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.

Little Golden Book Monday #91

Today's Little Golden Book is Walt Disney's Goliath II. I am not sure of the date of the book as the inside front page is missing from the book, but the Goliath II short was released in 1960, so I would guess that this book was released around that time. I usually don't bother purchasing books in such poor shape, but as soon as I took a look at a few of the pages inside, I knew I had to have this one for my collection! The artwork is obviously done by Bill Peet, who just happens to be my absolute favorite children's book writer/artist.
Once I started writing this, I decided I needed to stop at watch the Goliath II short, so I popped some popcorn, and popped in disc 2 of the Walt Disney Treasures "Disney Reties" DVD set. It turns out the short was written by Bill Peet, but after watching the short, I didn't find that the artwork was very Bill Peet like, and since he didn't receive any credit for art, it would seem he didn't have much if anything to do with the artwork for the film. The Little Golden Book version however was obviously drawn by Bill Peet. You can see the obvious similarities to the artwork in his 1959 children's story "Hubert's Hair-Raising Adventure" which is the illustration right below (the other two illustrations are from the Goliath II book).
Something I learned from watching the Leonard Maltin introduction to the Disney Rarities disc 2 is that the Goliath II short was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Subject, Cartoons, in 1961.
All in all I would say this book was well worth the 10 cents I paid for it at the local thrift shop!

Disneyland's Summer Nightastic!

With Disneyland's Nightastic! opening up this summer, I have been seeing lots of Nightastic artwork on the net, and they all feature the two Disney dragons from Fantasmic and Pete's Dragon. Here is the recent covers of the free guides at Disneyland and California Adventure withe the Disneyland guide featuring the dragon from Fantasmic and the California Adventure one featuring Pete's Dragon from the Main Street Electrical Parade.
I have always loved the dragon from Sleeping Beauty (my favorite Disney animated film), and Fantasmic is a favorite of mine. When I was at Disneyland back in 1992 when the show opened, I picked up a very cool Fantasmic! soft cover book for $5.95. The book is 8 1/2 inches square and has 26 pages, and and the front cover folds out with 3 panels to reveal a great drawing of Mickey battling the dragon. Inside is a nice pictorial souvenir of the show along with the story behind the show.
The inside fold out has a great 2 page drawing which looks like it may have been a promotional sign promoting Fantasmic, with the words "Opening Spring '92".

Family Circus... What a Mess!

The wife has gone out of town for the weekend and left Kaden and I to look after ourselves... Amazing how much of a mess an old guy and a 4 year old can make in just two days! We've played with our Hot Wheels cars and race track, we've played with just about every superhero action figure ever made, we've played with our vintage set of Lincoln Logs, we've sat around reading piles of comic books, we've watched a ton of cartoons on Teletoon Retro, and now the house looks a lot like the covers of these two old Family Circus books.

Little Golden Book Monday #90

Today's Little Golden Book is a great one from 1959. It's Hanna-Barbera's Ruff and Reddy. I actually do not remember ever seeing these characters on TV as a kid, but as an adult, I have an appreciation for all things Hanna-Barbera. Their cartoons did not always contain the best animation and the characters could be pretty weak at times, but as a kid growing up watching cartoons in the 70's Hanna-Barbera have left a lasting impression on me. I am always pleased to find an old 50's or 60's Little Golden Book in amongst a pile of otherwise lame books. This is one of those great finds... well wroth the 20 cents I paid!
After choosing this particular book for today's post, I remembered that I had also picked up a Dell Comics Ruff and Reddy comic book in a pile of old comics recently. This issue is #981 from April-June 1959. So apparently as well as their cartoon series, they also had their own comic book title. I still don't remember them though!

Angelina Jolie / Tomb Raider Got Milk?

I picked up a bunch of old comics the other day and as I was going though them, I noticed that a bunch of them had great ads on the back covers. Here is one of those ads. It is a 2003 Got Milk? ad with Angelina Jolie / Tomb Raider.

Little Golden Book Monday #89

I just about forgot about Little Golden Book Monday tongiht. Its getting late, so I just went in and grabbed a handful of books from my shelf to pick one for today. This one, seemed perfect. Its Margaret Wise Brown's The Sleepy Book, originally from 1948. This edition is from 1975. The little bear on the front reminds me a lot of the Travelodge / Sleepy Bear Motel logo that was on a drinking glass we had at home when I was a kid. I tried looking for the logo I remembered using a Google image search, and was surprised that I could not find the logo I remembered (now I can't wait to talk to my mother to see if she still has it!).. The Sleepy Book is filled with short stories, poems, and songs about sleep. As if I wasn't tired enough already, flipping though this book has almost putting me into a coma... Good night!

Batman comics score!

Today my son and I went to a comic shop that we do not visit very often. I was looking for the Boom Studios Incredibles comic issue #2 (which seems to be sold out everywhere!) as well as any cheap old Batman comics and any comics for Kaden - he likes Batman, Spiderman and the Teen Titans. There was a sign outside the shop which said "hundreds of comics for 25 cents each!" We had a blast going though the 25 cent and dollar boxes and found a ton of great stuff for Kaden and myself, including a bunch of 70's, 80's & 90's Batman and Detective Comics, which are the two titles that I am currently having fun trying to collect. Check out the photos of my Batman comics score!
Unfortunately we did not find a copy of the Incredibles comic we were searching for (cue disappointment music).

Wizard of Oz Lp cover

I picked up some more fun looking records at the Salvation Army on Friday. Among them was this really neat looking Cricket Records version of the Wizard of Oz with the Hanky Pank Players, with orchestra and chorus. I love how the letters in the title look like someone took a pen and doodled in them. Sadly this one album was sans record - but they did give me this nice looking record cover for free!
I have never been a big fan of the movie "Wizard of Oz", but I do remember going to see it in the movie theater some time in the late 80's when they rereleased it. At some point near the beginning I fell asleep and stayed asleep until the credits. Afterwards my wife was abuzz with excitement about the movie she had just seen. Wasn't it grand she asked!? All I could say was, "yeah, and the whole thing was in black and white, right!"

What's UP with this!?

This August, just a little more than two months after the release of Disney/Pixar's UP to theaters, comes the GoodTimes Home Video movie called What’s Up: Balloon to the Rescue. In the past there have been cheapo versions of Pocahontas, Pinocchio, and other classics, trying to cash in on the successful theater releases of Disney films. This one, is such a rip off, its hard to think that the Disney lawyers won't be contacting GoodTimes for something a little less than some good times!

Little Golden Book Monday #88

Today's Little Golden Book is Walt Disney's the Prince and the Pauper. This book is from 1990 and is based on the 1990 short feature that featured Mickey Mouse. The film was released to theaters with the feature film The Rescuers Down Under.
I didn't notice this until I was scanning in this book, but I purchased this book at Disneyland on one of our many trips, for the low price of just $1.29.
I was not yet a collector of Little Golden books back in 1990, but I had seen the Prince and the Pauper film along with the Rescuers Down Under in the theater, and I enjoyed the film so much that I wanted to add this book to my collection.

Batman Birthday Cake

Kaden had his birthday a while back and he wanted a Batman theme for his party. There were the usual Batman cups, napkins etc, and lots of Batman gifts including a Batman costume which he wore for the rest of the day! He also had a special Batmobile birthday cake that looked just like the Batmobile from the Batman Strikes cartoon series, complete with Batman and Robin action figures. I especially liked the graphics on the napkins which were also from the Batman Strikes cartoon series, which is my personal favorite of all the Batman cartoon series.

Oswald the (Lucky) Rabbit

At the Seattle Comic Convention a few months back I picked up this neat old Oswald the Rabbit issue #458 from Dell comics for $1.75. I am a little surprised that I can not find a date inside, and I could not find the answer online. There is a small 53 written on the price sticker of the comic, so I am going to assume this issue is from 1953. Again, I could not find much info online about the Oswald Dell comics, but I find it pretty amazing that there were 458 issues!
This post is mostly an excuse to show the two Oswald the Lucky Rabbit items below. There used to be a great Disney blog site that I would visit almost daily to see great new items that the blogger was working on for the Disney stores (the site has since been removed on Disney's request). These two items, the Oswald Big Fig and Plush were both supposedly available though the Disney stores about a year ago, although I phoned my local Disney stores repeatedly to see if they had these two items in, and all they ever had were some awful looking Oswald Christmas ornaments. If they had ever gotten these items in, I would have happily forked over the large sum of cash I am sure they would have been charging to add these to my collection. But unfortunately they never did show up in my local stores.

Moana Mickey's Arcade

My wife gave me a stack of stuff the other day that she had received from a friend who works at a travel agency. There was tons of Disney brochures, DVDs, posters etc. There were a few 11 x 14 inch cards with info on Adventures by Disney and a 2009 Wald Disney Word Product Reference Guide. These didn't interest me and I was going to toss them out, but I noticed this great picture on one of them for Moana Mickey's Arcade located at the Polynesian Resort in Walt Disney World. I decided to scan this image for myself before tossing out the cards, and I thought I would share it with you!

Little Golden Book Monday #87

On Friday May 29th, opening night, I went to see Up with my wife and 4 year old son Kaden. We chose to see the 3D version, as both were playing at the same cinema. I am not actually sure why someone would chose to see it in 2D when they could see it in 3D - my guess it that once the 3D showings were full, people were forced to see the 2D version. Our theater was so packed that we could not find 3 decent seats together, so Kaden sat on our lap for the entire movie.u I thought the movie was great and loved the 3D. I was very surprised that 10 to 15 minutes into the movie, my son took off his glasses. When I told him to put them back on, he told me, "no, it looks better without them", to which I shrugged and allowed him to continue watching without the glasses. I tilted my head up a few times to look at the screen without my glasses, and found the picture to be somewhat fuzzy looking with the 3D effect on the screen and no glasses. It wasn't until we left the theater that I realized that after eating greasy popcorn for the first few minutes and then touching his lenses repeatedly, it was like looking through greasy saran rap, which is why he didn't want to wear the glasses.
I was pretty surprised that they did not offer a plastic popcorn tub with the Up artwork. There was a time when every kids movie got the popcorn tub treatment.
After the movie, we made a stop at the Chapters book store to have a look for the Little Golden Book version of the film, and sure enough they had a large stack of them, along with all sorts of other assorted coloring books, sticker books, story books etc. It was kind of cool getting to go home from the movie with little souvenir