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Oops, sory for the slight delay, but back again - I don't have the whole set of these, but I do have a few highlights from the 'Bill & Ted's Most Atypical Movie' set - in this case, Napoleon pigging down on a gigantic icecream sundae in San Dimas!
The description simply reads as follows: "While Bill and Ted continue to round up subjects for their report, Deacon entertains Napoleon. Napoleon devours the ice cream and receives the Ziggy Piggy Award." It's amazing what a great movie Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is, and this is one of my favorite moments in the film - there's something about tiny unimpressed French dictators, I guess?
Some more retro comic book fun, perhaps, with Marvel's Star Trek comic book Issue #5 from 1980 - with the wonderfully sensationalist cover 'Dr McCoy... Killer?', and Mr. Spock yelling: 'Shoot the girl... or the Enterprise dies!' Can spaceships die? Odd.
[The Wikipedia page for Star Trek spinoffs notes: "Marvel's series of Star Trek comics began in 1979 with an adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and continued for another year... Marvel's license from Paramount prohibited them from utilizing concepts introduced in the original series, being restricted to only using the characters and concepts as they appeared in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The series lasted a total of 18 issues, ending in 1981."]
Of course, the other scan is a couple of panels from the final page of the book, which was written by Mike W. Barr and illustrated by Dave Cockrum and Klaus Janson, and including some awesome McCoy badinage to Spock: "Your pointy-eared Vulcan hide saved by primitive human emotions... it's somehow fitting!"
From a 1984-era hardboiled DC detective comic Nathaniel Dusk, I found some rather smart ads for Atari 2600 era games as advertisements within the comic - both Joust for the 2600, 5200, and associated Atari home computers, and Masters Of The Universe for the 2600 and Intellivision:
The Joust text is kinda fun ("Joust. You don't play it... you live it"), but the Masters Of The Universe text (with some really high-end screenshots from 1984, apparently from the 'Intellivision with Supergraphics') has more Rights Reserved, Trademark, and licensing *s in the text than just about any other ad I've seen, betraying the series' origins as a merchandising line first and a coherent universe second - sorry, MOTU fans. Both ads are neat, though - I'll try to dig out some similar vintage game ads as time goes on.
Since I just picked up a great non-sport trading card collection which has a small selection of a whole bunch of trading card sets dating back to the early '70s, let's try a classic from the Truckin' card collection in 1975.
As the description with the card list notes: "This series features customized trucks/lorries and vans. Each card back shows descriptive text and includes an order form for subscription to Truckin' magazine."And this particular beauty of a van is called 'Spaced Out'.
As you can see from the description of the van, made by Bob Cardenas from Denver, Colorado: "Spaced Out is a good name for this shortened Chevy van... some of the modifications are custom portholes, sunroof, scoop, two-piece front bumper, fog lights, shortened drive pipe, 11-inch driveshaft." Hawtness - I'll take a dozen.
Another thing I've been doing recently is picking up boxes of comics on eBay. I was never really a comic book reader when I was a kid, and have got into it a little in recent years, partly for research on a superhero video game I worked on, but have only really picked up TPBs and focused on the Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Vertigo-type nexus until very recently.
Thus, these random short and long boxes I've grabbed over the past few weeks have included a few surprises (or, at least, surprises to me!), and I'll be featuring snippets here - starting with Batman Issue #447 from May 1990, titled 'When the Earth Dies! Chapter Three'.
As the synopsis explains: "The NKVDemon continues his murder spree, and before long there is only one name left on his list: President Gorbachev himself, who will be attacked on Earth Day."
This was just after the Berlin Wall fell and Communism was starting to disintegrate in Russia, so it's fascinating to see a Batman story set in Russia and featuring a Soviet government superhero who agonizes over West/East unification ("Now we permit that empire to flee us and rush toward the decadent West"). Oh, and it's an awesome Brian Bolland cover. See, superheroes can be relevant after all?
Starting out with the arcade flyers - and it must be said that I don't really have a spectacular collection of flyers, and most of them are from 2000 onwards - but here's a nice beginning, a stylish flyer for Sega's 2004 skateboard arcade game 'Ollie King' which isn't even on The Arcade Flyer Archive yet.
From the folks at Amusement Vision who absorbed Smilebit's staff, this seems to have been developed by the Jet Set Radio creators, and is described as follows: "A street wise skateboard action racing game set in the modern day urban jungle. Players can race up to 4 other contestants to set the record time for the course. The more stylish the skateboard tricks are preformed then the faster you go. This is the first skateboard game that concentrates more on racing and speed than special tricks."
[The game uses the Xbox-based Chihiro hardware, but it sadly never got an Xbox conversion, presumably due to it being designed specifically for the skateboard controller, as earlier titles Top Skater and Air Trix also had in differing forms.]
First ever post on the new hotness that is Pop Cult Scan Fun, and the first of a wonderful non-sport trading card set - YO! MTV Raps Series 1, based on the MTV hiphop show of the same name.
I'll be busting out some of the other awesome cards over time, including Biz Markie in a lab coat and obscure-ass female Def Jam rapper Nikki D, hopefully, but in the meantime, here's one of the Tone Loc cards from the first series (as always, click through for a hi-res version):
A co-worker couldn't remember who Tone Loc was, which I was very disappointed by, since 'Wild Thing' and 'Funky Cold Medina' have given him his hall pass to hiphop fame in most people's books. Also, Ace Venture: Pet Detective, yay! But hey, the point of ephemera is that you can't remember, cos of the ephemerality, right? Also, as the back of the card notes: 'Tone is short for Tony, and Loc is short for Loco'. Aha!
