and 3 thinking that I was going to stop.  72 hours of the Dukes of Hazzard should be enough for any normal healthy human being.  But then there was season four starring at me.  "I'm only $15..." it would say coyly, batting it's eyes and giggling.  "Come look at my extra large rack... of DVDs."  See it was also the only 9 disc TV set I'd seen up to that point and I was curious.  Why they hell did it need to be on 9 discs? For $15?!?  So I said fuck it and picked the damn thing up.  At the end of the day I'm glad I did because it has one of the best episodes of the series on it, 10 Million Dollar Sheriff, so that's cool.



I have made a pact with myself and the evil lord below to prevent myself from buying any more seasons of this show, no matter how cheap they get.  It doesn't hurt that the next seasn introduces the faux Dukes while Tom Wopat and John Schneider re-negotiated their contracts with the studio.  The only thing worse than more Dukes would be false Dukes.

In a completely unrelated bit of news.  What the fuck is this piece of shit?  I mean, seriously, did the movie even make enough money to warrant a direct to DVD prequel?  Jebus Christos.

In trying to keep up with some DVD on TV news for 80’s cartoons series I stumbled upon this little gem.


Apparently, the original Ghostbusters cartoon is coming to DVD on Feb. 27th. Now when I say "original" Ghostbusters cartoon, that's to say the Filmation cartoon that was based on their live action comedy show from the 70’s, not the Real Ghostbusters cartoon which was based on the films, which I'm sure is more than obvious from the picture above, but I felt I needed to clarify that anyway.

I first came across the Filmation version while visiting family on vacation one year. I was bored and was shoved into an empty living room while the adults blabbered, which was cool because there was a TV with cable and it was time for the USA Cartoon Express or something. Well the Ghostbusters cartoon popped on and I couldn't believe my eyes, I thought that the cast had changed or something, like they pulled that gag that Charles in Charge pulled on me when the entire family disappeared on the first episode of the second season and was replaced by a bunch of Brady Bunch rejects. Poor Scott Baio.

Anyway, after that I'd always been curious about the show and actually didn't find out until just recently that the cartoon was based on a live action show from the 70's while watching trailers on the D&D DVD set. Just goes to show that I think I was born a few years too late because there is so much stuff from the 70's that I missed, shows like Ark II, Space Academy, Isis, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, etc., etc., etc. that I think I would have loved. But then that's also the beauty of DVD. Can't wait to watch this out when it comes out.

You know, if there were an award for the best company producing and distributing DVD sets in North America I would have to say that hands down, BCI Eclipse deserves it more than goth kids who cut themselves deserve a barrel full of happy face band-aids. Out of all the 80s TV on DVD sets I've purchased (hell of any from any decade) BCI has consistently brought out fun shows in unique and beautiful packaging at a very low price point. Just take a look at one of the He-Man sets with their vibrantly colored foldout digipaks, high episode counts (at least 32 episodes per set), the small color prints included in each set, and all for about $25-$35 depending on where you shop. And that's just the packaging. Their DVDs are also crammed full of trivia, documentaries, a slew of episode info, not to mention a few easter eggs here and there.

I recently received the complete Dungeons and Dragons cartoon DVD box set that was also released by BCI under their Ink and Paint imprint and it's just more of the same. The set is really gorgeous and it's chock full of everything you'd ever want from this cartoon. The set itself was designed to look like the core rulebook set from 1983, the same edition that came out when the cartoon premiered on American television. It's also set up like a box set (think shoebox) instead of the more normal slipcase, but inside is the same sort of foldout digipak that BCI and most other slipcase DVD sets come with.


This set contains the complete cartoon series, with all 27 episodes from seasons 1-3, a 30 minute documentary with interviews from the show's creative staff, a bunch of alternate footage (including the three different versions of the show's opening credits), a fan film, as well as a special treat for fans of the show, a radio play recording of the never produced final episode of the show that gives some closure to the D&D cartoon story. The set also includes a cute little hardbound D&D role-playing sourcebook that has player info for all the characters and items from the cartoon.

It's attention to detail like this that shows how much BCI cares about the fans and knows that at the end of the day it's fans of the show that are going to be plunking down hard earned bucks for the set. Other companies tend to take a situation like that and flip it so that they can make the maximum amount of money off of the least amount of DVDs sold. Take for instance the DVD release of the Adventures of Brisco County Jr. from Warner Brothers. It was a short-lived show with a niche fan base, and therefore probably a small audience on DVD, so they put a very sparse set together that has a $100 MSRP. Rhino Home Video did the same thing with a number of shows including Get a Life, Jem, G.I. Joe and Transformers, all of which had outrageous price points and very little in the way of packaging or extras. At the end of the day, I think it's because most companies produce product that they expect to sell to the general public, when they should have a more specific audience in mind.

Anyway, as far as the cartoon itself goes, I think it holds up rather well which is a credit to the creators and writers of the series including Mark Evanier, Jeffery Scott, Michael Reeves and Paul Dini. Like He-Man, this was one of the first shows that brought action elements back into Saturday Morning cartoons, which made it both fun and exciting. Its shows like this that would really pave the way for the more intelligent non-comedic action cartoons of the 90s and beyond like Batman and Justice League. If you've never had the opportunity to catch it, the show is about six kids who get pulled into the fantasy world of Dungeons and Dragons while riding a roller coaster of the same name at a theme park or carnival or something.






They each end up with special powers, armor or weapons that represent various classes from the Dungeon and Dragons world, the Ranger (Hank, voiced by Willie Aames of Charles in Charge and Bibleman fame) with his energy bow and arrows, an Acrobat (Diana, voiced by Tonya Gail Smith) with her resizable bo-staff/javelin, a thief (Shelia, voiced by Katie Leigh) who has a nifty invisibility cloak, the cavalier (Eric, voiced by Don Most of Happy Days fame) who has a nifty shield, the Wizard, (Presto, voice by Adam Rich of 8 is Enough fame) who gets a hat that he can "pull" magic out of, and a barbarian (Bobby, voiced by Ted Field III) who had a bitchin' club and an almost annoying pet unicorn Uni (voiced by Frank Welker, the man responsible for voicing two of my all time best Transformers voices, Soundwave and Megatron.)


Together with the Dungeon Master, the kids are fighting against Venger (voiced by Peter Cullen, who voiced Optimus Prime on Transformers), an evil tyrant set out to ruling the D&D lands. I always dug Venger because he rode on a Nightmare and had that really disturbing single horn on his head. He always reminded me of another screen villain, the Source of All Evil from Time Bandits.


What I think is pretty awesome about this show is that it manages to capture a very specific feeling and area of pop culture from the 80's, that of book and dice role playing as well as Saturday morning cartoons (which in the 80's had a much different feel from the Saturday morning cartoons of the 70's.) Like I said above, and can't seem to stress enough, that the box set is beautiful and at about $35, is the perfect price for a nice nostalgia DVD set like this (end product gushing and pimping.)

Anyway, I saw this great picture of the cast from the show on Wiki, so I thought I'd pass it along here. From bottom left, Ted Field III, Don Most, Peter Cullen, Director Hank Saroyan, Katie Leigh, Willie Aames, Tonya Gail Smith, Adam Rich, Sidney Miller, and Frank Welker.


I've got a lot of fond memories of watching this show, most of which revolve around getting up early on Saturday mornings, feigning sick to get out of soccer practice, and then vegging out to this show with either a bowl full of Chef Boyardee mini raviolis or Capt'n Crunch with Crunchberries, dry because I hated the damn Soggies. I also remember being completely ignorant of the table top role playing game, though I did have a couple of the D&D action figures, namely the Warduke and Strongheart. I think in my silly little mind world, the Warduke figure was actually more at home in the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome world than like a He-Man type world, what with his half on, half naked costume and evil red eyes. I don't know.

Pretty soon we can also look forward to the BCI Ink & Paint release of Bravestarr which will hopefully be just as beautiful and chock full of extras.

I pretty much grew up a big fan of comic books, though it's one of the many addictions I've had that has wanned over the years.  But in the interim, I've sort of become a movie buff, so where the two meet, I'm usually there.  I remember in the mid 90's, before comic book movies were so common, that there would be nothing better than like four or five CB movies a year.  Little did I know that this would soon come to pass, and that it would suck so much ass, and that, well I really can't think of a way to end this sentence with another rhyme.



When I first saw the trailer for Unbreakable, like everyone else in the world, I had no idea what the hell the movie was about, only that it seemed very much like the Sixth Sense, which I really dug, so I was kind of excited.  I had no inkling that it would end up being a freaking comic book movie, and in my stupid opinion, one of the best to come out in this decade of super-crap.  I went to see this in the theater with my girl Carrie, and we were both pretty blown away.  Well pretty blown away except for the ending, and it's not the twist I have a problem with, just the stupid-as-all-hell Animal House freeze frames and credits.  What in the hell was he thinking?

Anyway, this flick, or more precisely, this DVD is kind of important to me because it was the first DVD of my current collection.  I had picked up a few before this, but that was during a time when I typically sold all my CDs and DVDs to make back money for rent and utilities and junk.  So when I picked this up, along with my first DVD player (I had always mooched off my roommate before then), both with that stupid $300 tax refund that Bush sent out to everyone, it became the first of my concrete, "never going to sell", collection of DVDs.

I first came across Bottle Rocket while working at a grocery store after high school.  Every once in awhile I chipped in and manned the video rental desk and for my troubles the video manager let me take home the huge box of rolled up movie posters we received monthly to advertise the new flicks coming in.  She didn't use them because we didn't have room to put 'em up so I got to keep them.  Pretty much from 1995 to 1998 every room I stayed in, over like the four apartments I lived in were practically wallpapered with movie posters.



One of these posters (same as the DVD cover above), which my one friend Jeremy had commented on while flipping through the stash we both had (he also got loads of posters from a different store), was for this flick that neither of us had actually seen in our respective video rental places, Bottle Rocket.  Both of us had seen and loved both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and from the poster this flick looked like more of the same, if not maybe a little more indie.  We both wanted to see it but like I said it wasn't convenient because we couldn't rent it at our stores.

I ended up reliving a scene from Clerks, the one where Randell (who works in a video store) ends up going to a much larger chain video store to rent a movie because his store is so shitty.  I found myself browsing through Home Video, this almost obnoxiously large video place (it had two floors and about three times the floor space as a Blockbuster and twenty times what our stupid grocery store had, and in this Shang Ra La of a video rental place I came face to face with Bottle Rocket on a shelf in the new release section.  I figured I've give it a shot since I didn't make it into this place that often and that movie poster I had at home intrigued me.  (Did I just take four paragraphs to explain why I rented a video?  Yes I did.)

Anyway, after I finished the final frame of the movie I was in love.  For one brief shining moment I'd found a film that, from beginning to end, that exemplified my sense of humor almost perfectly.  It also introduced me to the brothers Wilson (Owen, Luke and Andrew) and the directing talents of Wes Anderson.  I don't think there's a frame of this film where I'm not either smiling, laughing, or just sitting amazed by how beautiful a film can be when the visuals, tone, and music gel together just right (as in the chase scene though the building near the end of the flick between Dignan and the cops set to the Rolling Stone's 2000 Man off of Their Satanic Majesties Request album.)  I mean the yellow jumpsuits, "escaping" from the hospital, their first robbery, the bird-call signals, Mr. Henry's karate lessons, all of this hits this absurd yet totally natural and subdued sense of humor that I find amazingly funny.

This flick, like Zero Effect, is one of the films I find myself trying to show to everyone I know.

I first came across Bill Hicks stand-up comedy back when his One Night Stand aired on HBO for the first time.  I was way too young to appreciate anything other than the most obvious of his jokes, but I found him funny and always wondered when I'd see more, or if he'd pop up in movies or TV like some of the other comedians I loved at the time.  Then I promptly forgot about him.  I was young, sue me.



Then flash forward to Shawn just out of high school and getting his first CD player (I was a late bloomer.)  I was browsing the local Disc-Go-Round, thumbing through the T's, skipping over 60 copies of 311's self titled album, wishing there were more They Might Be Giants albums to pick from, and then settling on a used copy of the new Tool album, Aenima.  I hadn't heard much, but the disturbing claymation videos were kind of cool, so I figured "What the hey."  I got home, popped the disc into my new player and sat back to the soothing easy listening that is Tool.  When I wasn't using the gimmicky Lenticular cover to look at all the dirty pictures int he fold-out cover, I noticed that one of the pages had a painting of a guy I kind of recognized.  Bill Hicks?  Yup.  Big influence on Tool, and this album in particular had both a eulogy and some snippets in one of the songs, Third Eye.  Couple of months later, gone and forgotten again, not that I wasn't listening to the Tool album anymore, but I tended only put it on when I was pissed and needed to work out some aggression, in particular to the Hooker with a Penis song.

Anyway, flash forward to about two years ago.  I was browsing through a discount overstock bookstore in Commerce, GA, in the Arts and Entertainment section when I found a copy of American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story for $2.  I'm a sucker for discount books, and I had just started to get into reading biographies and junk.  It sat on the bookshelf at home for a few months before I got around to cracking the cover.  Holy crap.  I was pretty blown away by the life of this guy who I'd just barely known about from some songs and one 30-odd minute stand-up performance.

I immediately sought out his CDs and any DVDs or video I could find.  All the CDs were still in print, so I picked up a couple of those, but there wasn't much in the way of DVD.  The best I could find was an on-demand copy of his One Night Stand via my local cable company, which was a start, but not really what I was looking for.  I gave up a little while later with no hope of finding anything.  There just aren't that many comedy performances available on DVD.  Sure, you can find some of the bigger names, or some of the more current fare, but as for a nice backlog of titles, there just isn't all that much.

Well, apparently my re-introduction to Bill Hicks fell on some sort of karmic time line because right about when I gave up hope, around Christmas of 2004, while shopping for various odds and ends for the family, I stumbled upon the above DVD, Bill Hicks Live.  I promptly bought up both copies they had in Best Buy and went home to watch it before sending off the second copy to my sister for Christmas.

The DVD has a good portion of his official live performances on it, from the HBO One Night Stand, to both Relentless and Revelations, as well as a decent documentary.  All in all it's about 3 hours worth of genius stand-up and insights.

You know how every collection usually has a couple of things in it that just don't fit?  Well It's Pat is one of those things for my DVD collection.



For the most part I really can't stand this movie even though I really dig Julia Sweeney and I didn't mind the SNL sketches this flick is based on.  I think this flick's main flaw is that the joke was overdone way before it was even considered as a movie and if I'm remembering correctly, even Julia Sweeney didn't want to do it anymore, but did for the money.  Even with Dave Foley of the Kids in the Hall, Quentin Tarantino (who helped write uncredited), and a cameo by Mitch Pileggi (he of X-Files and Shocker fame) to help it along this flick just flops from annoying to stupid to boring.

But I own it.  Part of the reason is that I bought it early on in the collection, before Wal-Mart $5.50 bins and DVDs came down in price, when finding a DVD for under $15 was a rarity.  Our local Media Play had it discounted down to $4.99 and I was tempted.  But why exactly?

Well, in a nutshell, this flick has a rather long cameo by the band Ween, well at least Gene and Dean Ween (Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo respectively) and Andrew Weiss, which is my all time favorite band.  Not only do they get to have a Ween-mobile, but they also have a nice bit of concert footage (with nice versions of Pork Roll Egg and Cheese and Don't Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy) and they are the first who truly get to see what sex Pat is.  This was years before the Live in Chicago DVD hit, so it was one of the only chances I had to have a visual representation of what the guys looked like on film.

Hi, My name is Shawn, and I own It's Pat (shudder.)

Well, it's an all-new week in an all-new year, so I guess it's time for an all-new type of 80's sticker to talk about.

Around 1985-86 is when collecting took on a whole new meaning in my little world. With my introduction to Garbage Pail Kids my focus shifted from being obsessed with toys to being infatuated with various types of paper goodness. It started with GPK's, and then moved on to baseball cards and collectible sticker albums (first baseball related, then albums based from the various cartoons I was into.) Sometime in 1986 the 7-Eleven in my neighborhood started selling Panini Sticker albums and stickers.

For a quarter you could either get one of the magazine-sized empty sticker books or a pack of 5 stickers. Though baseball cards were addicting, the sets were so big (topping out at about 700 cards per series) that it didn't seem like that big of a deal if you couldn't find a 1987 Topps Ozzie Smith, but these sticker books were a million times worse because when ever you flipped through the book, there were all the empty slots starring at you. Combine this with the power and freaking weird appeal of stickers (remember kids, it's just glue on paper) and it became a full-blown eating-up-all-my-allowance obsession.

The only thing worse than the Panini Baseball Sticker books were the cartoon sticker books because these told a story through the pictures. So it became a matter of getting to see all the pictures. Once again, like the whole glue on paper thing, for a kid to read a book and not see any pictures, or to have pictures missing is a little private hell. Go on, go read a story to a kid and don't show them the pictures. I'll wait. Do you see that look of hurt and rage on their cute little faces? Crazy huh?

I remember this being so frustrating that I couldn't bring myself to get more than a couple books growing up. It was just too expensive of a hobby. I think, other than a couple Baseball albums, I had the Transformers the Movie and Thundercats albums. When I was picking through eBay looking for stickers for this column, I was sort of unsure what to try and buy. My first thought was to try and find complete or semi-complete albums to share, but, as I soon found out, these albums are crazy expensive.

First of all, because Panini is an Italian company that specializes in Football (soccer) sticker albums, the majority of its products are sold in Europe. Most of the auctions were in the UK and that means shipping would be a bitch, not to mention that semi to complete sticker albums are fetching upwards of $100 a book, and that's stupid crazy. Then I was thinking that I could get some loose stickers and an empty album, but empty albums are pretty rare as well. I ended up finding an estate sale that had a bunch of singles from various American cartoon sets.

Now when I received the stickers, I was confused because they had a different company logo on them other than Panini called Diamond. I'm not sure if Diamond is the US version of Panini, or if it's just a similar type of collectable sticker book, but I seem to remember Panini and it's little jousting knight logo more than Diamond. Anyway, without further ado, I present a bunch of collectable sticker album stickers from the cartoon Jem! (Remember, you can click on the images to larger for your sticker viewing pleasure...)


This first set of stickers features Jem and the Holograms in their various forms. If you are unfamiliar with the cartoon, it was about a young girl, Jerrica Benton, who inherited her father's music empire Starlight Music (as well as a prototype entertainment synthesizer machine known as Synergy) and is trying to fund a house for foster children, the Starlight House. Her main nemesis is a man named Eric Raymond who ran Starlight Music before Jerrica took control, and the Misfits (not to be confused with the punk-hardcore band led by Glen Danzig in the late 70's early 80's), an evil all girl glam punk band that answers to Raymond's every beck and call.

Jerrica, through the power of the awesome magic synthesizer Synergy, can transform into Jem, who is outrageous, truly truly outrageous, and the worlds most popular singer. Backed by an all girl band of her friends, the Holograms, Jem fights the good fight of fashion sense, foster children and corrupt record execs, not to mention keeping the love of Rio (her purple haired hunk boyfriend), and keeping her duel personalities secret from the world.

Of the 255 stickers in the set, these really are the cream of the crop. I tried to get ones that exemplified the series, Jerrica (who touches her star earrings to turn into Jem), the Holograms, and Synergy as well as some rocking shots and such. Most of the stickers are horrible screen caps that are either blurry or have the character's backs turned. I tried to get as many shots of Jerrica/Jem kissing various guys to show just how much of a slut she really is.

This second set is all about the Misfits, who were my favorite, even as a kid. I mean rock and roll isn't about being nice and raising foster kids, it's about debauchery and being evil sluts. Unfortunately there weren't any sweet catfight stickers, at least not in the ones I was able to procure, though there is that one cool shot of Jem at the feet of the head Misfit chick. I was always partial to the one with the blue hair though.

I wish this cartoon would come back into print. Rhino really fumbled the ball when they released it at a $75 price point. Who the hell is going to pay that much for this cartoon?!? Anyway, next week on Peel Here, I'll get technical on what does and does not constitute a sticker with a little help from the Go-Bots!

There are still a handful of 80's flicks that I love and covet that haven't been released on DVD yet, namely:

The Monster Squad, The Legend of Billie Jean, Harry and the Hendersons, Howard the Duck, Ratboy, Big Shots, Rad, Night of the Comet, and Solarbabies. 

Well according to the Digital Bits, we can now expect Night of the Comet and Solarbabies to be released on March 6th, 2007!

Sweet Jebus.  Now if Lucas could just get off his "holier than thou" pedestal and get over the fact that Howard the Duck wasn't the best thing since Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea then we'd be on to something.

I know most of these are available via bootlegs and torrents, but I'm a sucker for official studio DVD releases.

Yea-fuckin-me.

Of all the films that I own, the ones that I tend to love owning the most are the little gems that slipped through my fingers when I first encountered them.  For instance, even though I'm a huge fan of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, my favorite of the Dead trilogy DVDs is Day of the Dead because I had overlooked that film for years before finally buying it and falling in love with it.



One DVD in this category that sticks out the most in my mind is Zero Effect.  I remember when this flick came out in theaters I passed it up even though I was a pretty big Ben Stiller fan at the time (having loved Flirting with Disaster and Reality Bites) because of all the negative press it seemed to be getting.  Then when it came out on video I happened to be working part time in the video rental department of a grocery store when I passed up seeing it again, this time because I'd heard that it was dumb.

I didn't end up seeing the flick until one night on TV a year or so ago.  My cable provider had been offering a freebie deal on their new service of ordering older flicks on demand, and the only flick I hadn't seen was Zero Effect.  I figured what the hell, it couldn't be as bad as Zoolander, so I gave it a try and was completely blown away.  Screw Ben Stiller, this flick is all about Bill Pullman, written specifically for him in fact by the director/writer Jake Kasdan.  Daryl Zero is probably my favorite screen detective of all time.  He's a little bit Sherlock Holmes, a little bit Hunter Thompson, and just a tad Buckaroo Banzai.  Like Buckaroo, Daryl Zero has one of the best obvious yet deep quotes of all time:

"Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them."

If there was ever a movie that screamed to be serialized into a TV show, it's Zero Effect, and in fact Kasdan produced and directed a pilot for the series, though for some reason he chose a different Daryl Zero, Alan Cumming (who is a perfectly fine actor, but he's no Daryl Zero.)  This is one of those films that I wish would get the 2 disc special edition slipcase treatment from Warner Brothers.  They could include the pilot for the series, and I'd love to see a making off or at least interviews with the cast, but it'd never happen.

I ended up watching the flick like two more times that weekend, and then promptly bought the DVD off of Amazon.com.  It's one of those films that I make everyone I know watch because they'd probably always pass it up like I did.