I really, really can't wait until the holidays are over. Bah humbug and all that rut. Well, there are a million things to do around the actual house of Branded right now, so to almost complete this month of mostly un-in depth sticker postings (I'll probably have one more quick one next week) I'm going to toss up some scans of the weird over sized Garbage Pail Kids stickers that I have in my collection.

This is more or less a teaser for what's to come in January and February as I'll be spending those months sharing my collection of 80s Garbage Pail Kids stickers (probably my favorite stickers of all time) in the Peel Here columns. So without further ado, here are a few of the large stickers reprinted from the 1st series of GPK's…



The biggest difference between these and the original normal sized sticker cards (besides the size that is) is the fact that there is no die cut line and they aren't numbered on the front. I also believe these didn't have twin stickers either (for those who are unfamiliar with GPK stickers, all of the stickers come in sets with two different names, in essence making the characters twins; there were also a few sets of triplets as well, but we'll get to those next month.)



Instead of being numbered on the front like normal, these are numbered on the back. I'm not sure if the rest of the card backs are different than the original series, but I wouldn't be surprised.





There was at least one set of these oversized stickers that came out in 1986, but I think there might have been at least a second (I'm way too lazy to look it up right now.)






Though these are much easier to come by than the normal 1st series GPK's, I've always resisted buying them because I'm a stickler and I'd rather have the original cards than these reprints, even though they're almost as old, and the art is at least three times larger and much clearer. I think I'll probably eventually break down and buy this set of large stickers if only so I can finally get a good look at all of John Pound's awesome artwork for the set.


So anyway, in case I don't get a chance to post next week, I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season, and let's all hope we get what we want in the war of gift giving.

I've been gearing up for Christmas. Well kind of. It seems as year after year goes by I become more and more enchanted by Halloween, and less and less enchanted by Christmas. I'd have to say that I'm missing a vital aspect of the holiday, which is maturing a little bit out of the awesome gift receiver and into the awesome gift giver. Of course, when I say this I'm referring to the idea that there should probably be a kid involved in the equation somewhere. My wife and I aren't planning on having and rugrats, and my sister and her husband are still undecided. Since I'm not all that close with my cousins or my wife's family, there aren't any kids to get stuff for. As for the adults in my life, well lets just say I get one of two responses during this season when I ask them what they'd like: "Whatever you get me will be fine…" or the un-enchanting "Eh, I don't really want anything." Compounding this is the fact that most of the adults I know don't read, don't really get into movies or TV, and have hobbies that are either way too expensive (hamm radio equipment), or are sort of uninspiring gift-wise (like buying yarn for the knitters.)

This leads me to a practice that I am mostly opposed to which is gift card giving. I'm mainly of the mindset that if you don't know the person well enough that the best idea is a gift card, than you probably shouldn't be exchanging gifts. Of course, there is the familial obligation thing, which leads to much gift card buying. Heck, for the last few years, my wife and I have been deeply entrenched in a gift card battle with her stepbrother and his wife. It started when they got married and that next Christmas gave us a $50 gift card when we had only chipped in for a $25 one for them. The next year the tables turned with us upping the amount and them lowering. And on and on. Funny thing is you think it would even out, but it never does. Anyway, enough complaining chitter chatter. We're here for the sticker goodness, at least until after the holidays when I'll be able to free up some time for digging back into the cartoon commentaries.

So what's up this week? Well, since I just found a super cheap copy of Robocop 2 in the dump bin at Wal-Mart, I've sort of been in the mood to share the Topps sticker card subset from their 1990 set of trading cards…



I've always sort of closely identified with the first two Robocop movies because I saw them in the theatre growing up and they were (at the time at least) two of the most disturbing films I'd ever seen. It was around that time that my parents lifted my ban on seeing R-rated films (I think I was about 10 at the time) and it was kind of a novel thing in my circle of friends. Later on, after I became a comic collector and my friends sort of caught up on the R-rated movie watching, we sort of developed a weird cult of fandom for sci-fi/action flicks that also had comic book counterparts, in particular the Alien, Terminator, and Predator movies. For some reason, try as I might, I just couldn't seem to win everyone over on the Robocop films, love them as I did.

In retrospect, I find it kind of weird that there was any merchandising off of these films at all because of how adult they were. I mean there was a Marvel comic, a cartoon series, a line of toys (which were cool because they incorporated not only caps, but also removable helmets), scratch and sniff stickers for the first film (I have to assume they smelled like motor oil), and probably lunchboxes though I can't remember for sure. The second film has always felt very hard edged, what with the drug addicted cyborg baddie, the evil little kid, and the extent to which Murphy (Peter Weller) is beaten down. I don't think the director (Irvin Kershner of Empire Strikes Back fame) handled the black comedy aspect quite as well as Paul Verhoeven did in the first (though I'm sure it didn't help that Frank Miller is the credited screenwriter on the second film, and he surely isn't know for his comical writing style.)

As far as the stickers in this set go, they're your pretty standard Topps fare. There were 11 in the subset, all of which had a badge like border and a huge logo that sort of distracted from the overall sticker (much like the similar Batman the movie stickers from a couple years earlier.)



I have to say that out of all the possible imagery they could have pulled from I'm glad they focused on Murphy for most of the cards. I just think it would have been even less kid friendly had they stuck in a bunch of the other characters. I'm also glad there was an E.D. 209 sticker as well. I'm not quite sure why, but I've always been fascinated with the chicken walker stylings of both the E.D. 209 and the AT-ST from Star Wars.

Like most Topps sticker sets, these also had puzzle poster backs, though the choice of the picture is a little weak considering they already used it as a sticker, and it's not all that interesting to begin with…





I wonder why there was never a set of Topps Terminator cards and stickers? I mean they did Alien (and the Alien Queen sticker from the Fright Flicks set), Robocop, and there was also that one Predator sticker in the Fright Flicks set as well. Maybe it was a studio property thing…

Again, I suck. If it's not lightening frying my modem, it's work getting stupid busy and taking up all my blogging time. Sigh. I did take part in a round table discussion on Christmas memories last night with Jerzy Drozd and Hoover on the Saturday Supercast podcast. We talked about all things gift related as well as going on many fine tributaries (which I do have to admit that I am a fan of tributaries.) You can find the podcast here (it's number eleven.).

So for Peel Here this week I'm going to throw up some more quick stickers, Shirt Tales stickers to be exact. I chose these because we talked a little about them on the podcast last night. I watched a decent amount of the show growing up, but I was almost completely oblivious to the fact that they originated as a series of Hallmark cards, stickers, and trinkets. I think there were also a series of stuffed animals as well. Anyway, here are a couple of sticker sheets to peruse…

So I'm a little in the dark here, what is the deal with the little tags hanging off all of their shirts?

Hopefully I'll be getting back on track with a more semi-daily posting schedule soon.

I'm taking part in recording a new episode of the Saturday Supercast podcast tonight at 7 p.m. EST, and you are all invited! Join myself, HooveR, and Jerzy Drozd as we discuss some of the best X-mas mornings of our respective youths. This episode is designed for any reader (of Branded in the 80s or of the Sugary Serials comics) to attend, with no cartoon geek card required.

What was the best X-mas present you ever received as a kid? What was the lousiest?

It's easier than ever to participate. Here's how you do it:

Option 1 - Call in via phone:

Dial: (724) 444-7444
Enter: 38795 # (Talkcast ID)
Enter: 1 # or your PIN (No worries if you don't have a PIN. Just hit 1 and the # key to enter immediately.)
Regular phone charges apply, though! So if you don't have free long distance/minutes after 7 p.m., please stand warned.

Option 2 - Call in on your computer:

Become a Talkshoe Memeber if you aren't already.
Download the Talkshoe Live Client.
Go to the Saturday Supercast Talkshoe page and click the "Join Now" button at 7 p.m. or after. Once you've launched the Talkshoe Live client, click the "Shoe Phone" link to dial in and talk on the show. You will need a mic and headphones to participate this way. However, you can instead use the Talkshoe Live client to listen live and participate in a chat room. We will respond to any thoughts and questions posted there. So you don't have to "go on the air" to participate.

I know it's on short notice, but I hope to see some of you there.

 

A quick Peel Here post this week. On top of my November laziness I was blessed with an unfortunate strike of lightening on Thanksgiving, which fried both my phone jack and my DSL modem leaving me in a lurch internet-wise.  To that end, I'm going to throw up some pictures of a set of puffy stickers that I'm not all that familiar with (form the show Riptide.)  This is from another one of those sticker gift sets, which came with a small album.  I'm crossing my fingers that I can have my internet up and running by Saturday.  Stupid lightening.

Wow, I really need to get back on the Cartoon Commentary! column. This is the effect the holiday season has on me though as my wife and I turn into human pinballs (as if we were caught in some nefarious trap by the wizard of evil-tainment Arcade), bouncing back and forth from one family gathering to the next, planning for trips out of state, and doing our best to shop while not completely putting ourselves in the poorhouse. Sigh, to be 8 again, without all the silly pressures of being an adult. Anyway, if nothing else, I am making sure to keep up with these Peel Here columns, if only because I did most of the hard work ages ago.

This week I thought I'd take another look at some Go Bots stickers, though instead of the Golden Sticker Fun book variety I'm going to take a look at a couple of packs of lenticular puffy stickers. Much like the Transformers (as seen here and here), the Go Bots brand (a Tonka toy) took full advantage of the lenticular sticker technology to showcase the toy line's main transformation gimmick. These two packages were released in 1984 by Gordy International, and were labeled as Change Action Flicker Stickers…



I know of at least three sets of these stickers, though I'm pretty sure there were probably four total (as most puffy sticker sets in the 80s seemed to come in four separate variety packs.) Also, similar to their Transformers lenticular stickers, these Go Bots stickers feature imagery culled from the toys instead of their animated counterparts. What's kind of cool is that Gordy ended up using photos of the actual toys unlike the transformers stickers, which featured the box art.

I find it kind of funny looking at these stickers because they're all labeled not only with the character's name, but also with a description of whether they are friendly or evil. Even though I had a hand full of Go Bots growing up, I never really paid much attention to the factions, well besides knowing that Cy-Kill was the evil leader and Leader-1 was the good, um, leader. I never really watched the cartoon so all I really had to go on was a little Golden storybook to clue me in on this. It's weird that there weren't any sort of faction icons like in most other cartoons of the day (the cobra snake, the Thundercats lion head, the Autobot and Decepticon symbols, heck even the Dinosaucers had faction symbols.)



I wonder which side Zod Monster was on? It's questions like these that always lead back to my desire to own all of the 80s cartoons. Sure, I could look this stuff up on the internet, but I also enjoy the direct approach to research, going straight to the original material.

Lazy, lazy, lazy. So I didn't get up the rest of the sticker collections from last week, though I think I'm going to hold off on those until later on. This week I thought I'd break out my small collection of V stickers instead. V was a pretty big deal for me growing up and probably had just as much influence on my tastes as the original Star Wars trilogy (in fact, Marc Singer in V reminds me a lot of a Han Solo/Luke Skywalker amalgam.) It was my first experience with a very long format story on film (the 2 mini series run about 8 hours, which doesn't even include the weekly show which clocks in at around 14 or so additional hours of material.) I missed out on Star Trek as a kid (well except for the cartoon), and Star Wars, though certainly long format, was still only 5 or so hours. V on the other hand seemed monumental in comparison.

I don't remember the weekly show all that well as I've watched the first two mini series a lot more. My fondest memory of the flicks was when I first moved to Georgia in the 8th grade. I had become friends with a couple of guys pretty early (which is weird for me as I’m kind of shy and quiet in person, especially as a kid) and one of things we connected over was the V series. One of them, Jeremy, had taped the entire thing when he was younger, and we'd sit and watch it after school. It was weird because he caught it on his local affiliate channel when he lived in Maryland, so all of the commercials and news breaks that he also ended up taping seemed so foreign to me. My head was already in a weird space after moving from Florida to Massachusetts to New Hampshire and finally to Georgia all within the span of a year, and then I was watching a broadcast from Maryland to boot.

Something that's always surprised me about V is how little merchandising there seemed to be. There was the one official doll (which I talked about awhile ago), and there were a few other odds and ends, a lunchbox, a series of spin-off novels, a comic book series, and of course these stickers from 1984, but it still really didn’t seem like a lot.



I'm sure these puffy stickers were available in four different packs, but I only managed to track down a couple of them. They made use of imagery from the weekly show, as I don't recognize the guy in the leather Members Only jacket who is pumping his fist in victory. I really love the sticker on the top right featuring Marc Singer and Jane Badler. I love the one uncovered lizard eye (instead of the overdone image of a character with half of their mask/face torn off.)

I also really like the fact that the sticker designers included the Visitor's symbol in the pack below…



I always really dug their icon, though now that I look back at the series I can see that it's basically a thinly veiled swastika.

In looking for V stickers I also stumbled across a set of cards (with a sticker sub-set) printed by Fleer, also in 1984. For some reason I never ran across many cards printed by Fleer as a kid, which makes me wonder if they had a smaller distribution or if they were more regional. Even later on when I was getting into baseball cards, Topps was king and Fleer and Donruss were pretty much non-existent. The first thing that jumped out at me when I picked these stickers up was that they are a slightly different size than Topps, a little shorter, and maybe a little stouter. This would have driven me batty as a kid, though I'm not sure if it's due to the the fact that they would have stuck out or if it's because I sort of have some slight OCD issues when it comes to standards in size (I’m so glad I didn't get into comics until much later as I might have shunned stuff like the Tick and TMNT if I hadn’t managed to get over these issues a bit.)



Unfortunately I didn’t find a complete set of these stickers because they were a bit pricey, which leads me to believe that Fleer had a smaller distribution and production scale. I think it's interesting though that these all seem to have come from the same photo shoot, or at least taken from the same set of screen captures. I kind of wish I found at least one Michael Ironside sticker, though I’m not sure if he ended up on any of them.

Like Topps, these Fleer stickers feature a puzzle poster on the card backs. I'm not positive, but I think this V poster is an enlarged version of sticker number 10 from above.

I swear this past week has been pretty weird for me. Nothing really important or interesting has happened per se, but I've just been busy or lazy. I keep bouncing from one to the other.

Anyway, I meant to post this over a week ago, but I took part in another episode of the Saturday Supercast podcast, episode 10 (which you can snag over at the Talkshoe page.) This time out Jerzy Drozd, HooveR and I spend some time talking about how our generation processes our 80s nostalgia influences, or more accurately why it seem in today's pop culture, instead of simply being influenced by the past, dredges up the exact same properties (Transformers, G.I. Joe, Thundercats, Robo Force, well, not really Robo Force, but we do spend some time getting to the heart of these hug-tastic robots.)

Since I'm on the subject, and since I really do love the project so much, I'd like to remind everyone that the Sugary Serials anthology comic is updating every weekday for free, and that you can now order a print copy of the first issue from Indyplanet if you are more into having a physical copy handy. So far there have been three stories updating, Dreamform Defenders (by Chet Lucero), Equalizers of the Divide (By Jerzy Drozd and Sara Turner), and Curse of the Pharaohs (by Mark Rudolph.) These are all really great stories with some awesome art to boot.

So, as I mentioned last week, this edition of Peel Here marks the 1-year anniversary of the column and a slightly more focused Branded in the 80s to boot. I'm not really patting myself on the back here as much as I'm surprised that I stuck with it this long. What's kind of weird is that I'm not even really a sticker enthusiast, at least not in terms of actively collecting or what not.

Anyway, for sort of a special edition of this column I thought it would be fun to share something a little different. One of my goals when I started this was to try and get my hands on an actual sticker collection, something that really illustrates what sticker collecting was like in the late 70s and throughout the 80s. In my minds eye I could see something very similar to what I had growing up, which was an old photo album, the kind with the horribly gaudy covers of either flowers or some sort of wall paper-like print, and filled with sticky pages covered in cellophane. I wanted to share something that felt a little less "mint on card", something that had a little more love attached to it (at some point at least.) As luck would have it I managed to find a very inexpensive auction on eBay that had two photo books filled with stickers, so over this week I thought I'd share them.



When I opened up the shipping box this came in I was immediately excited (there weren't pictures in the auction I won), as the photo album was exactly as I pictured it, goofy wallpaper print and jam-packed with stickers. There were even a few St. Patrick's day stickers adorning the cover.

On the inside front cover there are some interesting stickers. Surrounding the large puffy Tweety sticker (which is pretty well on model so I think it might be official) there are a bunch of smaller Looney Tunes stickers with some questionable artwork. The Elmer Fudd isn't that bad, but there's something shifty about Bug's eyes. I'm not positive, but I believe these puffy stickers are from the late 70s, probably 79 or 80. There are also some generic fruit and animal stickers, which feel like they're from around the same time period. Intermixed with these puffy stickers are a bunch of quote and word stickers which were issued as some sort of premium (be it cereal or something like that) as I had these very ones in my own sticker book as a kid. They also came with a set of alphabet stickers, which we'll see later in this album…



Of course, any 80s sticker collection wouldn't be complete without at least a few unicorns…



There are also some very weird 3-D cloth stickers on this page at the bottom. They also have little sparkly plastic "jewels" imbedded in them. I'm sort of curious about what came with this set of stickers as there are a few that seem very fantasy oriented (what with the castle, the dragon, and what appears to be dragon's breath), but then there is the alligator. Kind of weird.

Then there are what I believe are some puffy stickers which were meant to be placed in a journal or diary judging from the cute little sayings printed on them…



On the below page we have a repeat of the Bugs Bunny sticker from the inside front cover, though much bigger and much more bootleg looking. What is kind of weird about this sticker is all of the little stickers that surround it depicting oddly colored and miss printed food items (and a Yosemite Sam.) I'm pretty sure these stickers all came from the same set, which is really kind of weird, even for bootlegs.



On the next page we get our first glimpse of a really odd sticker variety that I wasn't aware of until I started scouring eBay for stickers last year, puffy scratch and sniff stickers…



Luckily, who ever started this collection received a ton of them, so on the following pages we'll get to see many more examples. I'm not sure if time wasn't all that kind to the design, as you can really see the thick layer of scented material on these, or if they always looked like this. Hey maybe that's why they weren't as popular (at least in my limited estimation), maybe because they looked pretty ragged from the get go.

I think it's kind of weird how the design in the artwork ranges from something that looks a lot like the artwork featuring the Campbell's Soup Kids (the Hawaiian kids in the pineapple stickers) to some very generic looking Precious Moments kids (in the orange and lemon stickers below.)


The one thing that I really liked about this collection is that it really hit on a lot of the various styles of stickers available at the time, including these googlie eyed Halloween puffy stickers…





If I had to guess I'd say that this was the collection of a little girl as most of the stickers seem to be in the cuter vein. Another nail in the coffin is this collection of Cabbage Patch Kids puffy stickers. Sure, there were some boys who had these dolls growing up, but I still think it's a safe bet that this was a girl's sticker collection.



Though there was one earlier that I didn't mention, this page more or less introduces us to the foil/glitter faction of stickers. I had a few foil stickers growing up, most of which came out of the various vending machines I happened to come across in places like Pizza Hut and Chuck E. Cheese, but I never had any glitter stickers.



Here's another page that looks like it's filled with bootleg stickers. This Goofy sticker looks like it was either made buy the same company that made the off-model Bugs Bunny sticker from before, or came with it as there are also a ton of weird smaller food-themed companion stickers. If it weren't for that tiny Mickey sticker (as well as that Yosemite Sam sticker from before) I'd probably think that the other small stickers weren't related to the larger Goofy sticker. This is really weird, though I guess not quite in the neighborhood of Ghostbusters/Panda weird, at least not yet.



Here is yet another example of foil stickers, the prismatic foil sticker to be precise…



As yet another example of what it was like growing up in my headspace, I think I would have really hated all of the raccoon stickers in the above page, as I would have had no idea "where" they were from (illustrating again how brand conscious I was as a kid.) Even though, it wouldn't have stopped me from sticking them in the book, as any sticker was a good sticker.

Here are some more Halloween puffy stickers (along with some duplicates of the googlie eyed stickers from before, not to mention the alphabet stickers I mention at the start of the colum.)





I think it's odd that the Deputy Dwag sticker set came with a stand-alone sticker of a gun. You'd never see that in today's uptight society. What's even funnier (well I guess it's funny) is how it comes off in this page, where it looks like Grover is way interested in it.  I wonder if that was intentional, and if so, should this make me worry about the child who arranged them?





The stickers that I was most excited to see in this set where these Wendy's "Where's the Beef" stickers from 1984, which I was searching for to no avail on eBay for months, and as luck would have it, both sets where featured in this collection.



I'll be honest though, I do not remember the Hot Stuffed logo or what it was for. Hot and Juicy yes, but Hot Stuffed? No.

Almost as cool as the Wendy's stickers, and yet another set that I was looking for but couldn't find where these Love Boat stickers.



I had managed to find a couple sets on eBay, but both sets were filled with odd cruise themed imagery like piñatas and streamers, and none had any stickers featuring the cast members, which are so much cooler. The only sticker I didn't get in this collection was of Isaac, but at least I got a Gopher and a Captain Stubing.

Again, almost as cool as the previous pages worth of stickers were these brand name food stickers. I was pretty ecstatic when I saw the Jello Pudding Pops sticker, as I loved these frosty treats as a kid (and it didn't hurt that Bill Cosby was shilling them either.) Quick side note, I remember one of the best things about the Pudding Pops was the crust of ice that would form on them that would come off in sheets as you ate them. These have popped up again recently, now under the Popsicle branding, but they aren't the same anymore as they're shaped like regular thin Popsicles (or fudge pops) instead of the wider, flatter variety that they used to come in. Why does this matter you ask? Because they don't have that cool-ass sheet of ice on them anymore. A little detail, but one that is apparently important enough to keep me from buying them.



It was also cool to see the older style glass Tang container. I never realized how nostalgic I'd be for food old packaging, almost as much as I feel for the toy lines and cartoons I grew up with.

Hopefully I'll be able to get to the two other collections of stickers that I have to share this week. Next week I should be back on schedule with more Cartoon Commentary! posts as well.

I just wanted to take a second to thank all the other blogs who were keeping the spirit alive this season (as well as giving me the inspiration to keep my month long post-a-thin going). I'd also like to thank everyone who stopped by and read some of the articles or posted comments, as this also helped. I think I'm going to have to take a break from posting for a few days, but I'll be back next week with my one year anniversary Peel Here as well as some new installments of Cartoon Commentary! For now I'll leave you all with some left over pictures, stuff that I just didn't get around to talking about…

HAPPY HALLOWEEN ALL!!!

So, I wanted to announce the winner of the season's Audio Ghost Story. There was some deliberation between the dog and cat, but in the end it we all agreed that Douglas Gonnelly and friends deserved to take home the prize.

Here, for everyone's listening pleasure is the story, The Witch of Saratoga…

…and I urge everyone to also check out Doug's site Preying Mantis Productions for some other great stories.

Also, before I forget, there are still four or so more hours to get in any entries into this year's Halloween create your own audio ghost story contest.

You can find the rules and sound files here, and the fun prize pack here.

Well, it's the last week in October with Halloween right around the corner, so it's time for my last spooky themed Peel Here of the season. This week's post is a short one, but one that should be welcome to any fans of some of Hollywood's more modern monsters (in particular Freddy Kruger.) The following stickers come from the 1988 Topps Fright Flicks sub set. I remember picking up a few packs of these cards and if I'm remembering correctly, they were a lot like the You'll Die Laughing series, just updated for the 80s.

I'm pretty sure the cards were similar to the stickers in that a fair number of them must have featured the incorrigible Mr. Kruger as he fits so well into the whole concept of cards with bad puns plastered all over them…



What's really interesting to me about this set of stickers (and the cards as well) is that the licenses for these characters come from multiple studios. It seems kind of weird that Topps managed to finagle them all into participating in a single piece of merchandising, but apparently they did.



Like most good Topps sets there is again a card-back puzzle poster, though this time it's pretty ugly, what with the whole cut and past job that had to be done in order to get all these characters together.



Anyway, next week officially marks the 1 year anniversary of Peel Here, and I've got a pretty fun post planned. Now I'm off to bake Halloween cookies and start carving our pumpkin. I can almost smell the roasting pumpkin seeds now…

One of the things that I haven't really written all that much about this Halloween season are all the movies I've been watching.   I guess there are only so many hours in a day.  To make up for that a bit I thought I'd mention this awesome box set of Vincent Price flicks that MGM put out recently (which is made up of a good portion of their previously released Midnite Madness double feature discs.)   I've been slowly getting into the Price's work over the past year or so after watching his awesome turn as Dr. Robert Morgan in The Last Man on Earth.   I've been stumbling through his body of work hitting a House on Haunted Hill here and an Abominable Dr. Phibes there.  Well my local Hollywood video went out of business and was selling off all their DVD stock, so on a whim I picked up The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum.  I really liked both and wanted to see some more of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations, so after doing a search on Amazon I found the very reasonably priced Vincent Price: Scream Legends Collection…



Over the last few days the wife and I found some time to sit down and watch a couple of the flicks which I think managed to show the range (quality-wise) of flicks Price has worked on, as well as what's offered in this set.  The first flick we took in was Madhouse, released in 1974.



Madhouse is basically a horror infused send up of Price's own film career.  He plays an actor named Paul Tombs who is best know for staring in a series of gruesome horror flicks all surrounding the character Dr. Death.  At the height of his career as the gruesome doctor, Tombs finally decided to settle down and marry one of his leading ladies, the announcement of which he made at a gala New Years party with all of his friends and colleagues.  Unfortunately not everyone is so happy with his impending nuptials and ends up killing his bride to be (beheading her in fact), though the question is raised, did Tombs kill her himself.  After a lengthy hiatus from film making (not to mention a stay in an asylum) Tombs decides to re-embark on his film career at the behest of his best friend and co-creator of Dr. Death Herbert Flay (played by the ever awesome Peter Cushing.)  Of course, straight away the bodies start piling up again, as do the questions as to who is killing all of these people.

At then end of the day I really enjoyed the first two thirds of the film, but it really suffered from an almost incomprehensible climax and resolution.  It didn't help that the film was filled with plot holes and some questionable directing (way too many red herrings, a fact that is actually celebrated in the final act with an actual dish of red herring.)  Price and Cushing do their best with what they have, even though their effort barely rescues this film from complete disaster.  At a time when the modern horror landscape was drastically changing, and surrounded by the likes of Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and Last House on the left, flicks like Madhouse with their questionable effects work (many obviously rubber spiders abound) and poorly written scripts just a little past their day.

The second film we caught was the much better and down right disturbing Witchfinder General (though American audiences might know it as The Conqueror Worm), released in 1968.



In this flick Price plays Mathew Hopkins, a lawyer and professional witch finder/executor, a character that's based on an actual witch inquisitor.  While making his way through England torturing and executing "confessed" witches (whether they are guilty or not), Hopkins is summoned to a small town at the behest of the populace to look into a local priest.  It just so happens that the priest is the uncle of Sarah Lowes, whose fiancé (Richard Marshall, played by Ian Ogilvy) is a Roundhead fighting against the Royalists.   After Hopkins tortures and executes Sarah's uncle Richard comes back to find his soon to be wife in quite a state (she had offered herself to Hopkins in exchange for her uncle's safety and was inadvertently raped by Hopkins' assistant in the process.)  Richard vows revenge on Hopkins, stopping at nothing to see him pay for what he's done.

The film was very well made with a startlingly non-camp performance from Price (a feat which young auteur director Michael Reeves accomplished by constantly questioning Price's acting choices unexplained to a point where Price ended up reeling in his typical black humor.)  The film was pretty brutal for the time, and much more so than Price seems to typically make.  I think it's because the material was handle very realistically and straight forward with no actual witchcraft or crazy plot devices.  I was also surprised by the very downbeat ending, also a rarity in Price's oeuvre.

I can't wait to make my way through the rest of the set which include five more films, Theater of Blood, Tales of Terror, Twice Told Tales, The Abominable Dr. Phibes (which I have seen and love), and Dr. Phibes Rises Again.   This set also includes four biographical featurettes (including on that focuses on the Witchfinder General in particular) that though aren't quite as in depth as one might like, do offer a nice staring point into the work of an amazing man.  All in all, it's well worth the $30 price tag (though currently you can find it on amazon.com for around $22.)

I managed to snag one of those newer Wal-Mart Halloween mascot tags. I'm really in love with this design. I especially love the Son of Frankenstein-esque purple fury vest deal. For some reason though, the rest of the Wal-Mart mascots (non of which ended up on tags, but are featured on some of the products) like the vampire, witch and pumpkin man really don't work for me.



Anyway, here's part two of my dollar store coloring book post. Again, I'm not very fond of the cover or most of the interior artwork…



…but there are some choice drawings from the same mystery artist as before. In fact, there is a little bit of continuity going on here as we get to see the same skeleton punk (who dug his way out of a grave in the previous book) rocking out on his awesome coffin shaped guitar!



I love the skull musical notes hanging in the air, they're a really nice touch.

In the "what the heck were they thinking" department we also have this odd Shark popping out of a toilet to trick-or-treat page…



I'm all for land-shark gags (my favorite being the Scora skit in the first or second season of the Kids in the Hall), but this is pretty weird. I mean, what exactly is the shark hoping to score here?

Finally, and in keeping in theme with the first coloring book, we also have a little bit more of the Halloween in space celebration with Major Jack here.



Ground control to Major Jack, take your candy corn and put it in your sack!

Last year during Halloween I found a bunch of fun stuff at my local dollar stores, a lot of which I blogged about at the time, but there were a couple of items that I never got around to scanning and sharing. Well, this weekend I aim to right that wrong. I was kind of skeptical when I picked up a thin bundle of Halloween coloring books at Dollar Tree, figuring that the art inside would be utterly terrible, but I happened to be going through a Creature from the Black Lagoon kick and he just happened to be gracing the cover of one of the books so I couldn't pass it up (besides, it was a dollar.)



I'm not a huge an of the cover art, though I do really like the wraith that was included in this weird trio (in particular the fact that she has one good leg, and if you look at the bottom left you can see the other poking out of the dirt.) When I got home and cracked the books open I pretty found exactly what I was expecting, which was some pretty bad cutesy (think Precious Moments cute) artwork. There were a handful of really cool pictures here and there though, including the following three. I'm not sure who the artists are (they never seem to credit artists in coloring books do they?), but this guy or gal did an awesome job with some really fun designs. I really liked this muck monster, complete with plastic pumpkin pail (and jack-o-lantern face), and "…all drippings with goo…" (as Peter McNicol would have said in Ghostbusters 2.)



I also really dug (conceptually) this below graveyard scene, complete with re-animated punker skeleton and his rat (with a real skull for a mask no less.) I'm not quite sure what's going on with the snake and the skull in the background though…



This was just a very rockabilly addition to the coloring book (which was printed in 1996 by Landoll's), which seems kind of weird, yet very cool.

Last but not least is the addition of a more intergalactic celebration of Halloween in space…



I'm pretty sure the same artist is responsible for all three, and as we'll see tomorrow in the second coloring book from the same company, this artist did some more interesting pictures. For now though, might I suggest printing these out, breaking out the Crayolas, sticking your tongue out of the side of your mouth, and bringing these drawings to life.

I figured, since we're getting down to the wire with only a handful of days between now and the big day that I'd sort of round up the rest of my Halloween food haul for this year. First off though, I'd like to point to I-Mockery's great rundown of 2007 candy offerings, it's a great list and way more exhaustive than I had the energy to do, so if you get a chance take a second to look at his write up and make his impending sugar coma a little more worthwhile.

I thought I'd start off with a fun new version of pretty much the only cereal I ate on a regular basis growing up, Cap'n Crunch. I'm not sure if this is new for this year, or if it's popped up in the past, but it's the first time I've ever spotted a box of Halloween Crunch on my local store shelves…



Basically, this is a variation on the Crunch Berries variety except instead of berries you get berry flavored ghosts. To add a little more zing, the ghosts (which are sort of an orange-ish red) turn a green-ish orange in milk (or I suppose any other liquid, but what else are we really eating our cereal with), and in turn they sort of turn the milk green. The whole color change wasn't nearly as astounding as I'd hoped, but I guess concessions have to be made to keep the stuff edible.

Even though I love the idea of it, I'm not a big cereal eater as I'm really not into sweet stuff. I do however love all of the pageantry surrounding the sugary breakfast food, in particular the mascots and artwork. In this respect Halloween Crunch is pretty darn awesome in my book as I've never seen the Cap'n so weirdly animated. I love the whole mummy gag, and the idea that he all of a sudden has the mystical power to summon forth color-changing ghost berries is pretty wild.



Cereal without milk (click to see an up-close picture of the bowl)



Adding Milk (click to see less than astounding color-changing effect…)



I know some other brands have gone hog wild during Halloween in the past, but this year there weren't that many other cereals getting into the spirit so to speak. Besides the trio of monster cereals hitting shelves again (Franken-Berry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula), the only other season box I saw were these Lucky Charms. There was nothing special about the cereal, but there was a fun bat mask that you could cut out of the back of the box. (Click picture below to see the Lucky Charms box close-up.)



There were also a few other bags of candy I picked up this year, though I tried to stick to stuff that was doing something a little more interesting than your normal Halloween candy offerings. First up we have one of my favorite finds this year, Ghost Dots.



Basically, these are just like the normal dots, except they come in an awesome translucent green (that looks a lot like your basic glow in the dark coloring) and they're all mystery flavors. I love the concept on these, I mean the whole idea that candy would have spirits is pretty crazy, and now kids all over the world get to send them to the after life again like so many scared Pac Man ghosts.



Another confection that I found in my local Dollar Tree which ended up doing something a little different were these Mr. Yummy Skeleton Pops.



I love the idea of replacing your basic boring paper stick with a plastic skeleton. It's just genius. Unfortunately the candy skulls are pretty much tasteless and even at a dollar a bag (you get five) it's a sort of a waste. I do have to give them points on creativity though. I've also seen another variation on this concept that had skeleton parts (arms and legs mostly) in a much larger bag (that was also around $6 so I decided to skip it), not to mention the build-a-skeleton pops that are reviewed on the I-Mockery site.



The last candies up today are the Jolly Rancher Creepy Pops…



At the end of the day there isn't anything ground breaking about these except that they taste awesome and just happen to be molded in the shapes of ghosts, vampires, skulls and jack-o-lanterns. You usually can't go wrong with Jolly Rancher.

I've been meaning to post this ad for the Vincent Price Shrunken Head Apple Sculpture kit for awhile, but I kept putting it off.



I guess I wanted to try and make a shrunken head of my own, but I've been lazy on the crafts front this month. Last night I decided to run out to the store before it was too late (and it might already be) and start my own little shrunken apple head. Though I don't have one of the awesome looking Vincent Price certified sets (which you can still find on eBay), I found a set of instructions on the interweb (via Make Magazine.)

All you need is one decent sized apple…



…some lemon juice (1/2 cup), some salt (2 teaspoons)…



…a knife (or potato peeler), and a small bowl.



Start by mixing half a cup of lemon juice with two teaspoons of salt to make one heck of a noxious anti-browning mixture. I broke down and bought the lemon juice from concentrate, though I'm sure fresh squeezed is probably better. Then peel the apple. I've always been envious of the folks who can peel their apple in one go, resulting in one long springy piece of apple skin. I guess as long as the job gets done though…



Next, place the apple in the salty lemon juice, making sure to coat all of the peeled areas.



Now using a potato peeler or knife, carve out your shrunken head's face. Concentrate on the larger features (eyes, nose, and mouth) as smaller details will probably wilt in the drying process. The site where I found the instructions suggested some possible accoutrements, like sticking a couple whole cloves in the eye sockets, and using large whole grains of rice for teeth, but I think I'm going to go strictly natural for my first go round.



Now that you have your apple peeled, semi-preserved, and carved, it's time to find a nice dry and warm place to let your shrunken head develop. I chose my cupboard as it's the only free place where my pets won't be able to get at it. I propped mine up on an up turned plastic storage container, though the site suggest a wire rack. This morning I found my head in a small pool of lemony apple juice, so I suggest trying the rack method as well (making sure to place some paper towels or something underneath to catch any liquids.) Let the apple head dry for two weeks, checking it every once in awhile and making any adjustments to the face that seem necessary.



As an alternative to the two week drying process, the site also suggests placing the apple head in the oven on the lowest setting for two days.  I'll check back on it with more pictures as it progresses...

Earlier on in the season when I first stumbled into the Wal-Mart Halloween section as it was being put up, I noticed what has quickly become my favorite find of the season (their packaging mascot for this year.)



What's kind of funny is that all I wanted that day was to buy one of these little Frankie tags, but everything that he was attached to was either too much to justify buying the product just for the tag, or something that would have been a total waste to justify buying it for the tag alone. I hate wasting money, but I hate throwing out perfectly good stuff just because I wanted to own the box it came in (yeah, I know I have some issues.) So the question became what I could buy that was branded with this awesome Frankie design, while spending the least amount of money while also getting the most mileage out of the product. I had it narrowed down to a tiny felt bag that was $2 and a cheap $1 rubber mask (the entire set of which I already bought last year.)

While I was driving myself nuts trying to figure out this monumental problem, I was walking up and down the few aisles Wal-Mart had set aside for season stuff and my flitted across a package of paper cut-outs that I think I've seen on shelves for as long as I can remember. It's a set that I've purchased a few times in my life, mostly in a last minute effort to decorate my mail room at work. What caught my eye though was that like practically everything else in Walls-Mart this year it was branded with the Frankie illustration. Though it was a little more expensive, coming in at a whopping $2.84, I figured that if nothing else I could throw up the cut-outs at work again this year.

When I got back to work I opened up the package and for the first time I took a real good look at the set and was surprised at just how long some of these paper cut-outs had been around, and I figured why not hit the interwebnet and try and find out a little bit more about these. Though I'm sure everyone and their mom already knows this, these paper cut-outs are made by the Beistle Company who have been in the market of novelty decorations since 1900. In fact, I think they’re responsible for most of the paper cut-out designs (across all holidays) that most people have fond memories for since they license out their designs to practically everyone making these types of decorations.

Unfortunately, only a few of the designs in the package I bought would fit on the scanner, but they are some of the really cool ones…

Jointed Black Cat (circa 1968)


Jointed Skeleton (there wasn't a date on him, but I'd be willing to be he was conceived in the 60s…)


…and last but not least, the amazing Flaming Skull (circa 1973.)


For cheaply produced quick holiday fare, there really is a lot of artistry to these drawings and designs. I love all of the multicolored detail on the flaming skull, which has some really great line work to it.

Beistle has a website where you can order direct from them, and recently (as seen over at the Secret Fun Blog) they've been reproducing more of their more vintage fare (I tried to get direct links to the various products but their website always re-directs back to the home page so if you do a search for the following product numbers you should find what they have available, 01008, 01015, 01063, 01193, 01315, 01318.) Spookshows.com also has a nice write up about the company here.

My only problem now is that Wal-Mart has an alternate version of their Frankie Halloween mascot tag on some of their seasonal clothing that is twice as cool as the tag above, but what am I going to do with a child's size t-shirt, which I'd have to buy in order to get it.  I think I need a shrink.

Today was a much needed day of rest and movie watching; in fact it was the first day of a vacation that should last through the 31st (knock on wood.)  So what was on the agenda at casa de Robare?  Well, the 1974 flick titled Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (or possibly the 7 Brothers Meet Dracula if you're more familiar with the shorter version with some alternate editing.)  I'd been meaning to see this flick for awhile (after hearing Ben and Dan talk about it on the Mondo Movie podcast), and today seemed like a great day to sit back and watch the very odd pairing of two cult movie studios, Hammer and the Shaw Brothers.  Yeah, I know what you're thinking, how exactly do you mesh kung fu and horror?  I was skeptical too, but after watching it I have to say that these two go together like chocolate and peanut butter.



I don't have a ton of experience with either studio's work though I have seen a few films by each and I've really liked everything I've seen so far.  Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires was Hammer's shot at trying to breathe some new life into the studio, aiming to cash in on the burgeoning popularity of kung fu cinema in the 70s.  The film was written by Don Houghton (who had penned some episodes of Doctor Who as well as a few other Hammer films) and directed by Roy Ward Baker (who was also part of the Hammer stable of creators), though it's also been noted that Shaw's most prolific and well known filmmaker Chang Cheh also worked on the film.

The film opens on a lone monk walking through the wilderness in Transylvania, 1804.  Right out of the gate you can tell this is a Shaw Brother's film as there are a couple of patented SB camera zooms…



After scaring the bejezus out of a local goat herder, the monk makes his way to a castle in the distance, a location he seems overjoyed to have found.  Though you pretty much have to figure it would be castle Dracula, what with the Transylvania subtitle and fact that it's a co-Hammer production, it was still pretty cool none the less when the monk makes his way into the castle to find a giant tomb with a large letter D on it.  In very quick succession, the tomb opens itself and the ghastly Dracula (played by John Forbes-Robinson) rises to greet the monk, who we find out is named Kah.



We get the basic gist of what's to follow as Kah begs Dracula to help him awaken the legendary seven golden vampires so that he can take control of a province in China.  Dracula refuses, and instead decides to take over Kah's body and so that he himself can return to rule over China and eventually the world.



Honestly this film should be a horrible disaster as right off the bat there are a ton of conflicting story holes, not to mention that the film relies heavily on the films that have come before it, but I still couldn't help smiling with glee throughout the whole thing.  The insanely colorful lighting, the corny dialogue, the interesting though pretty sub-par effects work, it all mashes up into a wonderful hour and a half of crazy monsters and fun kung fu action…



Peter Cushing reprises his role as Professor Van Helsing, though this time he's traveling through China in 1904 in hopes of enlightening the local Universities with his knowledge of the undead.



He recites the legend of the seven golden vampires, a story about a local farmer in an all but forgotten village who chose to stand up against a vampire uprising.  The farmer decided to go out to the vampire's lair one night only to find his daughter, kidnapped (along with six other girls) and tied to a rather ominous looking alter and surrounded by Kah (Dracula) and the seven golden vampires.  The farmer, distraught after seeing his daughter, busts into the temple and proceeds to attempt to free his daughter (unsuccessfully) and to steal one of the vampire's golden bat talismans before fleeing.



In a particularly awesome sequence that follows, Kah summons an army of ghouls who, along with the golden vampires, are set out to track down the farmer.  I was pretty amazed at how creepy and effective the sequence with the ghoul army was considering the film probably didn't have that large of a budget.



Unfortunately Van Helsing's pleas fall on deaf ears, well all but one set that is.



Hsi Ching (played by David Chiang) breaks into Halsing's hotel room to beg him to come back to his ancestral village, the very village being over run by the golden vampires.

To shake things up a bit Houghton introduces the audience to Van Helsing's son Leyland, (played by Robin Stewart) who is at a party when he becomes enchanted by a Swedish widow, Vanessa (played by Julie Ege.)  The two manage to piss off a local Triad Leung Hun, after Vanessa rebuffs his advance.



This leads to the first of five main fight sequences as a group of Triad enforcers attack Leyland and Vanessa.  The duo is saved by two mysterious warriors who we quickly find out are Hsi Ching's brothers, who have been lying in wait to protect the Van Helsings during their trip through China.  Because of their newly acquired troubles with the local mafia, and being pressured by both Hsi Ching and Vanessa, Van Helsing decides to embark on a journey to Hsi Ching's ancestral village to rid them of the vampire plight.



Right as the group sets out on their journey they are besieged by an army of Triad warriors led by Leung Hun.  The battle is a great chance for the seven brothers and their sister dot, er, I mean Mai Kwei, to show off their awesome fighting abilities.  It's a little hard to see, but the seventh brother is in the first screen shot on the top right off in the background (he didn’t get a close-up as he’s an archer and needed to be further away to be effective.)



This is another great moment for Shaw studios to shine with some really fun choreographed kung fu action, as well as some well placed crazy in-death reaction shots…



What surprised me a little was how much Cushing wasn't doing, action-wise.  If there was one thing that I noticed about Cushing's performances in the other Hammer films I've watched (Curse of Frankenstein, the Horror of Dracula, Hound of the Baskervilles and Night Creatures), it is how amazingly action packed his roles have been.  When chasing down Dracula, the man is jumping on tables, running and tumbling everywhere, so different from his turn as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.  In Lo7GV Cushing pretty much kept to the background as soon as any fights broke out (of course, he was 61 or so at the time, but still.)



Strangely, in the middle of the film, love blooms everywhere as Leyland makes eyes with Mai Kwei, and Vanessa nuzzles up to Hsi Ching.  This felt kind of odd considering the two genre backgrounds meshing together, but then again it's also very modern, and maybe a little ahead of its time.





There's another great battle set in a cave that the group of heroes camps in along the way.  This is their first battle with the supernatural, one in which the group figures out how to destroy the demons.



I was reassured of Cushing's mobility in this sequence as he grabbed up a torch and started some vampire slaying…



After the battle, and even though the group is tired and disheartened, Van Helsing rallies the troops who quickly make their way to village.  The group builds some defenses while waiting for the final battle they expect that evening.  At this point the film is basically becoming the blueprint for films to follow like the Lost Boys.



This is also the point in the film when the tone takes a dark turn as the battle plays out and vampires, brothers, and Swedish widows start dropping like flies…



Vanessa is turned into a vamp, who in turn bites Hsi Ching, leaving him to make a hard choice deciding ultimately to kill her, and then himself…



That was a surprisingly dramatic sequence that actually had me on the edge of my seat.

There's a final race to the temple as the last golden vampire kidnaps Mai Kwei.  Leyland rushes after to her rescue almost dying in the process…



Now that we're in closer quarters with less villains, it's papa Helsing's time to shine as he saves his son and confronts Kah/Dracula, convincing him to transform back into his more normal visage…



During the transformation sequence there is a subtle bit where Dracula takes on the form of a giant bug-like creature that makes me wonder if this was a way of revealing his true demonic form.

In the end, Van Helsing stakes his man, and like in all the previous films Dracula bites the dust…



What's kind of weird is that this whole movie sort of negates Helsing's battles with Dracula as the characters supposedly disappeared from Transylvania in order to travel to China to awaken the seven golden vampires.  Even though there are giant plot holes, this is still one of the most enjoyable vampire flicks I've ever seen.

I can't believe there are only ten more days until Halloween (if you count today.) This month has flown by, which kind of surprises me considering the amount of posting I've been doing. I guess time flies and all that rut. Anyway, not only has this month flown by, but the year as well. In a couple more weeks I will have been doing the Peel Here column for a year, which seems kind of strange to me. I'm too lazy to check back to see if I mentioned it in the first column, but my goal was to try and do the sticker deal for at least a year, and from the looks of it, I have enough material to last almost through a second, so we'll see how that goes.

To sort of bookend last years Halloween DVD contest, I thought I'd pull out my set of the 1986 Topps Little Shop of Horrors sticker cards. These were kind of strange (like the Topps Supergirl the movie sticker cards) in that the entire set consists of stickers instead of an eleven or twenty card subset. Also like the Supergirl stickers, these are sort of mashed together with what would have probably made up the basic set of cards in that most of the stickers feature the story of the movies in the backs instead of just poster puzzle pieces. I'm not sure if Topps saw a trend in the popularity of stickers in general or if they were getting a lot of feedback on their subsets, but it’s interesting to see them sort of abandoning basic non-sports cards in favor of stickers. Heck, their Wacky Packs and Garbage Pail Kids series probably also had an impact on this shift.



The set consisted of 44 stickers, 32 of which had story backs, and 11 that had either the puzzle poster pieces or a completed poster card. Over all these are both kind of cool, and kind of silly in that the Topps gang added a bunch of subtitles and quotes which are both not lifted from the movie or funny in most cases.



There are some stickers that shine through though, in particular the one utilizing the screen shot where Frank Oz did the "from in the mouth" camera gag in the dentist office.


Then again, there are some great stickers that are really hampered by all the added text, as in the crazed Steve Martin one below…





I also didn't care for some of the artistic embellishments, like adding a little vine on Audrey's shoulder.



On the other hand I really dig the three stickers featuring drawings of Audrey II that made it into the set. I'm not sure if these were done for the set or if they were production drawings that Topps had access to, but it’s nice to see a non-screen shot sticker here and there.



Actually, I'm kind of wondering who this set of stickers was for. Granted, I saw this movie when it came out when I was nine or so, but my parents were kind of liberal on gore and violence. I mean, I don't think this movie is so bad kids shouldn't see it, but it does have a lot of adult innuendo and, well, violence, so it doesn't really feel like the sort of flick that would be aimed at kids, and therefore it's kind of weird that there was a set of bubblegum cards/stickers produced. I mean the collectible market wasn't like it is now back in '86, so were adults buying these? Now that I think about it, who was buying the Rocky Horror Picture Show trading cards that were released back in 1980? I kind of figure that these two flicks would have a very similar audience, which is what, teens and twenty somethings? Also now that I'm remembering, there was also a segment in the show Head of the Class that featured the class performing Little Shop (and it seemed more influenced on the Oz remake than the original), so if a sitcom was featuring it, maybe it was aimed at a more family audience. I don't know.





Anyway, the card backs feature a super condensed version of the story, which you can enjoy below…











Next week on Peel Here I'll wrap up the Halloween sticker festivities by break out my set of more modern horror icons featured on their own sticker cards.

In the post on the Crestwood Monster series of books I mentioned how I sort of felt like I missed out on the whole monster craze because of growing up in the 80s. One thing I really feel like I missed out on was the fun cheap schwag you could order from a million ads that appeared in comics in the 60s and 70s. In particular the alluring idea of a giant monster for only $2!



I'm pretty sure these are all posters or some variation on a 7' piece of polyethylene, but they’re all pretty cool. Above there are two variations on Frankenstein's monster (or a skeleton) posters at various prices (not to mention one being drawn by the supremely awesome Jack Davis.) There are also a couple of monster-ghost/wraiths that might have been die-cut to make them all the creepier.

I wonder how much these go for on eBay these days. I'd be willing to bet the mark up is astounding…

Today is going to be a busy one, so to make sure that I don't miss the deadline, I'm going to make this a little more of a visual post. Here are some of the drawings I've done over the last few years that more or less seem to fit the season for me.

















Also, I received the 1st entry into the audio ghost story contest, which is exciting. There are still 11 days to get any entries in, and if you missed it, the prize package was announced here.

It's day 19 of the 31 days of Halloween insane-o blog-a-thon, and it seems like a good day to sit back, break out the candy corn, and dare myself to eat more than five pieces. Instead of concentrating on the history of the confection (John Rozum did a great job of that already this month) I thought I'd look more to the variety available in today's crazy bustling candy world.



There was a time (I suppose) where there was really only one variety of candy corn, your basic yellow, orange and white kernel shaped bit. At some point there were a couple variations introduced including the brown, orange and white chocolate kernel (or Indian corn), as well as the larger, richer, pumpkin mold (complete with little green stem stump.) This would come to be known as your basic autumn mix, with all three varieties present.

Also, at some point before the 80s there was also a mixed bag of what basically amounts to candy corn, but instead of being multicolored and shaped like kernels of corn, the candy was molded into some iconic Halloween shapes (jack-o-lanterns, black cats, bats, and crescent moons) as well as some not so iconic shapes (corn cobs, bundles of wheat, and jugs.) The bats and cats are chocolate, the pumpkins, corn and moons are normal candy corn flavored, while the wheat and jugs are either caramel or maple (I can't quite tell.)



I’m sure that there must have been other shapes and variations before the 80s, but these were the ones that I was most used to seeing around the holiday. You can still find all of these pretty darn easily, though the Halloween mix was a little bit harder to find (which I eventually did in a Walgreens.)





Last year while browsing the aisles in Target I noticed some crazy colored candy corn that was marketed as being gourmet (a useless world if there every was one.) There were a couple varieties, green apple and cherry. I worked up the courage to pick up a package of the cherry (I'm not a big fan of fake green apple) and was horrified by the taste when I broke open the package later that night. Typically I can stand my fare share of candy corn in small doses (so I'd say that one normal sized bag will last me well into Thanksgiving), but after a while the stuff just gets to rich for my blood. The cherry variation was insanely sweet, and so rich that I couldn't continue after two pieces, rendering the package more of an oddity that I felt the need to force on all my friends and co-workers. I can only imagine how bad the green apple ones were.

This year there were four varieties at Target, a returning green apple, and three new candidates for worst candy ever including strawberries and cream, tangerine, and popcorn.



I just couldn't bring myself to try them after last year's fiasco.

Joining the fray into flavored candy corn this year is Brach's, who are introducing two new flavors of their candy mainstay, Caramel Candy Corn…



…and Caramel Apple Candy Corn.



Honestly, though I wasn’t excited about the idea of candy corn in new flavors, I do have to admit that Brach's at least tried to use more seasonal flavors. Though I expected it to be too sweet, the caramel candy corn was actually nice and mellow, enough so that it cut the richness of the regular candy corn flavor. The caramel apple on the other hand, though not bad per-se, was sort of weirdly tangy. Their heart was in the right place, but artificial apple flavor tends to lean towards the tart and tangy side, at least in my opinion.

Also new this year though not really candy corn, is Hershey's Candy Corn Kisses…



These are basically white chocolate kisses colored like candy corn with a kick of flavor added in. If you’re one of those people who can't take more than two or three pieces of candy corn in a season I would suggest avoiding these like the plague. There is so much concentrated candy corn flavor in these that I'd be willing to bet that most people, even those who enjoy a handful now and then, would be hard pressed to make it through one kiss. It doesn't help that they're made from white chocolate either, which tends to be both rich and not really a favorite among candy fans. I do have to admit that they're pretty, but on the other hand I have no idea what I'm going to do with an entire bag of these. I've already contributed all of the candy corn above to the work candy bowl. I'm thinking that the one kid who will eventually knock on our door this Halloween is going to get the whole lot of it.

A discussion on candy corn wouldn't be complete without mentioning the mutant kernels you always find hiding in bags.



I managed to find a decent number of examples here including the extra long pieces (with a double or triple sized white tip), the two-color pieces (which tend to be missing the white tip, but can also be a little smaller and be missing the head of the kernel), and the pretty rare single color kernel (which is usually made up of either the middle or top color, and sometimes, but very rarely, you'll find an all white piece.)

I've mentioned my love for a set of elementary school library books called the Crestwood House Monster Series on the site before, but I figured it would be fun to delve into one for the Halloween countdown this month. Probably referred to as those 'Orange Monster Books' (because of their deep orange back cover and spine) by kids like me who weren't astute enough to notice the publisher's name, these relatively short (at around 50 pages) hardback books were a treasure trove of monster related trivia and information for a generation of kids in the 70s and 80s.

There were at least 15 books in the series including Frankenstein, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Dracula, The Mummy, The Blob, The Wolf Man, Godzilla, Mad Scientists, King Kong, The Phantom of the Opera, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, The Invisible Man, It Came From Outer Space, and The Deadly Mantis as you can see on the back cover of my tattered copy of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman…



I'm not positive, but I think some of the later editions had a purple back cover and spine.

Now, growing up in the 80s I wasn't inundated with monsters to the degree that the generations before me were, at least not the more classic monsters, though we did have our fare share of newer creations, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Filmation villains and horror movie slasher icons. Fangoria had supplanted Famous Monster of Filmland by that time, and merchandising for the classic monsters (like monster models and the like) had become few and far between. My only real introduction to the Universal stable of monsters was through watching a couple of the films with my parents, the one time that one of our local channels teamed with 7-Eleven to broadcast Revenge of the Creature in 3-D (you could pick up a free pair of 3-D glasses at the stores), and the Crestwood House series.

So what's in these books you ask? Well, why don't we take a look at my copy of Frankenstein and see…



I'm not sure if that’s the Glen Strange or Bela Lugosi incarnation of the monster on the cover there (I prefer Karloff.)

**UPDATE**  As has been pointed out many times in the comments thread, The above picture is of Lon Chaney Jr. under the make-up.  That is all...

On the title page we can see that the book was first written in 1977 by Ian Thorne, though I believe that Thorne is a pseudonym for Julian May an active science fiction writer who published these Crestwood books with her husband in the 70s and 80s…



The book begins with a summation of the events in the first Universal Frankenstein movie, along with some really gorgeous still photos (Forrest J. Ackerman actually provided photos for the Crestwood series) including this one of Fritz terrifying the monster with a torch.



Now honestly, most children's books on Frankenstein would probably stop there (though it would also probably have a short section about Mary Shelly and her novel), and this is where this series really shines. Not only does it include a bit on Shelly, but it also goes into the history of Frankenstein on film, going so far as to mention Edison's version of the film from 1910.  Luckily a print of Edison's 15 minute film was found, though I think it's sort of being held hostage by the guy who discovered it (here's the story), but thanks to the internet you can now watch it for free here.



There's also a close-up on Boris Karloff and some of the other Universal incarnations…



…as well as a bit on The Munsters.



Though there's a little bit of unneeded criticism on I Was a Teenage Frankenstein by Thorne/May, it still amazes me that it was brought up at all, as well as her invocation of the Hammer version of the monster as portrayed by Christopher Lee…



There's even a bit at the end about a made for TV version of the story.

Though I'm sure the content of this book isn't nearly as revolutionary as I'm making it out to be, I can't help but feel that it is. I've read a few books on horror and monsters, and it wasn't until I picked up David J. Skal's The Monster Show as an adult that I read about all the various incarnations of Shelly monster on film, and to think that it was all (mostly) in this children's book just amazes me. I guess this also points to how much I think I missed out on growing up without magazines like Famous Monsters, and not really getting all that much on TV (at least in central Florida where I lived at the time.) Here's a question for all you monster kid parents out there, are there books out there for children that are this well versed in monsters?

Here's a nicer (less damaged) version of the back cover (though it's also an earlier copy without the full set of books listed)…

In talking about that Universal Monster figures yesterday I thought it would be fun to follow up on the other UM licensed product I found this year, a set of votives shaped in the busts of the monsters…



I found these at a Walgreen's on sale (3 for $2.) Like the action figures, these don't really reflect the appearance of the original actors and actresses that portrayed them, but they're still pretty cool nonetheless. Heck, the fact that the company who produced these gave a nod to the creature is pretty darn cool all by itself.



One of the things that always nagged me a little come pumpkin-carving-and-displaying time is when I carve the jack-o-lantern's mouth too large or low and then I can end up seeing the candle inside. Well this year I won't have to worry, because even if I slip up, the candle will be all Halloween-y anyway…

This weekend while I was out looking for some Frankenstein goodness for the prize pack in my Halloween contest, I decided to hit a few stores that had surprised me last year with their Halloween schwag, in particular Toys R Us. Now I seem to remember there being a seasonal section back when I was a little kid, if only because I remember the rows and rows of Ben Cooper style costume packs, but I don't tend to associate Halloween with toy stores all that much. Last year I was surprised by the size of their section, and was really happy to finally find some licensed Universal monster merchandise (namely the jiggly Creature and Frankenstein's monster toys.)



When my wife and I walked though the doors and saw the Halloween section I thought it was going to be even better this year because there were actual displays and signs, which were a lot nicer than the previous year's…



…but as we took a closer look we realized that this was probably the worst Halloween section we'd seen all year, anywhere. In fact, out local grocery store had a better set up and schwag. Most of the section was filled with your basic year round fare like Star Wars figures and Pokemon plush dolls. There was only a very small end cap of some run of the mill candy, and there were practically no real holiday themed items, and the stuff that they did have (like plastic candy pails and the like) was from last year or the year before. There was a small section of costumes, mostly for infants and very small children.



There was a pretty fun flashlight. It was one of those new fangled ones that looks like a little character with a handle on the back, and when you squeeze the trigger the mouth opens and the light shines. The one Toys R Us had was sort of a cross between a skeleton and a zombie, and was pretty darn cute…



There was also an odd little felt bag with a picture of Frankenstein stitched into it that looked strangely like Eddie Munster.



I was pretty disappointed, if only because the signage in the store was pretty fun (though not quite as awesome as the Frankenstein logo at Wal-Mart this year which is quickly becoming my favorite Halloween find this year.) There were signs everywhere (at least in this one corner of the store), hanging from the ceiling and plastering the walls…



I really liked the effort, design-wise, which reminded me a lot of the current independent art/vinyl toy culture (for a crash course, go to Kid Robot and check out some of the toys.) In particular I liked the look of some of the more detailed mascots like this mummy…



It has some very bold clean lines, which I like, as well as a touch of detail that puts the figure off symmetry (which I also then to find attractive.)

My favorites by far had to be this trio of figures…



As you can see in the signage though, Toys R Us is claming to be "your ultimate Halloween scene", which is just sad considering the lack of Halloween in the store.

I had all but given up on finding anything super cool at the store when I decided to look in the action figure section to try and find the elusive 25th anniversary G.I. Joe figures when my wife spotted some toys that completely made my weekend…



…a set of five licensed Universal monster action figures. These took my breath away for a second, as I had no idea that these were even in the works, let alone out on store shelves. If the little dollar store monster figures made me happy last year, you can get an idea of how awesome I'm finding these. Unfortunately, this being Toys R Us and all, the price tag was too much to swallow as $13 a figure. Even with the included pieces to construct a giant 14" Frankenstein, it's still a little too steep for me, but boy I sure will be pining after these. Hopefully they'll hit the discount bins eventually, though I doubt it.

There are five figures in this set (which is marked Series 1, so there might be even more on the way), all of which come with a piece of a giant Frankenstein's monster as well as a mini poster, and are packaged in a nice looking coffin shape. The figures are kind of weird in that they both do and don't resemble their original movie counterparts. The costumes are pretty close for the most part, but the features aren't those of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, or Lon Chaney Jr.



At the end of the day though, they are still pretty cool, I just wish they were more in the $7 range, which is pretty much my ceiling for action figure purchases. I could easily see myself dropping $40 on this set, but not $65-$70.



Oh well. At least I'll have these pictures if I never find them any cheaper…

So, it's the start of the third week of Halloween blogging and I'm only going a little crazy. I thought it would be fun to shoot out of the gate this week with an awesome set of sticker cards that were printed by Topps in 1980 called Weird Wheels. There are 55 stickers in the set, which basically covers the gauntlet of the whole monster funny cars thing (the Kustom Kulture movement, Ed Roth's Rat Fink, Stanley "Mouse" Miller, as well as stuff like the Aurora model kits: Dracula's Dragster, Frankenstein's Flivver, Wolf Man's Wagon, Mummy's Chariot, Godzilla's Go Cart and King Kong's Thronester), though it skews it a little.



I'm not positive, but I believe the cards were painted by two separate artists, Norman Saunders (who mentions on his site that he did 22 of the stickers) and Gary Hallgren. Though I grew up a little late to catch onto the whole Kustom Kulture deal, I really like the art and style of this stuff. The energy in these paintings in undeniable, and of course I love the monster themes in a lot of the stickers. They're also decidedly un-PC which is kind of fun in this uptight day and age. I really like the Putrid Porsche sticker above, as well as the outright zaniness of the Voo Doo Vette (complete with voodoo car/doll) with the bloody teeth/front grill and the matching mask.



There are a lot of really fun concepts here, some more obvious than others, but all executed very well. As a collector of the 80s Garbage Pail Kids, and considering the new series that have been coming out from Topps over the last few years (as well as new Wacky Packs) it really is awesome to go back and look at the various projects that lead up to them. Nowadays Topps is more concerned with the three Ps, puke, pee, and poop, and very rarely do they let a concept slip by that would be akin to what we're seeing in this set of stickers. I'm sure if they commissioned a Drag-On sticker today, the character would be flying over and pooping on Mt. Fuji or something.



I also love that the set gets a little room to breathe with 55 different paintings so there is plenty of room to explore both the more classic Universal inspired monsters (like Frankenstein's monster, the creature, the mummy, vampires, and a werewolf) as well as monsters in general (dragons, giant insects, and blobs), interesting pop culture stuff (the punk movement and greasers), and even historical baddies (pirates, samurais, and the Huns.)











Of course, like most great Topps sticker card sets, there was a nice card-back puzzle poster, though this one is a little different as it's made up of 9 pieces instead of the more standard 10 (which also meant that I could scan it in one go, which was nice.)



Next week on Peel Here, Rick Moranis, a giant plant, and one dead dentist!

In talking about the odd cover choices publishers sometimes make with some novels (like not featuring the title character, or any character for that matter, on say the cover of Dracula), it reminded me of the various covers I've seen on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Granted, I tend to associate the monster with the classic Universal interpretation, which I realize isn't probably the best, but I never seem to see anything as striking. I've had three copies of Frankenstein over the years, two of which featured a desolate landscape at dawn with a gnarled tree branch in the foreground, and a third which featured a graveyard.

Recently I stumbled across what I think is my favorite cover (and I realize that this probably not the best one either), which features a portrait of Boris Karloff as the monster. You can always tell the Karloff images by the sunken right cheek where the actor had some bridge work (or something) that he'd remove and suck his cheek in to give the monster's visage a little more of a corpse like appearance.



This version was published by Dell in 1975 soon after the release of Young Frankenstein (I know this because there is a blurb on the back of the book taking a jab at the film's comedic portrayal of the monster.)

This brings me back to the contest I'm currently running this holiday season. I was trying to think of a fun gift pack and I decided that since Frankenstein is my favorite monster, that it would make a might fine prize pack. So the lucky winner of the "create your own audio ghost story" contest shall receive the following:



Included are one licensed stretch monster and molded bust votive, one Wal-Mart Franky mask (with the awesomely designed tag to boot), the above mentioned copy of Mary Shelly's masterpiece, as well as a brand new copy of the 75th anniversary Legacy collection Frankenstein DVD (which has 2 discs and a ton of features including what I hear is an awesome documentary on the Universal era of monster movies.) So you can sit back and look like the monster in the mask, while you simultaneously read the book, watch the film, play with the monster, and even do it all by mood lighting from a monster candle. What more could a person ask for?

All the details on the contest can be found here, and now, thanks to Tom Foolery, you can also download a zip file of all of the sound effects (right click and save as) if you don't feel like clicking through and grabbing them.

Today I thought I'd take a moment to share one of the oldest books in my collection, not by publishing date, but a book that I've had for what seems like forever (it's really only 20 years.) It's a short book of ghost stories called The Restless Dead which I ordered from one of those awesome Troll book club fliers in the fifth grade. I'm not sure if elementary and middle schools are still pimping books through these types of book club fliers (I think there was also a Scholastic club and a third that I can't remember the name of), but when I was a kid it was an exciting moment to get one of these order forms handed to me. They usually consisted of one sheet of colored newsprint folded in half (or maybe quarters) with sections on fiction, activity books, comic strip collections, and even stickers and posters as well. It was probably around Halloween in 1987 when I saw this book by Daniel Cohen listed…



The cover art totally sold me on the book and I'm know I rushed home and begged my mother to order it for me. Like the Halloween Horrors record I posted about earlier in the week, the artwork mesmerized me, and I'm sure I worked up a story that connected the ethereal figure of the lady on the cover of the book to the unfortunate ghost in the main story on the record.  I also live the skull worked into the clouds (and outlined by the spindly trees) behind the ghostly lady, as well as the super creepy shrouded figure in the background (who I can only assume is the reaper.)


There are a few generally scary or gruesome tales, my favorite of which revolves around a very demanding husband and his wife. He asks her to cook him a nice liver dinner, so she runs out to the market and fetches the best liver the meat monger has for sale. She then spends the afternoon slowly cooking it, taking little nibbles here and there to check on it. A little bit before her husband is due home she caves and devours the whole thing, feeling guilty and scared immediately afterward. Her solution is to go next door to the mortuary where an elderly lady who had just passed had been laid out by the mortician. She snatches the old lady's liver and quickly cook sit for her husband. He loves the dinner, but then soon after the household is plagued by the ghost of the lady whose liver has been eaten. The husband finds out what happened and does the only thing that makes sense to him, which is to carve out his wife's liver so that he can replace the one eaten.  It works like a charm.

How crazy of a tale is that?!? It reminds me of some of the more gruesome Grimm brother's tales actually. I re-read the entire book (I say that like it was a challenge at it's hefty 100 pages) and though some of the stories didn't connect quite the same as they did when I was a kid, I still really enjoyed what Mr. Cohen had put together. Now, if I can find the time to break out Bunnicula and Samantha Slade: Monster Sitter…

So last year was sort of fun for me because it was the first year where I really took the time to seek out Halloween past the odd grocery store where I'd be doing my weekly shopping. I hit everything from Wal-Mart and Target to Dollar Tree and the many gas stations near my abode. I hit drug stores, discount chains, toy stores, department stores, specialty stores, convenience stores, party stores, you name it, in search of the best (or at least the most fun) schwag I could find. There were some awesome moments (like all of the Universal/Hammer monster stuff at Dollar Tree and finding all of the Friday the 13th flicks at Wal-Mart for $4.88), as well as a lot of misses (you'd think art and craft stores would be overloaded with awesome stuff, but not really, at least not in my area.)

This year I was hoping for the same experience, if not better. Though there's been some great stuff around, I haven't really had that jaw dropping moment yet (well unless you count the Frog Dissection kit.) Most of the stuff I'm finding on the shelves this year is more or less the same stuff that was out last year. There have been some interesting finds (particularly in the candy department), but overall it has been kind of "eh." That's all right though, I'm really not complaining (and hopefully I don't sound too whiney), I guess I'm just lamenting. Actually, I think the problem I'm having is that I really hoped there would be a second set of the Universal/Hammer monster figures. I love my disconcerted little Frankenstein's monster, my Dracula that looks like a little kid, my spot on mummy, my unfortunate if not poster-accurate King Kong, my fearsome Hammer-influenced werewolf, and my not-quite Godzilla. I so could have done with a goofy creature from the Black Lagoon, a snide un-masked Phantom, a lackadaisical mad scientist, a swanky Invisible Man, a bulbous little hunchback, and maybe even a crazed little London After Midnight vampire in a top hat. A guy can hope right? Maybe next year (you hear me X One Archive Inc.?)

Anyway, continuing my look at the various places pimping Halloween this year (see my Wal-Mart entry), I'm going to take a look at what you can expect to find at your local Target (Tar-jay if you're so inclined.) Now I don't typically cover costumes all that much, especially at places like Target, because honestly they're hard to photograph. Suffice it to say there is a whole new movement in children and adult's costumes that is both very similar to the whole Ben Cooper thing, and amazingly different. You can pretty much find a pre-made, and pretty darn accurate looking costume of any big pop culture character these days, from full on Spiderman suits (with muscles included) to Ghostbusters jumpsuits (including inflatable proton pack.) What really gets me jazzed though, are the awesome selection of inexpensive props that are turning up in stores these past few years, offering kids and adults a chance to have some really nice accessories…



The selection of plastic weapons available at your local Target is crazy. I remember when you’d be lucky to find anything other than a meat cleaver and a scythe, and now you can have anything you could dream of up to and including a pretty realistic chainsaw with working chain and sounds. I don't know, I just find this fascinating.

One of the things I enjoyed last year was Target's dollar bins as they were full of all kinds of cheap fun. This year's selection was sort of dull (though there is a pretty fun three pack of little gargoyles that would darken up any cubical for the season.) In stead there was a display of blister packs that where a little more expensive but not too much. It was mostly little party gifts pens, pencils, plastic spider rings and the like…



…but there was also a couple of fun packs of gore balls, as well as a nice little eyeballs in a plate of worms deal. You can also see that Target is indeed going for the whole Edgar and Ellen Halloween theme this year, ditching their cute and more original spider/ghost/witch/vampire characters from years past.

There was a nice selection of Styrofoam tombstones and gargoyles, though noting really new.



Another trend I've been noticing is the influx of cheap statuary for the front yard. I'm a pretty big fan of this type of thing, especially considering the price, and the stuff is decent quality and should last a number of years (unlike the almost totally Styrofoam/balsa wood fare at WalMart.)



There were a few new items in the little knick-knack section including some really nice (and quite hefty) metallic skulls. For some reason or another I've managed to amass a pretty large collection of skulls and these were a nice addition.



There was another larger (and I assume outdoor) item that caught my eye and seemed to be new for 2007, these oversized metal spiders…



…but I wasn't what in the heck I'd do with one. We live in an apartment and I know they'd get stolen if we left them outside. They are pretty cool though.



There was also a nice selection of party items, including a very awesome skull candy dish (2nd from the right on the second shelf) that I also have no idea what I'd do with (I actually have two other skull candy dishes already.) I really do like the designs on some of this stuff. It's a little cute, but still interesting and pretty easy on the eye…



Coming back for a second year are the seriously awesome mariachi skeletons. I bought one last year and it’s worked its loveable way into our year-round decoration scheme. For $10, it really is a steal. When I was down in Florida this past summer we went to Epcot and there were some amazing wooden hand carved Mexican skeletons, but all of them, even the small 3 inch ones started at $50.



Though I'm not all that fond of the Edgar and Ellen theme, I was impressed by the huge mechanical cardboard house in the in the center of Target's Halloween section…



Now when exactly did pirate and Halloween themes start converging? Sure, I realize that pirates are all the rage right now, but there was a ton of if pervading the merchandise I was seeing. I mean, I guess I get it, skeletons and Halloween go hand in hand, but really, enough already.



Another thing I like about Target over say Wal-Mart as far as discount places go, is their attention to detail in design. Wal-Mart hit a nice note this year with their awesome Frankenstein packaging, but Target has been pretty steadily producing nice eye catching design work for years. There are a whole series of pumpkins that are gracing the candy shelves this year that have some really fun artwork to them…



In the candy section was where the real new and fun stuff was. Take these molded white chocolate confections for instance…



That is probably hands down the coolest looking skull and jack-o-lantern candy I've ever seen. Unfortunately I really don't like white chocolate, but still…

There was also an expanded section of 'gourmet' candy including Halloween themed gummi candy as well as wacky flavors of candy corn. I tried the candy corn last year and hated it, and though the gummi candy looked fun, it was nothing more than interesting than you'd find in a candy shop any other time of year, just in spiffier packaging.



There is also a nice section of drink mixers. I particularly liked the ones in the beakers…



My favorite candy of the year has to be the Edgar and Ellen themed stuff. There's an end cap dedicated to it with stuff ranging from the Gummi frog dissection kit, to test tubes and beakers full of candy powder, and even a 13 day Halloween advent calendar.





There was also a nice selection of more Target specific candy including various gummi and hard candy…





My favorite of which had to be the gummi vampire tongue…



I thought it was an ingenious way to repackage and sell your tried and true plastic vampire teeth, both as a novelty and as part of the packaging design.  (You can actually find these elsewhere, so apparently there was a 'how to repackage vampire teeth' conference that I wasn't invited to...

I also liked these hard candy snakes (which I mistook for gummi snakes when I bought them.)



They're nothing more than glorified granny candy, but they were still fun.

Next week I'll make sure to talk about the Spirit store as well as the secret (if it really is one) to the store's origins…

Also, if you liked the Halloween Horrors album below and you are in the mood for some awesome ghoulish tunes and fun, head over to Dave's Mostly Ghostly Music Sharing Blaaahhhggg!!! for a bunch of great stuff. He does this year round, but he's also cranking out the music every day this month as well.

I thought I'd share some more monster strips from the DC Plop comic. Enjoy…





























By the way, you can find more Plop fun as well as a load of other great Halloween posts at Harris Smith's blog Negative Pleasure. Harris is also doing a great blog-a-thon this month with a lot of horror film reviews and more.

The most exciting aspect to nostalgia for me is that moment where you experience something mundane that for some reason sparks a memory of days gone by.  Now, I am a reveler when it comes to nostalgia, this site is a testament to that, and I'm also a collector by nature, so finding a cherished childhood item that I can add to my collection in one form or another is great.  Still, the one thing that really gets to me is stumbling onto a long forgotten memory out of the blue.  This is when I sort of stop whatever it is that I'm doing and get that glazed over look to my face (you know the one, think of the boy from The Man Without a Face, but taken down a notch or two.)  At the same time I sort of get chills down my spine, as cliché as that sounds.  It's pretty rare and fleeting though, which is probably what makes the sensation so appealing to me.

The last time I had one of these discoveries was about a year and a half ago when something or other put me onto the memory of a spooky record that I listened to about a gazillion times as a kid, the 1977 A&M Records release Halloween Horrors…



I'm not positive, but I'd be willing to bet that my parents picked it up the year I was born (back in '77) as they had just moved into their first house together and I'm sure they were preparing for their first real onslaught of neighborhood kids trolling for candy and treats.  When I turned four I received an old hand me down record player from my sister after she upgraded her set-up, and I immediately usurped all of the 'fun' records in the house (basically the Halloween Horrors album, a couple Christmas records, and the soundtrack to American Graffiti, which I loved for the picture of the carhop on the gatefold cover) to add to my growing collection of read-along book and record sets. It stayed in a more or less regular rotation all year round, though when I'd put it on the turntable I always made sure to drag the player into my closet where I could listen to it in the almost dark.

Side A of the record was reserved for The Story of Halloween, a short story (14 minutes) about a young man who has inherited an old antebellum mansion called Elm Hall from his Grandmother.  He drives out on a rainy night to take a look at it and ends up with an experience he'll never forget.  Now that I think about it, the story has nothing to do with Halloween besides taking place on All Hallows Eve; it's really just a ghost story.  The flipside of the album is dedicated to a series of Sounds of Halloween, a good portion of which were employed in producing the story on side A.  I remember laying on the floor of my darkened closet with a flashlight listening intently to the ghost story, an as soon as it would finish, I'd flick the light on, turn the album over, and make my way through all of the sound effects as well.  There's also a creepy little introduction that implores the listener to utilize the library of sounds to create a new story. I'm not sure if this is common on these sound effect albums, but it certainly makes sense for this one because as you make your way through the collection it really does end up feeling pretty darn random (which was totally lost on me as a kid, in fact I think I had a subconscious story running through my head as I listened to the tracks, something about a man walking through a maze of craziness, encountering various theme rooms as the tracks on the album are sort of grouped by theme.)

In addition to the album itself, the artwork on the covers was just as mesmerizing to me.  The above painting of the abandoned mansion, with the single shaft of light bursting through the one window, the multiple lightning strikes, the Spanish moss fluttering on the gnarled tree branches, the stone gargoyle post with the green eyed black cat lounging on top, and the oddly skeleton shaped puddle at the foot of the muddy driveway totally set the mood for the story on side A, while the trio of insanely evil looking witches with their bubbling cauldron, and fiendish cat companions on the back was a perfect illustration for the sound effects…



The painting was done by Gary Meyer (who I believe might be teaching illustration at the Art Center College of Design in California), and Joe Spencer created the album font.  The back cover artwork above is a cleaned up version of the original (with the track listing and credits removed by Keith Milford over at Old Haunts.)

Though my young mind never made the connection, two thirds of the cast of the side A story was actually very familiar to me.  Michael Bell provided the voice talents of the 'Young Man' and Peter Cullen voiced the grizzled old gas station attendant.  As I'm sure most of you already know, Bell voiced Duke on G.I. Joe (as well as a plethora of other characters in many 80s cartoons), and Cullen is probably best known for voicing Optimus Prime in the Transformers cartoon (as well as Venger in the D&D cartoon among other voices in 80s shows.)  Rounding out the cast is Nadine Arlyn as the lonely ghost, who according to IMDB hasn't done much else to speak of except for an episode of Combat! and a B-movie or two.  Rounding out the credits are J. Robert Elliot (who wrote and produced the album), Dave Iveland (who engineered it), and Stuart Kusher (who handled the art direction.)

For anyone interested in giving the story portion of the album a listen, it can be found here…

Here are the individual sound tracks from side B...

Screams, Falling Scream, Cackle/Witches Laughter, Howling, Ghost, Groans, Mob Scene, Creaking Door, Shutters Banging, Creaking Iron Gate, Breaking Window, Chains, Bubbling, Earthquake, Pipe Organ, Violin, Church bells, Chimes, Gong, Foghorn, Ship Creaking, Storm at Sea, Thunder and Lightning, Rain, Wind, Fire, Dripping Water, Bats, Cats, Owls, Crickets, Baying Dogs, Snarling Dogs, Snake Hiss, Panther Howl, Lion Roar, Monsters Breathing, Monsters Roar, Horse and Wagon, Train, Automobile, Auto Crash, Police Siren, Helicopter, Explosion, Gunshots, Machine Gun, Swords Clashing, Flying Saucer, Giant Space Ship, Laser Ray Gun, Galaxy Sounds, Space Station Computer, and an Interstellar Communication.

If you'd like to grab all of the above files in one handy .zip file, right click here and save as...

Day nine of the Halloween countdown has arrived and I figured it would be a good day to dig back into my sticker collection with another installment of the more gruesome Peel Here column. Well actually it's not all that gruesome, but there are monsters, Gremlins to be exact. Sure I realize that the film actually takes place during Christmas, and it was released in the summer of 1984 instead of say the fall, but it still has monsters in it and it freaked me out as a kid so I say it counts.

I thought I'd start out a bit small with this one single individually wrapped Hallmark Stick-R-Treats Halloween sticker…



I'm not sure exactly how many of these there are though I know of at least one more that features Gizmo. I missed out on the whole idea of non-candy Halloween treats growing up, except for the occasional house with a bowl full of pennies and the one time I received an apple (which my father quickly yanked away from me and threw down into a nearby sewer.) Though as a kid I probably would have sung a different tune, now that I think about it, I really like the idea of stuff like stickers and cheap plastic toys intermixed with a bowl of candy as Halloween treats. I don't think it really caught on though, as I only really remember seeing a couple other similar ideas over the years (like the fun but overpriced Matchbox cars two packs that come incased in little skulls and jack-o-lanterns.)

This next sheet of Hallmark stickers is a little odd because they're all dated 1983 when the movie didn't come out until '84. Now granted, I realize that the merchandising machine is crazy, but even today you only really start seeing stuff a few months before a movie hits, so I'm wondering if the date on these is a misprint or something. If not, then maybe Spielberg and Dante were really hyping this thing like crazy during the winter before the movie came out…



Next up we have some very suspicious looking puffy stickers. I say suspicious looking because even though Gizmo is prone to amazing acts of cuteness, I don’t think I've ever seen him jam out on a ukulele or fly in cute, multi-colored saucers. There's also a variation on this set where the top left Gizmo is carrying a torch, so I'd have to say that these are bootlegs. Yet, at the same time, the top left Gizmo is on all of the official merchandising, including the rest of the sticker sets I’m sharing today, so who knows…



A column on Gremlins stickers wouldn’t be complete with out the 1984 set of Lazer Blazers hologram stickers from Colorforms…



Again, you can see the goofy picture of Gizmo (from the puffy stickers) just bopping along…

Like all fun science fiction/fantasy/horror movies of the day there was also a set of Topps trading cards, which of course had a subset of 11 sticker cards…



I’m not all that fond of the repeated Gremlins logo in the background of the stickers, but I do like the various poses the designers chose, in particular the pre-gremlin version of Stripe which seems to get overlooked a lot in merchandising…



There's also the card back puzzle, which features a really fun close-up of a freaked out Gizmo…



I’ve also decided to include the following Rub n' Play Transfers set from Colorforms. I haven't really broached the subject of these transfer activity sets yet. There were a few brands out during the 70s and 80s, but the two I was most familiar with were Presto Magix and these Colorforms Rub n' Play sets…



Basically these acted like stickers except instead of just sticking willy nilly or in albums you transferred them with a pencil or some other blunt instrument from a thin sheet of cloudy plastic to a board or a mini fold out poster which had a background printed on it so that you could set up little elaborate scenes. Basically these were printed up with the picture portion stuck to the back of the plastic and you drew on top of it to transfer the image onto another surface. The transfers are very similar to temporary tattoos actually and could easily be ripped or develop a horrible case of wrinkles.

I remember mixing and matching the transfers between sets so that the Dukes of Hazzard could meet up with Knight Rider, or so Skeletor could fight against Thundarr and stuff.



I think I need to gather the rest of my transfers sets together for a future Peel Here column. Next week on the column I'm going to break out a whole mess of creepy weird wheels…

Though I thought I was going to be able to knock out the Cartoon Commentary! columns with the 31 days of Halloween with no problem, it looks like I was basing that assumption on the idea that there were about four more hours in the day than there really are. So for the next couple of weeks there frequency might be off a little. I did manage to knock out a lot of the legwork on the next week's (or two) worth of Halloween posts so I might be able to get to two of these CC! columns a week, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm a little deeper into the series and a lot of the conventions that had been bothering me (loud color scheme, wacky pacing, insane amount action going on all the time) are becoming a little easier to swallow, or if my mind has finally been able to shift gears from a show like Dungeons and Dragons to this one, but I'm starting to enjoy the experience a little more. There are still a few aspects that I don't love, but the show certainly has it's place in 80s cartoon history. Today's episode, titled The Beef Who Would be King, is chronologically (I believe) supposed to come after last week's Pizza's Honor airing on September 27th, 1986, though it's listed as the second episode on the DVD release (which lists the cartoons in production order.) The episode was penned by the script-writing duo of David Wiemers and Ken Koonce who worked together on a few 80s cartoons including Muppet Babies, DuckTales and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors.



This episode basically revolves around the rivalry between Beef Bonk and Doyle as a diplomatic committee from the planet Cholesterol comes to Galaxy High looking for a new king. Their interest in Beef makes Doyle and his friends a little jealous, so the two decide to put the kingship on the line in a winner takes all race…

The episode starts off with an answer to a question I had about the concept of exchange students in space, which is, where are Aimee and Doyle staying? Typically in the exchange student comedy situation there is a wacky fish out of water scenario involving the student shacking up with a family that is the polar opposite of them (ala Long Dock Dong from Sixteen Candles or Monique from Better Off Dead), but in this cartoon the producers and writers decided instead on a college dorm type of situation. The dorms are connected via a woosher pneumatic tube to the high school just like Luigi's Pizzeria and the galleria are.



What's kind of interesting about this opening scene is that the writers do a decent job of working in the concept of gravity in space (or a lack there of) with the gag of having had Beef put an anti-gravity pill in Doyle's breakfast. A little later on in the episode though, this is all thrown out the window with a different gag that makes it seem like there is gravity in space, which is kind of weird.

There's a small continuity error in the next segment involving Beef's woosher patrol sash/belt, which disappears on the monitor screen when the Cholesterolians are spying on him and Doyle.



Though this is a little error, it's interesting to note that this points to a choice that directors and animators face when using the picture within a picture gag in cartoons. Basically it raises the question of whether or not to simply reuse the existing animation, though shrunk down and cut to fit the screen in the new sequence, or to re-draw and paint the scene taking place on the screen with the reset of the animation in this sequence. You also see this in comic books when panels are repeated for effect with either slightly different art or different speech bubbles, and it's up to the artist as to whether they re-draw the same panel over and over again, or to photocopy it (or digitally copy them nowadays.) The sash/belt error came about because the director had the animators re-draw the scenes in the monitors instead of recycling the previous animation. What's also kind of interesting is that neither choice is easier or safe, and both pose possible continuity errors. For instance, in the opening sequences of Transformers the movie, Laserbeak is spying on the Autobots on their moon base orbiting Cybertron. Laserbeak then returns to Megatron and plays back his video, which director Nelson Shin decided to show by recycling the animation from the opening on a monitor. Because of this, and because there were many dynamic p.o.v.'s in those scenes, the whole effect is thrown off a bit because it would have been impossible for Laserbeak to get the shots that are displaying on the monitor (at least without finding a way into the room he was video taping.)

This is a little long winded, but it goes to show that there is a lot of thought and artistry that goes into all aspects of animation, comics and filmmaking that get overlooked by the audience a lot.

On a lighter note, I though the character design work on the Cholesterolians was fun (and sufficiently bulbous and soft for their eating habits), though it reminded me a lot of the Michelin Man (who apparently has a name, Bibendum)…



Though I've complained in the past about how busy the backgrounds are in this show (what with the myriad of aliens cramming every scene), I'm really starting to get to like the 'Where's Waldo' aspect to freezing the action and looking through all the different characters. Some of the designs are just sort of weird shapes or almost Seussian aliens, but then again a lot are also anthropomorphic Earthy items. For instance in the three screen shots below we have a hamburger alien, a 'peas in a pod' alien, a walking cigarette lighter (that's an odd one for a cartoon, not to mention a missed opportunity visually), and, well, Mr. Penis man (again.) When, oh when, will the penis gags stop on this show. Heck, by this point I'm almost coming to expect it, like the Dragons in the D&D cartoon.



Another odd subject that's broached in this episode (for a comedy series that is) is the death of a student. I realize that by pointing this out I'm sort of upping the drama of the situation as it really was meant to be a one-off gag, but it's still a little weird. Doyle, having just come back from the garbage bin where Beef had wooshed him off to, is supposed to be dirty and smelly as he's walking down the hall. It's so bad he's attracting flies, one of which he takes a moment to smash, only to find out that it wasn't just a fly, but a student, Harold Horsefly.



Granted, it's just a cartoon, but I thought it was a little weird, maybe even a little inappropriate, to illustrate Doyle's problems with integrating into the school by having him mistakenly kill another student, no matter how silly it is. I don't know. Death is such an odd subject to broach in cartoons..

One thing I noticed that I really respected is that the show had been thought out past the gags they incorporate into it. For instance, the weird notion that everything is alive, like the ships and chalkboards and stuff.  Well we haven't seen the chalkboard in action since the first episode, yet in the background paintings of the classrooms the board is depicted with robot arms and stuff. I think that this would be an easy detail to overlook, especially in a BG painting, so I'm really happy to see it here.



As far as the plot of this episode goes, I thought it was a little weird that Aimee and Doyle were jealous of the Cholesterolians choice of Beef Bonk as their new king. I guess since Doyle seems to be on his last leg as far as school is concerned, maybe Aimee thought it was a chance for him to make something out of his life, though idea of the characters wanting to leave school this early on into the show is kind of jarring. Heck, you'd think they'd want to be rid of Beef Bonk instead.



Also, the design on the alien's ship (a sort of flying waffle with a cherry on top and fork satellite dishes) reminds me a lot of a similar design in a Garfield coloring book I had as a kid. I guess the idea of food-centric aliens isn't a new one (Pizza the Hut from Spaceballs for instance.)

According to a Galaxy High fansite, this cartoon, like many others that made it into re-run syndication after their initial airings, was also subject to the editors knife to make room for additional commercial time. Because of this, about two minutes of footage was cut from each episode, which typically consisted of material that was considered non-essential to the plot like one-off gags. One of these gags was probably the Creep serenading Aimee from time to time in each episode. The website alludes to the fact that this joke was done multiple times in a given episode, so it would make prime material for cutting.



So, in getting back to Harold Horsefly for a second (and to illustrate how silly the whole idea is) there is a scene at the start of the big race in which Coach Frogface eats a fly as he's announcing the race. Beef even made a joke about Frogface eating Harold earlier when Ms. Mcbrain called on him during roll call. Again, it's a cartoon and just silly, but why would you, as a writer, use a common horsefly as a student to illustrate the idea that the environment is alien and that you have to respect it, and then include a gag with the coach eating a fly just minutes later? As far as morality in cartoons goes, this is very conflicting. Oh crap, now I'm starting to sound like a member of ACT or something. In my defense, I simply think it's interesting, not something that needs to be changed. There, I feel a little better (maybe I am looking too deeply at these episodes…)



To illustrate the wacky Tex Avery quality to the show, there is a gag at the start of the race where Doyle and Beef fly though a time warp (represented by a giant clock floating in space, a gag that I think the first Starfox video game also used) and are intermittently switched from being babies to rickety old geezers as they're driving…



Specking of moral content in this episode, I thought it was fun that the writers decided to make the morals a little ambiguous. For instance, at a point in the race when Doyle realizes that Beef is cheating, he makes a pit stop and tells Aimee that the only way he can win is if he also cheats. Aimee gives the obvious speech about cheaters never winning, and sends Doyle off with a clear head to win the race…

…which he does, reinforcing the moral lesson and all. (By the way, like Penis man, there has been a confetti-throwing scene in every episode so far. What is up with this penis-confetti obsession?)



Now to muddy up the waters a bit, we find out that the Cholesterolians actually celebrate cheating, and therefore Beef Bonk is still crowned King. I thought that this made for a nice spin on the whole idea of morality in cartoons, and it's used a bit later to illustrate yet another moral lesson, so in the end it all works out.



Now this seems a lot like Kricfalusi design, though again, I'm not sure on what aspects of the show he worked. It just reminds me a lot of the inserted paintings in the Ren & Stimpy cartoon, not to mention the zaniness of a planet made out of bologna, eggs, head cheese and salami.



Also, we get a clearer view of the spaceship and it's possibly waffle influenced. It's either that or it's supposed to be one big pie, which probably makes more sense now that I think about it…

In the vein of getting a little more mileage out of the conceptual aspects of the cartoon (like the muddied morality), I was impressed out how naturally the gag of why Beef was chosen king plays out. First off, the Cholesterolians plan on eating him. There, I've ruined the surprise. What I love is that in what should have been some pretty by the numbers joke writing (ala giving Beef a bath that's actually in a stew, ala Looney Tunes), the writers (or whoever worked on the gag) instead decided to have Beef be given a 'beef' tenderizer shower. I don't know, I just found that really witty and clever.



Similarly, in a segment on the planet, there is a crowd gathered to greet Beef, and there's a gag concerning two kids spoiling their supper (their Beef Bonk supper). I thought it was a nice extra detail to have their chocolate on a stick be in the shape of Beef's head. Again, a detail that could have easily been more ordinary and less in on the joke, so it seems a little more thought out.



Now how the candy making denizens of the planet managed to know ahead of time what Beef looked like in order to mold chocolate in his visage is beyond me…

So finally getting back to the whole gravity and morality issues, there is a scene when the students figure out why Beef was chosen as king of Cholesterol and decide to go help him. First off, this plays into the 'doing the right thing' lesson, even though Doyle did the right thing before and was still stomped on because of it (Beef winning the race by default because he cheated.) This moral plays out very straightforward but is made a little more powerful by Doyle overcoming his feelings about Beef, and helping him anyway. Second, we're brought back to the idea of gravity in space as Aimee's car conks out mid flight and it starts to fall downward (only being saved by a balloon that pops out of the trunk) instead of say drifting forward as they would in reality. Now, I get that the whole falling thing is a funny gag, but I don't think it's really funny for the most artistic of reasons. I think it was intended in a very straightforward manner; ship takes off, flies, conks out, and then falls. Ha ha, funny. Now think about a similar gag in say Spongebob Squarepants where it's raining under the sea. Sure there are your normal rain jokes thrown in, but it's all encapsulated in the irony of rain under the sea, and it's obviously written to be that way. I'm not convinced Galaxy High was written this way, it just doesn't feel intentionally ironic. This is of course, just my opinion…



Okay, I keep invoking his name, but this seems so Kricfalusi inspired…



The idea of milking a giant chicken (who bears a striking resemblance to Beef Bonk for anyone who didn't think that he was chicken inspired; which also sort of makes this scene weirdly Beef Bonk inspired as his name could be considered ironic considering his appearance, and the cows and chicken here are switched as well), and having to collect the eggs from a bunch of nesting cows seems like something that would fit perfectly into the Ren & Stimpy universe.

For once I was so glad when I heard a very obvious joke in this show as the Cholesterolinas are chasing Beef and his savior Doyle and someone shouted "Where's the Beef?" I sat through the whole episode hoping to hear that silly Wendy's slogan from the eighties, as it seemed like it would be a crime if it weren't used.

Now getting back to the whole idea of these American created and written cartoons being animated overseas.  There is a moment at the end when we can see that the Asian animators added one of their cultural touches to the cartoon. In a pile-up of aliens, there is a pink Cholesterolian on top who is either out-cold or sleeping from the strenuous chase, and he has what can only be described as a snot bubble coming out of his nose. This is a convention in anime and manga that is used to illustrate deep sleep or unconsciousness. Why a snot bubble you ask? Well, why do we use a series of floating Z's or a pictogram of a log being cut by a saw to illustrate the same point?



I thought it was really cool to see something like this make it's way into an American cartoon, and it makes me wonder how many other little instances our cultures have crossed in 80s animation.

Well, hopefully later this week, but probably not until next week I'll get to episode four of Galaxy High, Where's Milo.

Since Kirk from the Secret Fun Spot put up an awesome recollection about his esteemed membership in good standing in the Freddy Fan Club, I thought it would be fun to share this comic ad from around 1987 which features a bevy of Nightmare on Elm Street schwag. The quality of the printing and the slight deterioration of the paper don't do the ad any justice, but I think it comes off well enough. For only $98 (4 easy payments of $26.50) you too could have your own rubber Freddy mask, soft Styrofoam fedora, thin canvas and plastic glove, framed mini poster, VHS cassette of the first flick, companion book to the series, and last but not least the official board game…



The ad is kind of ominous as it threatens that if you don't buy the package, Freddy will "…get you all…", which I assume means he'll kill everyone everywhere.

Though I wasn't allowed to see the first two movies when they came out, I was still a huge Freddy fan and I did in fact have my very own costume set featured in this ad.  I didn't even wear it for Halloween, I think I just wanted it for everyday use. I remember that the hat I had looked more like a sombrero because there was a split up the back of it and it never really retained it's fedora-like shape. I also remember having many elaborate daydreams about constructing my own glove out of kitchen knives and stuff, but I wasn't that industrious and I'm glad to read that Kirk was, and then some.

I'm not sure how many licensed games were made off of the Nightmare series, but there's a good chance that this is the same board game that Matt over at X-Entertainment reviewed a while ago (just with a different cover perhaps.)

I found this book a few months ago in a used book store and I found myself immediately drawn to it. First of all, I don't tend to find any of Stoker's non-Dracula works in used shops all that often, and second, they never have covers this cool. For some odd reason I think I own at least four separate copies of Dracula and all of them have very boring covers (with like blurry impressionist paintings or some generic graveyard.)

What's funny is that book (published in 1968 by Tower Publications) is obviously being marketed by the Dracula's Curse story which is only twelve pages long, while the bulk of the book is actually The Jewel of Seven Stars novel. Heck, Dracula's Curse isn't even really about the titular character for that matter. Either way, it's an awesome piece of work, so I felt it was well worth sharing here for the Halloween countdown. Unfortunately the artist isn't given credit so I have no idea who painted this or if it was even originally for this book or some other bit of merchandising.

Even though I'm not a big fan of cereal in general, I love monster themed cereals, and the crème de la crème of which has to be the General Mills collection including Franken berry, Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Fruit Brute. In 1988 or so a new monster was added to the breakfast table…



In this MAD magazine-esque comic book ad, you had to fold over the page to see the new monster (though most kids probably didn't fold their comics and honestly it was pretty darn obvious if I do say so myself)…



…Yummy Mummy!

Though I've had my (more recent) fare share of Franken Berry, Count Chocula and Boo Berry, I never had the chance to try either Fruit Brute or Yummy Mummy (which I believe was a replacement for the Wolfman themed cereal, the main difference being the flavor of the marshmallows, a change from lime to vanilla.) My parents never bought me cereal with marshmallows, though they'd let me eat Capt'n Crunch till I burst. Maybe one day General Mills will re-issue these lost fruity monster treasures, and I’ll finally get my chance to taste them.