Happy 3rd Birthday Ronn's Big Pile of Stuff!

Today marks the 3rd birthday of Ronn's Big Pile of Stuff! I've been having tons of fun posting all kinds of stuff that I enjoy, and that hopefully others enjoy as well. And thanks to all those other blogs who have added this page to their links, the extra traffic is great. Don't be shy, use the 'comments' button at the bottom of any post and let me know what you think. And be sure to check out my other two blogs the Disneyland Records Blog and Ronn's Minor League Hockey Mania Blog.
Lastly, a BIG thank you to all the other bloggers whose sites I visit on a regular basis. Thanks for all the entertainment you provide!

Little Golden Book Monday #95

Today we have the second of two farm related Little Golden Books I got recently. This one is A Day on the Farm from 1960 (See last Monday for Old MacDonald had a Farm).
The funniest part of this book is when the mailman shows up with a box for Farmer Brown. You know it has to be something good because the box has a bunch of holes in it. It turns out the box is filled with lots of new baby chickens! I wonder if you can still order baby chickens though the mail?
Reading though this book kept reminding me of my grandparents. They didn't live on a farm, but so many of the scenes in the book reminded me of my visits to their house. The little white house on the inside front page looks just like their house, and the page of the 'big folks' sitting around chatting on the front porch totally reminded me of spending my evenings on their front porch.

Magic Related Comic Book Covers

Here are two awesome comics I picked up in the 3 for a dollar bin at a local comic shop. These two issues happen to have magic related covers which I love!
Hi and Lois issue #9 from Charlton comics, 1971. I have always loved the Hi and Lois comics from the newspapers, so when I found this comic I snapped it up. The fact that is has Trixie coming out of a magic top hat on the cover is a bonus. Unfortunately when I got home and flipped it open hoping to read the cover story, I didn't find anything even remotely resembling a magic show in the comic. No magic hat, no rabbit nothing.
The second comic is Mandrake the Magician from King Comics, 1967. As well as being a really fun comic, I especially enjoyed the two page spread in the center of this one called the King Comics Corner Store which featured some great stuff including; The Green Ghost game (a great board game featuring aglow in the dark ghost), Hypno-Spex, the Chose ' N Play Automatic Phonograph, Spunkie Punkie Puppet (Skunk puppet), and a real live Venus Fly Trap you could send away for! Boy, if only I could go back in time to buy some of this neat-o stuff!

Disney's California Adventure Post Cards

I found some Disney's California Adventure postcards amongst all the various postcards at the thrift shop the other day. I picked them up because I enjoy collecting Disney postcards, but I have to say that these are some of the lamest Disney postcards I have ever seen. Generally Disneyland postcards have iconic images that make you want to go to Disneyland. These DCA postcards illustrate why the park has been such a failure. If these are the best images they could come up with, I certainly would not want to visit the park based on these postcards. And I am guessing that who ever bought these postcards at the park got home and realized just how lame they were and donated them to the local thrift shop.
Hopefully with the huge makeover the park is receiving, they will be some postcards in the future worth adding to my collection.

Little Golden Book Monday #94

I found a large box of Little Golden Books at a thrift shop today for just 30 cents each. I added 32 new Little Golden Books to my collection, including this wonderful 1975 eighth printing of Old MacDonald Had a Farm - first printing was 1960.
I know that I had a request from a blog reader for a LGB about a farm. Hopefully this is the one they were looking for. If not, I have another farm book to post next Monday. Ee-igh, ee-igh, oh!

Coca Cola: Original Great Taste, Since 1886

I have been collecting Coca Cola ads from magazine for years. Thankfully my mother knows this, as she is always finding Coke ads in her magazine like this one she found in the October 2008 issue of Canadian Living magazine. It's a great two page ad with the tag line "The Bottle Has Changed, The Original Great Taste Hasn't." With no added preservatives or artificial flavors, since 1886. Look for them in the "100 calories of refreshment" aisle. Original great taste, since 1886, and only 100 calories.
Seeing all those bottles in the ad got me thinking... I don't know about you, but for me, a Coke tastes so much better from a glass bottle than it does from a can. Some time a few months ago, I had purchased a few bottles of Coke while in Washington State. They were the tall 335 ml bottles that had been imported from Mexico. I drank one and have been using the bottle ever since. I put it in the dish washer after each use. Then, about 20 minutes before I want an icy Coke, I will put the bottle in the freezer, and and then use a funnel to pour a can of coke into the bottle, and voila, an incredibly refreshing retro Coca Cola!

The Melmarx Bros! Invade ALF Comics

I picked up a big pile of 25 cent comics the other day, and in the pile was this awesome issue of ALF comics #21 from November 1989. I picked it up because I am a big ALF fan, but was even more thrilled when I got home and noticed that it had a call out on the front cover that said there was a Melmarx Bros (featuring; Chippo, Oucho and Burpo)story inside! As big of a fan of ALF as I am, I am an even bigger Marx Brothers fan. I have all thirteen Marx Brothers’ feature films on DVD (as well as video tape), and have spent countless hours laughing to the hijinx of Chico, Harpo, and Groucho (as well as Zeppo). Sit back and enjoy the story of the Marx Brothers Melmackian counterparts, the Melmarx Bros! in a Night at the I-Hopera! Click here to download a copy of the Melmarx Bros story in .cbr format

Little Golden Book Monday #93

Today's Little Golden Book is Big Bird's Red Book featuring Jim Henson's Muppets. This educational book was created in cooperation with the Children's Television Workshop, producers of Sesame Street. Children do no have to watch the television show to benefit from this book. Workshop revenues from this product will be used to help support CTV educational projects. This is the forth printing from 1978. The artwork in this book reminds me of a Richard Scary book with Big Bird walking though all the scenes.

STRYPER Murder By Pride

Christian rockers Stryper will be releasing their newest album on July 21st, called Murder By Pride. The band had a "Murder By Pride" artwork contest on their website for fans to submit the potential cover for the upcoming album. The winning artwork, which will be used for the group's new CD, was submitted by Gilvan Rangel of Campina Grande, Brazil. The band says, "Hundreds of submissions were received and carefully reviewed."
Above left is the artwork that Gilvan submitted to the band. The image on the right is the artwork after it was tweeked by the band, and as it is being advertised on sites such as Amazon. The middle image was created by Tobi Elektrik over at Firestream.net, and I think it is a substantial improvement over both the original and tweaked versions. Ever since I saw the original image, I have disliked the face in the image. And I much prefer the zoomed in image of just the body and arms, and the much larger Stryper logo. All in all I think the middle image looks more like an album cover to me than the other two.
I really hope that Stryper will decide to showcase all of the images they received on their official web site, as I would love to see some of the other images that were submitted. If you would like to see two such images, you can check out Death is Gain where the artist has posted two of his submissions.
The official album 'may' have the image to the right on it, but my iTunes copy will happily have the middle image as its cover!

Captain America #600

Last week saw the release of Captain America issue #600. The previous months issue was issue #50. So what gives? Turns out, Marvel Comics is celebrating 70 years next month, and as part of the celebration, they are releasing Daredevil #500, Amazing Spider-Man #600 and Captain America #600. This should make me really happy, as one of my biggest pet peeves in comics was the trend to restart all popular titles back at issue #1 (in some cases, more than once). Apparently the comic companies thought that comic readers would be too intimidated to start reading a comic with 500+ issues and would be more interested in buying more collectible #1 issues. I myself found comics that had been going long enough to have issue #854 (such as Batman Detective Comics has this month) to be extremely cool. Back in my youth, I read and collected Captain America and Daredevil, but once they reverted back to issue #1 (thereby ignoring the history of all the issues that had come before), it was a big part of why I quit reading comics. It took about 10 years to come back to comics. To Marvel's way of counting, the current issue of Captain America would have been #600 if it had continued with its original numbering. I'm sure they have fudged the numbers a bit to make sure that this summer, their big titles all hit a milestone number such as 500 and 600.
So, I should be happy right!? Unfortunately this just seems like a lame sales stunt. I'm sure if we wait a few months, someone at Marvel will get the brilliant ideal to start back at issue #1 again for these titles.
Happily for me, DC comics has allowed Batman and Detective Comics to continue with their actual numbering reaching 688 and 854 respectively so far!
Nuff Said...

Little Golden Book Monday #92

Today's Little Golden Book is Dinosaurs. Few things are more fascinating to a child than the story of the giant creatures that once lived on our earth. Jane Werner Watson's clear, simple text and william de J. Rutherfoord's imaginative illustrations bring to young children a vivid picture of how the world might have been, in the long-ago days of the dinosaurs.Seventh printing, 1973 (First printing 1959).

Toy Story III: Woody's Rip Off

Is it just me, or does the character in this ad look like a certain character from a certain movie?

My school library was tossing out a bunch of old magazines, so I happily dragged them to my desk and spend my lunch hour flipping though them looking for cool ads for my collection. Here is one that I pulled out thinking it was a Disney/Pixar ad with Woody selling batteries. It wasn't until I looked at it closely that I realized that it was actually for Children's Motrin, not batteries, and that it was not actually Woody, but a Woody knockoff. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Disney/Pixar should be extremely flattered with this ad.

Goofy and the Tiger Hunt

Here I present one of my all time favorite Disney book covers "Goofy ant eh Tiger Hunt".
After Monday's Little Golden Book post, I decided to pull out this book from the Disney display case in my office. The tiger in the Goliath II book reminded me of the tiger on the cover of this book. In my mind they were identical. Now that I have the Goofy and the Tiger Hunt book in front of me, I see that although they are both tigers, they are not that similar. But, since I had already pulled this book out, and it is one of my favorite Disney items in my collection, I thought I would share it with you today.
This book is from 1954 and is based on the 1945 short "Tiger Trouble". I decided to pull out my Walt Disney Treasures DVD "The Complete Goofy" to watch the Tiger Trouble short, which it turns out is written by Bill Peet, which makes me appreciate this book even more.