Christmas 2022 Is Saved: The How-To Mega-Pack

So there you are...well, there you will be, anyway:  stuck at some relative's house, with barely enough room on the musty, undersized couch (that smells of cheese balls and Virginia Slims) to even sit, crammed among people you don't know and don't want to see, wishing you were somewhere else.  Dog hair and sweet potatoes everywhere.  It must be the holidays!

Of course, you have to try to talk to these people...if you can get a word in, that is, as they blather endlessly about how amazing their own children are, and how superior they are to you and your side of the family.  If only you had a way to really impress them...if only you had some new skills you could show off...!

This blog to the rescue! Taking advantage of the records below will put you over and above with the skills that you need to stand out this holiday season! To blow those suckers, with their Eagle Scouts and their Honor Roll urchins, right out of their eggnog! Observe!

7 DAYS TO BETTER BOWLING (1961)

Does it even need to be said that bowling prowess makes you the star of any family? What's more interesting than listening to somebody talk about bowling anyhow...reading about golf, maybe?

LINK: Better Bowling

BREAKDANCE (K-Tel, 1984)

One side sweet early hip-hop (when it was good, before it was about killing cops) and one side instructions that are actually rapped to righteous beats, you will thoroughly enjoy learning with this amazing LP that has never seen the light of a re-release.  Includes bonus poster of instructions and moves, which is included! What more could you ask? You, spinning on your head on the dining room table, with green bean casserole flying everywhere, will be all the thanks I need.

LINK: Breakdance

LEARN-PLAY BONGOS WITH "MR. BONGO" (1961)

Okay, so maybe your family is more white bread.  Worry not, "Mr. Bongo" has you covered.  Get ready to hear and say "Dickey, Dockey" until you are numb to the actual words.  Documentation included, but let's be real, we are just hitting a tiny drum here.  It's not nuclear fission.  And that album cover! Not since Led Zeppelin's PRESENCE have we seen creepier pod-people families.

LINK:  Learn (and we use the word loosely) Bongos

HOW TO C.B. (Pickwick, 1976)

Now, truck driving is something that will never go away.  I'm sure it's changed a bit, but return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when everything was all about the C.B. Radio.  Pickwick spends an entire record teaching you the complete etiquette of using the thing, with LOTS and LOTS of sample jargon.  I mean, you don't want to embarrass yourself out there, and incorrectly pick up skanks when you ask them to meet you for a beer at the nearest Howard Johnson's? One slip of the terminology, and you could end up buying oil at a police station.  I kid you not, an entire dictionary of the slanguage (ugh) that encompasses 500 terms is included! Some of them are rather inappropriate, but who are we to judge.  Those Nutty Buddies aren't going to drive themselves to the grocery store, are they?

LINK: How To Speak C.B.

LET'S DISCO (K-Tel, 1978)

There is a 100-page book that goes with this record (what, K-Tel again?), but you won't need it; it's all there.  Remember:  This photo above could be your family this Christmas, rather than the scenario already described at the beginning of this post.  All I can do is lead you to the water and give you the tools you need.  The choice is yours.  

LINK:  Let's Disco

Good luck out there.  And please, curtail the voluminous emails of gratitude.  Instead, spend your time bowling with your breakdancing grandma to bongo music at the truck stop, which after all is the true meaning of Christmas.

Godzilla Crayon By Number (Craft House, 1995)

Here's another of those things that you won't find anywhere else, and it was really made possible by a complete fluke.  But we will get to that momentarily. 

First of all, as I'm sure you know, "activity sets" have always been popular with manufacturers, primarily because they are incredibly inexpensive to produce (paper products, including jigsaw puzzles, were famously the only Star Wars merchandise to be found when the film first became a surprise hit in 1977), but let's not diminish the fact that they sell very well.  I myself spent many a summer afternoon ruining a perfectly good activity book, watercolor kit, or velvet coloring poster! They have always been a reasonable way to keep a child busy...you have to wonder if they are expected to be all digital today!

If you are a fan of the 1990's Trendmasters Godzilla output, then you've noticed that the look of their particular KING OF THE MONSTERS branding could be found on products made by several other manufacturers (you can see a list of these products on our Trendmasters page).  It gave a nice uniformity to Godzilla products of the time, and this particular item is no exception.

This thin box holds two things:  a 12-page booklet with pages that can be separated easily for coloring, and a bundle of 8 generic crayons in a rubber band.  I would love to tell you these are really terrible restaurant-level crayons and make a joke about it, but they seem to be fine (or perhaps hardened by age, who knows).  What's really strange about them is that they weren't packaged in a box, which would've allowed them to be stored flat, instead of in a round cluster.  At any rate, the manufacturers were smart enough to put a protective sheet of blank paper between them and the booklet...which wouldn't have been necessary if they were boxed, come to think of it.  Also, while we are complaining, the coloring pages are double-sided, which was never a good idea, and certainly made the possibility of markers impossible!

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.

But enough pedantics, let's get to what you came for:  cool Godzilla artwork! As this is a pretty rare set, and doesn't seem to be anywhere else, I was originally debating even opening it, but lo and behold, that was decided for us.  The seller, in their infinite wisdom, packaged it in a "bubble mailer" instead of a box, allowing the postal service to crush and mangle it, with the final indignity being that the postman folded it nearly in half to cram it into my mailbox.  Thus, fate has decided for us. Enjoy!

If you'd like to download the complete set of 12 scans, you can do so here!

Godzilla Weirdie Wiggly Action Figure ("Jiggler," Ben Cooper, 1980)

 

Today, let's knock another vintage Godzilla toy off of the "somehow-neglected" list of empty links on our page of Chronological Vintage American Godzilla items.  You probably know the name of the Ben Cooper company, and it probably makes you think of these:

Vintage Halloween costumes from your youth; the plastic-smock kind that came in what they call "cake boxes."  You know, the ones with the mask held on with the world's weakest rubber band? As it turns out, they made other items too.  Let's start with a rubber dinosaur from 1974:

You had these types of things as a kid, and so did I, and so did nearly every child in the free world at one time.  Hard rubber dinosaur figures, about four inches high.  They became so commonplace to toy and drug stores--and nondescript--that collectors often refer to them today as "Chinasaurs," because 99% of the time, they have no maker listed on them at all.  When Ben Cooper got the Godzilla license, they made a fast change to this figure, which really only consisted of removing its horn, and quickly re-christened him "Godzilla:"

Well, maybe if you squint.

Another thing they did was add an elastic loop to hang the figure from (this I think is what resulted in the nickname of "Jigglers", and not the material they are made from.  If they were that old type of "Wacky Wall Walker" soft rubber, they'd have surely all disintegrated by now!).  This also provided a place to put the tag, which is a sticker doubled over on itself.  There are two variations to this tag, one with red ink and one with black.

There's also a bit of color variation to the figures themselves.  It becomes harder to tell with age; you never know where (or in what conditions) one of these has been stored anyhow, but some figures are more yellowish, even green, and some tend more toward brown.  Here is an example of a mega-rare display box, and you can see that the extant figures inside are all the same shade, if that's anything to go by:

I can't look at this photo without imagining them
peeping like baby chicks!

It also tells us that the official name for the toy is "Godzilla King of the Monsters Weirdie Wiggly Action Figure." It's a terrible name for a toy, but the sweet artwork on the top panel brings the idea more in line with the Hanna-Barbera, and even more so, Marvel Godzilla of the time:

So, as you can see, this toy was very much a "product of its time," but also cool in a wacky kind of way.  They don't come up very often at all, and can be tough to find.  

Unfortunately, Ben Cooper was bought by Rubie's Costume Company in 1992, but the nostalgia for the old-style Halloween costumes will never die.  This year, Super 7 made 3 different Godzilla masks in the vintage style!

Popeye - Pirate Treasure (Record Guild of America, 1948)

 

Here is a Thanksgiving treat that, like many, many items on this site, doesn't seem to exist anywhere else.  This is a 6 & 1/2 inch cardboard record from 1948 that is also a two-sided picture disc! According to Discogs, Record Guild of America issued tons of these 78 rpm, full-color beauties, some based on comic strips of the day (there also exists one for Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates, for example).  It's pretty amazing that this one, which I found in a flea market out of town for five bucks, has survived. But how well?

Extremely well, for a 75-year-old record made of carboard that's coated with a fragile, thin plastic layer.  I really wasn't sure it was going even to play.  The biggest problem I had with it was that--as you would completely expect--the record was bowed from time and temperature.  One side approximated a dome, and the other, a bowl.  It wasn't extreme, from the perspective of a collectible, but on the other hand, from the viewpoint of a stylus, less than trackable.  What to do?

I puzzled over this one for a while, trying to invent some complicated invention that would be low-profile enough for the arm of the turntable to clear...until the epiphany finally came.  It's usually the simplest ideas that work the best.  I bought a corkboard at a thrift store, cut it into a circle, and used thumbtacks to hold the record flat, so that it could be digitized.  And it worked like a charm.

Amazingly, the entire adventure, which adds up to about 3 minutes, plays without skips or mistracking.  It was extremely noisy, as you would think (this is a problem with picture discs anyhow, but in this case, wear and age play a huge part).  At first it was a struggle to hear the words.  I worked on it a long time and was able to greatly reduce the surface noise and make it completely listenable.  It's now akin to an AM radio broadcast, when before it was like having your head down in a running clothes dryer.

The record is very well-done, and seems to be emulating the early Fleischer cartoons (or possibly even one of the radio series).  Basically, Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Swee'Pea stop on an island to have a picnic, run into pirates, who Popeye trounces, and then they leave with the pirate's treasure (which Popeye probably added to his enormous wealth)! It's worth pointing out that there is no spinach to be found in this story, which points more toward the comic strip than the cartoons.

Enjoy!

Popeye - Pirate Treasure (1948)

Don't want to download? I have also shared this on YouTube, which I honestly need to be doing more of with this sort of thing:

The IMPERIAL GODZILLA Figures (Imperial, 1985/1992) part TWO

Continuing our coverage of the mighty Imperial Godzilla figure, last time we looked at the "12-inch" variety (and learned that number wasn't completely accurate).  Today, we will cover its 6-inch counterpart:

...which looks basically the exact same as his bigger brethren, but was a more accessible (and portable) scale in some ways.  

Here's one interesting thing that came out of making this post--remember with the large figures, how the Hong Kong variant was a much brighter green? It's exactly the same with the 6-inch! Weird.

Unlike the giant Godzillas, the 6-inch figures were distributed in display boxes that were meant for the front counters of toy stores.  These boxes held an army of 24 Kings of the Monsters, and weighed 26 pounds when full! The artwork for the 1985 display boxes was also awesome (some of it was also used for Imperial's "Action Stickers," which you can see at our List of American Godzilla Items).

Both sizes of figures were re-released by Imperial in 1992, but unfortunately, the artwork changed for the worse.  One new addition for the second time around was the inclusion of a carded version of the figure, which looked like this:

The figure was packaged in a running pose, which is hilarious, but man...that artwork. It's like a Joker grin.

The back of the card was completely generic, like the true rack toy that it was...did you notice the $2.76 price tag?

The counter-top display box also made a return...with the same new artwork:

If you bought the figure from the display box, you got a hang tag, which was something left off of the carded variety.

Lastly, around this time, Imperial grouped their smaller figures together for one monster (and apparently very rare) boxed set called CLASH OF THE MOVIE MONSTERS.  It's worth it for the artwork alone (I can't get around the woman who is tied...to a phonebooth.  To the outside of the phone booth.  Huh.)!

That's a look at the iconic Imperial Godzilla figures.  I meant to mention in Part One that there is a pseudo-Gigan that was sold around the same time in a couple of colors.  You may see some folks attribute the figure to Imperial also, but this isn't the case.  At least it gave kids somebody for their Imperial Godzilla to throw down in the sandbox, though!

The IMPERIAL GODZILLA Figures (Imperial, 1985/1992) part ONE

 

This is another post that is going to fill several gaps in our Vintage American Godzilla Items list.  Somehow, this legendary Godzilla item hasn't been featured around here, but today's the day to fix that.

Just as the Aurora model kit represented the Godzilla fan of the 1960's, and the Shogun Warriors Godzilla defined the fan of the 1970's, if you grew up in the 1980's (even if you only had one Godzilla toy), you had an Imperial Godzilla.  There was an onslaught of items around the time of GODZILLA 1985's release (unlike today, products didn't have to be slavishly specific to the film or its exact events, or be driven by corporate dictums), and Imperial Toys was there in every grocery, toy, and drug store, with a whole range of products (you can see their other items at the page linked above).  

Chunky and nearly indestructible, the largest of the Imperial Godzillas was "12 & 1/2 inches tall," according to the manufacturer's sell-sheet.  He was posable, towered over your other figures and dinosaurs, and accompanied many a kid to the sandbox, backyard, and probably even bathtub (I knew some weird kids).  One huge advantage he had over your other, cheaper dinosaurs was that other toys and their weapons couldn't go down his throat and get stuck.  The back of his throat was walled off, which was a nice touch.

There are two variations to this big figure (collectors often call him "12-inch," since that is an existing scale of figures and it rolls off the tongue much easier), and that all has to do with the under-the-foot stamp, which either says MADE IN CHINA or MADE IN HONG KONG.  I will admit to you that for years I thought they were pretty much the same...until I moved them to the same shelf, and I discovered this:

Can you see it? The following picture shows it better:

They aren't the same height! My mind is still blown.  Of course, the Hong Kong model is a brighter green, too, but it measures 12 & 3/8 inches tall, while the China variant measures a full 13 inches (measurements that, we should point out, fall on both sides of the manufacturer's officially stated height)!

The tails look a little different (which is difficult to photograph), but I think this is because the Hong Kong Godzilla is a reduced version of the China one, which means the tail is shorter.  I guess it's obvious that there would be different molds, but you would think that they would all have been identical...then again, anything's possible in the world of inexpensive toys.  Imperial was basically a rack & dimestore toy manufacturer when they got this license. As I find myself saying a lot around this blog, we solve some mysteries here, but we create others.  Here are the feet of the two figures:

The HONG KONG figure has the Imperial Toys logo and the "MADE IN" information on his RIGHT foot, and on the LEFT, "c 1985 Toho Co. Ltd"...

...while the CHINA figure has the Imperial Toys logo and "MADE IN" on his LEFT foot, and the "c 1985 Toho Co. Ltd" on his RIGHT.

Who knew, all these years, that they were different heights?  The 6-inch figures don't have this issue.  Here is a better look at the hang tag that came on these figures in 1985:

By the way, the tag for the 6-inch figure was slightly smaller.

In 1992, Imperial re-issued both the "12" and 6-inch Godzilla figures.  No changes were made to the figures themselves, which still utilized the exact same molds with the "1985" year on them.  In fact, only the hang tag was changed, and not for the better:

I'll never get used to that art, and we will see lots more of it next time, when in Part Two, we will look at the 6-inch version of this classic toy.

But, before I forget--did you notice anything weird in the "family photo" at the start of this post?

This guy.  He actually doesn't belong--this is actually a bootleg, an exact copy of the Imperial Godzilla that measures about 9 inches tall! The only major difference is the tail, which as you can see has a rounded end that's completely different.  He has no year on him, only the usual "Made in China" that most toy dinosaurs have had for decades.  It's always a testament to the popularity of a toy to see it copied, but yet in this case, they went the extra mile and invented a new size!