So this week I thought I'd dig a little deeper into the whole school book club flyer phenomenon of the 80s while also taking a look at one of the more recognizable clubs, Weekly Reader.  Again, all of these scans come from the personal collection of the Evil King Macrocranios, or Steve if you prefer, to whom I am indebted.

When I was originally looking for some examples of these book club flyers to share them, I was a bit uncertain as to who the actual companies were that produced them in the 80s.  After doing a little digging there were a few names that sprang up, namely Weekly Reader and Scholastic, but I know that there were others that I remembered more fondly like Troll and Arrow.  This past week I shared a few Troll flyers, and I'll have some Arrow flyers to post about next week.  The big question that was still sort of hovering over all of this for me was were these all difference companies, or were they just different imprints aimed at certain regions or age levels there were all from the same corporation?  Turns out, it's a little bit of both.

From what I can gather off the fine print of the various Weekly Reader and Scholastic websites, back in the 80s there was a whole bunch of different companies distributing discount books through catalog flyers in classrooms.  Some of the services, like Troll, seemed to be more concentrated on liquidating discount books, while others (namely Weekly Reader) seemed to be interested in selling books as well as distributing their own branded periodicals providing news and articles for teachers and students.  Over the last 20-odd years there has been a lot of focus-shifting and consolidation and there seems to be only two companies left, Scholastic (who bought up a lot of other clubs like Troll and Trumpet) and Weekly Reader who seem to have strayed away from regular book distribution and begun offering mostly their own branded products (teaching aids, study books, and WR non-fiction picture books for young kids.)  These days Scholastic provides a whole slew of book club flyers aimed at various age groups and it appears that they've also taken over most if not all of the in-school book fairs, but we'll talk a little more about that next week.   This week it's all about the Weekly Reader…

These WR book club flyers were distributed as a part of the Weekly Reader Eye periodical handout, and were a bit different in terms of layout and advertising.  Again, there seemed to be a dual motive with this company in that they seemed to want to educate as much, if not more, than they wanted to distribute books in the classrooms.  Another variation of their magazine was called Senior Weekly Reader and seemed to delve into some much more adult topics and current events including the crack epidemic, the Challenger disaster, homelessness and the government's plans to create an anti-nuclear missile defense system in space.  All of this seems pretty heady for preteens who were most likely more concerned about whether or not their friends would think they were dorks because they still wanted to order Choose Your Own Adventure books in middle school…

You have to hand it to the publishers though, they were trying their best to not write down to middle-school-aged kids.   Actually that reminds me of similar memories I have of watching the fledgling Channel 1 in my homeroom when we had TVs installed in our high school class rooms back in the early 90s.  The snippets of news stories seemed to be almost on par with what my mom and dad were watching on the evening news.  Of course it bored me to tears back in the day, but there's a part of me that appreciates what they were trying to do education-wise now that I'm a little older. 

Anyway, back to the meat of this post and on to our first Weekly Reader book club flyer, which is from November of 1984…

The first thing I noticed while flipping through these was a slightly less commercial feel to the design.  They're printed in mostly black and white with a single accent color that I'm sure was intended to lessen the printing cost (which was mostly likely deferred to help supply the news portion of these handouts.)  They're also a bit less shilly in that it was much easier to obtain the "free" posters as you only had to buy a single book instead of the requisite three from clubs like Troll.  These flyers also had a secondary, longer term, incentive program in what they called PaperBucks.  For every item that you purchased from the catalogs you’d received one of these Paperbucks (see the 4th page of the flyer below for an image) which could be saved up to "pay" for specialty items like sticker sheets, plush dolls, instant cameras and posters…

This flyer also has some pretty damn nifty offerings including one of the Mr. T Antioch sticker books (featuring stickers with B.A. Baracus skiing), another of the Serendipity books by Brian Cosgrove (called Morgan and Me), a Masters of the Universe picture book (always loved the art in these), a Fraggle Rock poster and an offer for 100 stickers for only $0.75!  Oh, to go back in time with 5 bucks and access to one of these flyers…

Next up is the December 1984 flyer/insert…

This flyer also has some great books, but what really got me excited was the offer for a sticker collecting wallet for only $0.95.  I've seen official sticker collecting books, photo albums, stapled together sheets of construction paper, and even childhood furniture used to house a sticker collection, but never a wallet.  How neat would it have been to whip out a bill fold to show off your stickers on the go?!?

There's also an interesting special offer on the Garfield collection in this flyer which comes with four Garfield branded brown paper lunch sacks.  However neat these would have been to carry my lunch to school when I was in-between lunch boxes or in that gray area where I was getting too old to bring a lunch box, they still seem like a pretty weird thing to bundle with a comic strip collection.  It's like winning a contest and getting new socks or something.  Practical, but not exciting…

The last flyer I have for both today and for the Weekly Readers was released back in February of 1985…

This flyer is chock full of awesome swag including a Go Bots picture book (featuring art by none other than Steve "Spiderman" Ditko), another Serendipity book (Flutterby), and a sweet Break Dancing poster…

There were also a couple of interesting Choose Your Own Adventure style books with offers for an Indiana Jones Find Your Fate paperback and one for one of the more obscure brands, Wizards, Warriors, & You.

Last, but certainly not least, we have a handful of Weekly Reader posters which were a bit different than their counterparts in the Troll book club flyers.  Granted, I'm only going on a selection of three flyers from each club as reference, but the Weekly Reader posters seem to be a little less generic.  Not only do they feature some pop culture icons like E.T., the cast of the Empire Strikes Back and Wicket from Return of the Jedi, but even the goofy kitten and puppy posters are a little neater with printed titles on them.  These posters often featured ads for books on the back as well…

Next week I'll be back with a closer look at the Scholastic book club called Arrow…

Been doing a bunch of collection culling, house cleaning and framing these past couple of weeks (trying to get a jump on Spring cleaning I guess), and in the process I've been digging back into my collection of Garbage Pail Kids.  I’ve always wanted to find a fun way to display some of the GPK card art on the walls of the Branded abode, but I didn't want to go with an uncut sheet or one of the checklist style posters that was released back in the day.  The cards themselves are a bit too small to really pop on the wall too, so aside from trying to procure some of the original artwork (way too pricey) my thought has always been to pick up some of the 5"x7" Giant 1st series cards.   Up until recently though I've resisted this urge since I wasn't as familiar with that set (having missed in while collecting as a kid), and I felt a little weird framing some of those pieces.  After stumbling onto the majority of the 1st series by chance this past year though, I decided 'what the hell' and picked up some of my favorites from the set to frame.  I haven't hung them yet, but they look freaking spectacular in the frames so I can't wait until they're on the walls peppered throughout the rooms...

I figured this would be a good time to share some more of the GPK wax wrappers in my collection, so beginning where I left off with the 1st WPPA, here is the 6th series pack released in 1986…

It never occurred to me that it was a little weird that Topps switched from using the Adam Bomb imagery for the wrappers with this set, but now that I think about it, it is a little weird that they switched to an image of Potty Scotty.  In the sets following the wrapper designers started highlighting a new sticker from each set as the wrapper image, so I wonder why they chose to dip back into the 1st series for this 6th wax pack?  Especially when you consider that this set featured an updated variation on the kid-in-a-toilet concept with JOHN John & Flushing Floyd.  Actually, there was also an updated on the Adam Bomb concept with Dyna Mike & Newlydead Ed that would have been pretty damn cool for the wrapper.  Guess it can just be chalked up to a missed opportunity…

The 7th series was released in 1987 and was one of the last series that I heavily collected back in the 80s…

Next up is the wrapper for the 8th series also released in 1987…

The 9th series is pretty much where I stopped buying.  It's also the last "classic" series that featured the original GPK arched logo, Cabbage Patch Kid inspired eye design, and the softer imagery of plush dolls for the kids.  It was around this time that Topps settled a lawsuit with the makers of the CPKs, part of which was to augment the artwork to feature harder looking dolls with larger, rounder eyes and cracked skin.   Though I wasn't aware of the impending changes at the time, I'm sure I would have scoffed at the coming 10th series as too much of a change.  25 or so years later though I find that I have a soft spot in my heart for the last six original sets and have been able to get over the imposed changes to the series adding a bunch of them to my collection.  I guess being a completist is a stronger urge than a traditionalist...

Last up today we have the 10th series wrapper, which was the second to last one released in 1987…

Since I started sharing Ste-vil King Macrocranios’s collection of vintage school book club flyers this week, I thought it would also be a cool opportunity to take a closer look at some of the stuff one might have ordered back in the day.  Today I thought I'd take a look at a rather odd read-along storybook featuring the characters from the 80s sitcom Webster.  It's also an opportune time considering that the show was finally released on DVD this past Tuesday from the fine folks at Shout! Factory…

Before I get into the book I wanted to talk about the series for a second.  Webster was part of an interesting subset of sitcoms released in the early to mid-80s that were aimed at a younger than typical audience including shows like Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, Charles in Charge, and ALF.  This explosion of new kid-centric series came in the wake of the success of shows like Diff'rent Strokes and its spin-off The Facts of Life, as well as the popularity of goofier sitcoms like Mork and Mindy which certainly catered to a younger demographic.  I think it was also in response to the booming Saturday morning and weekday syndicated cartoon markets, which was proving to be lucrative for advertising dollars.  I'm sure the big wigs at the big three wanted to try and get some of these viewers watching in prime time with their parents so they could scream "buy me that" a bit more often.

Anyway, all network and commercial jadedness aside, even though the networks were all scrambling to address this audience, the ratings numbers must not have been stellar because this fad of kid-vid in prime time died down pretty quickly.  Shows were getting canned by the big three left and right, including Webster, but there was an interesting turn of events in store for a number of these series.  Again, based on the booming first-run syndication boom of cartoons at the time, the producers of these shows decided not to throw in the towel and instead shopped these canceled shows to local affiliates to run new episodes in the post-cartoon/pre-prime time slots between 6:00-8:00pm.  Shows like Charles in Charge, Punky Brewster, Silver Spoons, and Webster found reprieves and would stay on the air a couple more years (in most cases long enough to complete a 4-season backlog to ensure there were enough episodes to qualify for regular re-run syndication packages.)

So, getting back to the meat of today's post, this read-along book is called Webster's Great Space Adventure which was released by Kid Stuff Records back in 1986.   Though the sitcom was firmly grounded in reality, this book takes a very Muppet Babies-esque ride on Webster’s imagination train (or space capsule in this case), rocketing Emmanuel Lewis into the stratosphere and beyond.  Weirdly enough, the last episode of the sitcom before it was ended featured a similar plot in which Webster is beamed aboard the Next Generation Starship Enterprise and guest stars Michael Dorn reprising his role of Worf…

The book was written by Michael J. Pellowski and featured illustrations by Walt and Cheryl Schoonmaker.  I don't have a list of the voice actors that narrated the accompanying tape, but I can honestly say that the cast didn't include Emmanuel Lewis, Alex Karras or Susan Clark.  You can listen to the audio for this read-along here (or you can right click on it and save it for your own listening pleasure.)

The basic gist of the story involves the Papadapolis' taking a trip to a Chicago area space museum.  Webster gets a chance to sit in a real rocket capsule, but then quickly falls asleep and dreams of taking a ride into outer space…

After experiencing some meteor turbulence, he crash lands on a crazy planet with huge flora and insane freaky human-headed bee-people!  Yikes!

The freaky bee-people help him back into space and he goes on looking for a new adventure.   He encounters a crazy used spaceship moon and realizes that aliens are just as un-protective of their environment in an oddly placed PSA about litterbugs…

The last stop involves Webster docking at a space station populated by a couple of the freakiest robot Papadapolis' adoptive parents ever.  David Bowie, eat your heart out!

As a quick side note, I think it's really interesting how dedicated Alex Karras and Susan Clark were to each other.  A real life married couple, I've pretty much only ever seem them acting together.  In addition to co-producing and starring in Webster, they were also both in Porky's, a couple of made-for-TV movies, not to mention appearing together in a bunch of furniture advertisements in the 70s and 80s.  I wonder if they ended up with any of this art for their personal collection?  I know I would have wanted it...

Honestly, as weird and insane as some of the imagery from the book is, it's not nearly as wild as I thought when I first flipped through it, though it is probably one of the most heavy-handed 16 minute PSAs about littering that I've ever heard…

Even though it's cheesy, I do love these old read-alongs, in particular the catalog offered by Kid Stuff. In addition to Webster, they were also the company that brought us branded titles like Transformers, G.I. Joe, the Marvel and DC super heroes, Rainbow Brite, Masters of the Universe, Care Bears, the Sectaurs, Knight Rider, the Smurfs, and I believe the A-Team as well…

I'm a bit late in getting to this before Christmas, but I wanted to take a second and point to one of the coolest things I received during this past holiday season.  I've been reading Roger Barr's I-Mockery site for years, in particular during Halloween because he always has a plethora of hilarious thoughtful and in-depth commentary on the season and its swag.  The site also has a bunch of swell games and articles.

In addition to the fact that I-Mockery is an interesting read, Roger & the resident artist Pox have been putting together some super awesome pixel art posters in the past couple years.  Basically they're 8-Bit style art jams featuring 6.2 million pop culture, gamer, comics, and cartoon icons culled from the 80s through today, and both of them are a real treat for the eyes.  Honestly, I spent a couple hours pouring over every square inch of these prints picking out characters I knew and trying to figure out the rest…

The best way I can describe these prints is they're like when you were a kid in the doctor's office painstakingly looking for all the wrong stuff on the back of an issue of Highlights, except everything on these prints is right!

The prints are very attractively priced as well and the quality is pretty top notch.  The wife and I are getting ours framed for our home office as I type this.

If you dig pop culture as much as I do and have spent any amount of time playing any old school NES games, I suggest heading on over to I-Mockery and taking a gander at these fine pieces of art…

**Update** You can see a pretty cool interview with Roger and a bunch of other artists from the Gallery 88 show that these pieces were created for over at Coin-Op TV!

I wanted to start off 2011 and the end of my winter hiatus with something that I think is pretty damn cool.   One of my goals with this site was to try and track down and share some of the more obscure things that I was really fond of as a kid.  Sure, talking about the Transformers and G.I. Joe is cool, but so are the Donruss Zero Heroes sticker cards and issues of Stickers magazine.  Trouble is, the majority of the obscure stuff I'd love to track down and talk about isn't all that easy to present in an interesting manner.  It's one thing to just talk or write about something, say the Screwball brand sherbet/bubblegum treats that used to only be available on the various ice cream trucks back in the day, but it's hard to provide that heady feeling of instant forgotten memory recall without some sort of scan-able packaging, or a theme song, anything that's a bit more visceral.  So I have a list of stuff, a wish list of sorts, that I'm patiently waiting to dig into when I have something more tangible to share.

Well, this past December, a very awesome friend of the site dug deep into his archive of school papers and ephemera from over 25 years ago, and he came out with some very amazing pieces of newsprint. Esteban, the Evil King Macrocranios, the ruler of the kingdom roboplastico home to muchas robots fantasticos and metalicos, not to mention the host of the Roboplastic Podcastalypse (which if you dig any of the podcasts I've done in the past you'll probably love this show), found his old stash of elementary and middle school book club flyers which he has very graciously scanned and sent over to be shared here, and I can't thank him enough.

Much like vintage food packaging, school book club flyers are in my opinion so of the rarest pieces of ephemera as there is absolutely no reason to archive them.   It's rare enough that kids would keep their homework and school paper work longer than it takes to peel off a congratulatory scratch and sniff sticker, let alone any peripheral materials that would just clog up your backpack, but for it to survive for 25 or more years is just astounding.  Even if these flyers were kept, it's not there’s any sort of market or demand to get them out into the hands of collectors.  The closest thing would be the very niche market of people selling old Saturday morning cartoon ads on ebay, but it seems like no one is selling book club flyers.  Hell, I remember wracking my brain just to try and remember a single name of one of these book clubs when I first started this site and I couldn’t find anything on the interwebs that really helped.  Either people don't care or these book clubs have become obscure enough nostalgia-wise that there isn't really anyone talking about them in the shadow of conversations about potential Thundercats movies, Smurfs as CGI, and Return-of-the-Jedi-themed jungle gyms.  Honestly, that's all right, because this is the stuff, the more obscure stuff, that still gets me the most excited nostalgia-wise…

So thank you Esteban for braving your old pile of school papers to dust off these amazing gems.  I'm going to be sharing his collection over the next couple of weeks, and today I'm going to start with a few Troll Book Club Flyers, the first of which is from April of 1982…

For the most part my memories of these book club flyers surrounds the excited jolt I'd get when the homeroom teacher would hand out them out each month.   In fact, I was kind of a nerd for anything that involved school and spending money; be it browsing for cool figural erasers and themed pencils in the school store, the occasional book sale held in the library, or the yearly Christmas fun raisers where we'd sell gaudy wrapping paper and off-brand meat & cheese gift-sets, I always got excited at the prospect of spending money at school.   Maybe it was because I didn't typically buy my lunch in favor of a packed lunchbox, but I always felt so independent and grown-up when I'd be trusted with a few dollars to spend any way I saw fit.  These flyers were a monthly opportunity to tap into the bettering-Shawn's-schooling fund and to pick up some nifty stuff like stickers and posters along the way…

With this first flyer, I realized that at least one company, Troll, issued different monthly fliers for the various grade ranges.  This one represents books available for kindergarten through 1st grade, and mostly features the large format floppy picture books and read-alongs.  Highlights for me include the Astrosmurf which featured artwork by Peyo (I wasn't sure if his work was repurposed back in the 80s or if it was all derivative stuff based on the Hanna Barbera cartoon adaptation of the comics), and Leo the Lop by Stephen Cosgrove.  Leo the Lop was part of a series of books by Serendipity written by Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James that really knocked my socks off as a kid (illustration-wise.)  Also included in the series were books like Little Mouse on the Prarie, Trapper (about a little while seal), and the Gnome from Nome (my favorite.)  You also get your first glimpse at the book club flyer up-sale which includes the concept of a free poster with the purchase of three or more books.  For a kid in the first grade back in the 80s, I'm sure that 11x17 of two white rabbits peeking out of a top hat was mesmerizing.

This next flyer is for a slightly older set (grades 4th through 6th) and was released in February of 1985…

This is a bit more of what I remember from back in school.  Though I have all sorts of fond memories of these flyers aesthetically speaking, I have to believe it's mostly just nostalgia.  I mean look at the horrible job on that curved block font around the dog poster.  Don't even get me started on the six million different fonts used for the various book titles in the descriptions.  Wowzers.   I mean using the specific font as an image lift from a book like with the Heathcliff offering is one thing, but mixing in the serif and sans serif fonts is hurting my eyes a little.  Anyway, enough grousing about design, I mean look, original solicitations for Choose Your Own Adventure books are in this flyer!

I also love the fact that even though some of these posters are super cheesy, they were al least also super cheap.  $0.75 for 24"x18" poster?  Hell, I'd have a hard time passing up the one with the collies at that price.   Also, notice the solicitation for Mad Libs #11.   Though I never had any Mad Libs books as a kid I know they were huge and these book club flyers were most certainly one of the main places to score them.

Book club flyers were also a place to score stickers, and if memory serves there was also a sheet of stickers in the flyers offered by Troll. 

Lastly, one of my favorite stand outs from this first '85 flyer is the special on the break dancing book on the back.   I'm sure this was the gateway for a bunch of fourth graders to get the instruction they needed to properly pop and lock like a pro…

The last Troll flyer I have is from December 1985…

Featuring more Heathcliff and Mad Libs, as well as Encyclopedia Brown, a handful of classics, and a trio of different Choose Your Own Adventure Style seris (including CYOA, Indiana Jones Find Your Fate, and Zork books), this was one heck of a flyer.  My favorite listing is for yet another of my holy grail items, the 1985 Antioch sticker book, Hogan Wins the Belt.  I've managed to find the majority of the Antioch book and sticker sets (from the Ghostbusters and Karate Kid, to Mr. T and the Bigfoot Monster Truck), but this WWF Hulk Hogan wrestling entry is proving one of the harder ones to find (at least with the stickers intact.)  So it's pretty awesome to get a glimpse at the stickers that were included with this book…

Rounding out this book club flyer are a sweet looking generic BMX book and a How To on Babysitting for Fun and Profit…

But before I end this post, I have a few more treats.  Along with these flyers Esteban also found some of the sweet posters that he and his sister ordered back in the day.  I'll let the Evil Macrocranios set the mood for these:

"Among my childhood school papers were some of the posters of horses and kittens and puppies we got from various book clubs.  It all seemed silly to me and as I unfolded yet another sickeningly cute poster of kittens I asked my mom what kind of little boy likes this stuff.  Then my three year old son walked into the room and when he saw the poster he started yelling 'CATS! CATS!' and he did a little dance and grabbed the poster from me like it was the best Christmas present ever.  Troll sure knew their audience."