Also, while I’m on the subject, I love these dealer ads meant for the various arcades and pizza joints.  “3-Player Simultaneous Play for increased earning power!”  “The Real Ghostbusters Logo increases initial attraction to game play!”  You can read that last factoid as: “By the way, the actual game play barely features Ghostbusters-esque characters, none of which are wearing cartoon accurate colors, so at least the logo will get kids popping quarters in!”

Anyway, thanks again Tom, now I have to track one of these bad boys down…

Getting back into the swing of things around here and as luck would have it this week’s League assignment is a real peach!  Submitted by Jason over at Rediscover the 80s (who just started a pretty rad podcast that I totally am way behind in pimping), the topic is all about building a dream arcade in our homes.  Though I’m not much of a gamer these days, I did spend a decent amount of time playing the stand-up cabinets at the local pizza joints, mall arcades, Showbiz and Chuck E. Cheese’s, and even in the converted utility closet of the 7-Eleven that was in my neighborhood growing up.  That being said, my dream arcade would probably fit in a utility closet now that I think about it…

So what would be in my dream arcade closet?  Only four cabinets.  Well, three cabinets and one cocktail table unit.  First up, the classic (at least for me), Galaga…

This is my go-to game when I’m in the mood for a truly old school arcade experience.  It’s also the game I judge most pizza places on.  Sure, if a place makes a good NY style pizza, that’s good, but if there are arcade cabinets in the joint and Galaga is missing, so too will be my patronage.  For my money (and I will drop a considerable amount of coinage in a Galaga cabinet when I have a belly full of pizza) there no better combination than securing that double spaceship with the taste of sausage and onion in my mouth that was just recently washed down with coke sipped out of a clear red plastic cup.  Just a bit of heaven if you ask me.

Plucking some similar pizza place-centric nostalgia heart strings would be securing a Mrs. Pac-Man cocktail sit-down table.  Faux wood grain trim would be essential too…

Can’t count the number of times I played a unit that looked just like this while waiting for my personal pan pizza at my local Orlando area Pizza Hut as a kid.  Did I mention that the personal pan pizza in question would have invariable been free based on my appetite for reading and the Pizza Hut Book It program…

Now the next cabinet is not an arcade game in the strictest sense, but it did provide an arcade experience, and that’s the Nintendo PlayChoice-10…

This unit was basically a way for Nintendo to “advertise” for the NES system by housing it and 10 games into one arcade cabinet.  We had one in my local 7-Eleven when I was growing up and it’s where I spent a good deal of time playing games like Ducktales, Goonies II, and more importantly Lifeforce.  I also learned a neat trick where if you could pull both of the joysticks to the right and mash down all the buttons you’d get free timed play on a handful of the games in the cabinet.  I used this method to play a shitton of Lifeforce before breaking down and begging my mom for an at-home copy of the game.  In other words, mission accomplished Nintendo.

Rounding out my dream arcade would be my favorite arcade game ever, a 6-player X-Men game cabinet…

Not only was this game based on Pryde of the X-Men, my favorite X-Men cartoon of all time (the one-shot failed pilot produced by the wonderful folks over at Sunbow), but it features one of my favorite X-Men characters, the much underrated Dazzler.  My four friends during middle and high school were all X-Men nerds like me, so between the five of us we used to rock the crap out of this game at our local arcade/go cart track called Malibu Grand Prix.  All of us would beg our parents to go there for birthdays just so that we could spend a couple hours plunking quarters into the above machine.  I’m pretty sure we even came close to beating it one or two times.  Hands down some of my favorite arcade experiences surrounded time at the joystick playing either Wolverine or Dazzler.

About 10 years ago I ran across a very reasonably priced 6-Player X-Men cabinet, but was plagued with the ultimate nerd conundrum of how to justify a car payment on something so big and loud that would be next to impossible to move without a professional team and a forklift.  In the end I passed, but there has always been a part of me that regretted it…

So there you have it.  The Branded in the 80s Arcade.  Small, sure.  But for me, arcade heaven.  Pass me a slice of sausage and onion, and don’t worry, I’ve rigged all the cabinets so you don’t need tokens!

If you liked my shenanigans this week, why not check out these other rad League participants…

Pax, Cavalcade of Awesome (and my rad Cult Film Club co-host), lists his top 10 arcade games!

Classick Material, Cold Slither Podcast, goes the extra step and makes a fantasy show about his favorites!

Rich, The Nerd Nook, Moonwalks over to the 7-Eleven to play some Street Fighter II!

Kal, Calvin’s Canadian Cave of Cool, has a bone to pick with Dragon’s Lair!

So, something that I’ve been meaning to write about for the past six months or so is an awesome retro inspired iPad case that was designed and built by a really cool gentleman that goes by the name Dust!  Hailing from Australia, Dust is a child of the 80s who has focused his considerable creative manufacturing and design skills into a series of awe-inspiring retro themed projects, from General Lee scooters to working TMNT T-Phones, to custom Real Ghostbusters dress shirts and custom upholstered pillows.

Dust hooked me up with a seriously awesome retro wood-paneled-TV themed iPad case that’s been getting a lot of use in the house of Branded…

One of the things about the iPad that’s really bugged me is that it’s not the easiest thing to use while lying in bed.  Sure, it’s relatively light weight, but to lay down and watch a movie or a couple episodes of Airwolf it can be a real pain to try and keep upright without getting hand or elbow cramps.  I even have one of those newfangled folding magnetic covers, but unless it’s resting on a hard surface it’s pretty useless.  Well, Dust’s TV box case was the perfect solution.  It’s light and wide enough to provide the perfect amount of self-sustaining stability in my lap while lying in bed.  Also, it looks super rad!

Constructed from plexiglass and a beautiful custom sticker wrap, the TV box case consists of two components, the outer case and the iPad holder inset…

The insert is designed to fit very snugly into the case and holds the tablet securely so it’s easy to use while inserted.  The best part?  Now you can store your iPad on a shelf and have it look pretty darn wicked cool when not in use.

If you like what you see, do yourself a favor and hit up Dust on Twitter.  He’s a really great guy and he’s producing some really rad stuff that I think the world needs to take a gander at for sure!  Tell him Branded sent ya!

First off, no visit to Branded HQ would be complete without taking a gander at the action figure wall.  Kong really wanted to join the ranks of the Joe team, but Cobra always ended up picking him first…

Kong also Mumm-Ra.  You think the two would pal around, but that ancient spirit of evil is kind of a nutty fruitcake…

I had to show Kong my framed Crestwood Monsters book as it’s sort of like a high school yearbook for him…

Now as far as Atlanta goes, I took him to some of my current favorite spots, and it wasn’t until I was processing the roll of film that I realized I apparently love places that start with the letter “V”.  Case in point…

…the Vortex (my favorite Atlanta building and a great place for Fried Pickles)…

…the Varsity (great hot dog place)…

…and Videodrome (one of the last surviving mom & pop video rental places in the southeast)!

Anyway, head on over to Cool and Collected to check out more pictures from Kong’s stop in Atlanta as well as the other stops on the tour so far!

Recently though I sort of came to an impasse with the shittyness of the platform, the comments were almost totally broken, and honestly I wasn’t sure what I was going to do to save the site. Enter two supremely awesome folks, Ben Rollier and Jaime Hood. Having a twitter conversation with them one day about my lame comments section issues Ben suggested a way that I could port all of my posts pretty easily into a WordPress environment. Playing off of that Jaime took it upon herself to basically save Branded in the 80s from the trash bin. Over the last couple of months she’s been working tirelessly in her free time to rebuild my site from the ground up and has made it a fully functional big boy’s website where I can, like, work with a platform that makes sense and a comment system that’s actually geared towards conversations. Pretty much everything I always wanted out of the site. The site might look largely the same (by design), but it’s way cooler in the functionality department, and to be honest it sort of has me pretty darn stoked to be writing again. If only I can get past this speed bump in the real world.

Anyway, huge shout out to Ben, and especially Jaime who channeled all of her Ninja Turtle inspired craftiness to save my damn website. Seriously, if you haven’t checked out her site, do it. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet to hang out and learn about pretty damn awesome movies, music, and all the other stuff that runs through her mind.

Been a lot of personal “behind-the-scenes” stuff going on at Branded this year, but I’m doing my best to bounce back and get to some more regular posting soon. In the meantime I wanted to tackle this week’s League assignment as it touches on the very subject I’ve been meaning to write about for the past couple months, comic books. Remember when I talked about the awesome gift, my original Atari 2600 game system and original eight games, a long time friend (D) gave me recently? Well, not only was he gracious enough to restore one huge chunk of my childhood, but he also returned another important part of my past that’s been MIA for over 18 years, my run of Uncanny X-Men comics that I traded him out of desperation in high school.

At the end of my sophomore year of high school my Dad was laid off from his position as a salesmen for a large semiconductor and telecommunications company. I’ll be honest, he made some pretty decent dough back in the day and throughout all of my life to that point we lived very comfortably. It wasn’t lavish by any means, but we weren’t hurting and there was always a decent allowance that I used to keep myself in toys and comics. When he lost his job though, we were in sort of a pretty tough situation as his company had moved my family across the country twice in the space of two years, so they had fronted my Father a large portion of the down payment on the house we’d been living in. After they laid him off they wanted that money back and it forced us to regroup as a family, cut costs as much as possible and move into a small two bedroom apartment. None of this really mattered to me, but I did lose the bucks that I needed to keep me in comics, so I started to cannibalize my collection, selling off whatever I could to get the money to buy new comics. As any collector knows, this can be very dangerous and usually leads to losing everything, which is basically what happened in my case. There were a few runs that I held off on, stuff that was really personal to me, books like The Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, and X-Factor. As I started to chip away at the “money” books in these runs my friend “D” made me an offer on my collection of Uncanny X-Men books that I couldn’t refuse so I traded him my run, issues 196-281.

At the time I was sort of relieved because those books were the cornerstone of my collection, the stuff that got me into the hobby, and by parting with them I felt the need to collect comics sort of die. It’s not that I wanted to stop collecting and reading, but it’s an expensive habit and at the time I kind of wanted to just take a break. Well, over the years I’ve drifted back into collecting, though nowhere near as fiercely as I did during that time between 1988 and 1995, and big reason for this is that without those original X-Men comics I sort of feel disconnected from the hobby. More importantly, sort of like Scrooge McDuck has his Number One Dime, the most important piece of currency in his fortune, I had my own lucky book, Uncanny X-Men issue 242. This was the first comic I bought back in 1988, and it’s always been the center of my collection. I’ve picked up copies of the book over the years, but not having the actual copy that I purchased from a grocery store spinner rack back in the day has always been a little pin prick of loss and remorse when it comes to my comic collecting.

That all changed earlier in the year when “D” regifted those books to me along with my long lost Atari. There aren’t even words for how happy I was to reunite with this stuff. Again, I don’t have a ton of surviving stuff from my childhood and so this pile of comics is just beyond amazing. There was a time when I felt like the stories that Chris Claremont wrote in these issues defined me. Like a lot of kids I heavy related to the characters, Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, Longshot, Dazzler, Colossus, Psylocke, and Havok. These were “my X-men”. Later, I fell in love with Gambit, got acquainted with Polaris and Forge, was only mildly annoyed by Jubilee, and dreamed of what it would be like to step through the Siege Perilous. I did a quick tally to see what these books retailed for, not because I give a damn what they’re worth monetarily (they’re priceless artifacts as far as I’m concerned), but I was curious what my friend potentially gave up to reunite me with these books. Let’s just say that at market value was about a month’s rent, and I know that he knows that. Egads, can’t thank “D” enough.

Like what you read here?  Why not visit some of the other League members to see what they had to say about this week’s comic books topic!

Big J talks about the Desert Peach…

Eric talks about Plastic Man…

Rich talks about Superman…

Yelinna talks about a bunch of comics and toys…

Tim talks about bird poop and Iceman…

The Cult Film Club is totally siding with Mr. Pink when it comes to the idea of “No Tipping”, at least receiving them that is. We’d love your support in helping to cover our costs, but instead of holding out our grubby hands for a tip or donation we’ve got these rad stickers to sell instead.  All profit goes directly into paying our podcast hosting and equipment fees.  I’d really like to sell through the 40 packs we have by the end of the month, and I’ll be honest, I’m going to need your help to do it.  Right now we’re almost half way to that goal, which is awesome, but we still have a little ways to go.

Plaster these on your car, Trapper Keeper, or your favorite pet!  In addition, if you leave a comment below letting me know you put in an order, I’ll include a Branded in the 80s Logo sticker for free!

Thanks in advance for supporting this project, and especially to those who have already picked up a pack or two.  And thanks always for stopping by Branded and reading my silly thoughts!

Click to be whisked away to the Cult Film Club sticker store!

I do however have a couple of pictures that I took of my room during high school, circa 1995 that I can take a look at.  Granted, it’s not the 80s, but it’s basically been 20 years, so it’s still nostalgic and junk.  Looking back I guess I was going through my “dark” phase where I wore a ton of black, made my own goofy Punisher T-shirts, and took selfie photos with my dad’s Pentax 1000 manual camera that I stole so that I could take photojournalism as an elective in school.  I wonder how long I f-ed with my hair until I was happy with this picture at the time (sigh, what a retard I was.)  Also, note the X-Men keychain I turned into a necklace pendant (hanging near the Punisher skull nose area), as that’s a clue to an upcoming post, the second part of this Atari post from a couple weeks ago…

Anyway, now that you’ve had a look at my dumb ass, here’s what my room looked like…

This was is just a smidgen of the cacophony of posters, clippings and miscellaneous crap that I had plastered on almost every square inch of area in that room.  By the time I was done I had the entire ceiling, all four walls, the doors, door frames, bookshelves and dresser covered in stuff.  Wish I had some more shots other than the two in this post.  That being said, lets take a look at some of the junk in that photo above.  First off there’s an awesome Aliens poster that I totally forgot I had.  The two mobiles hanging down from the ceiling are the dissection worksheets of an earthworm and a crayfish that I swiped from biology the year before.  I was full swing into horror movies and I thought they were cool.  Lets see, there’s also at least three Vampire the Masquerade promo posters up (including the two on the top right, and one of a vampire chick coming through a doorway off to the left), as well as a Werewolf the Apocalypse calendar (just to the right of the hanging lamp at the top left of the photo), and a Wraith the Ascension poster all the way to the left.  I was pretty big into the White Wolf role playing games even though I had a tough time finding people to play with (my friends played Werewolf, but Vampire was too weird for them.)  In that same vein (ha, punny) I put up a Red Cross Give Blood sign I nabbed from a local grocery store to go with the Vampire theme.  There’s an image from James O’Barr’s The Crow up at the top.  That was cut from one of the free swag bags at Dragon Con that year.  Speaking of Dragon Con, there’s a flyer for my first show up underneath the one Masquerade poster.   There’s also a chunk of one of Casper’s brothers from the Casper the Ghost movie that came out that year.  I’m pretty sure that came from a cardboard standee that I got from my local Home Video rental store.  On the ceiling you can see the corner of a Star Wars Trilogy poster, as well as a comic book page I drew for my Senior Independent Study class (I was so proud of that class as I was the only student having convinced the school to let me have it as an additional elective.)  Last, but not least there’s a fireman’s helmet, a gift from my uncle Dale who worked for a time as an EMT, and my high school diploma…

In this final photo (taken with a roll of black and white film left over from my photojournalism class) there’s a bit more of the wall to the right of the original photo.  In addition to some Atari ads I cut out of comics (Kool-Aid and Mario Bros.) there are a couple of my favorite Saturday Morning cartoon ads (this one featuring Pryor’s Place and this one with It’s Punky Brewster, Kidd Video and the Smurfs.) There’s also a Highlander the Final Dimension cardboard standee poster and some snapshots of friends from our graduation.

I never realized just who emo and faux-goth I must have seemed at the time.  Le sigh…

So there’s been some behind the scenes stuff going on with Branded, moving hosts, fixing broken junk, you know a bunch of technical wizardry that is way beyond me (I’m super lucky to know a rad lady named Jaime who is like single-handedly saving the site), but posting has been kind of quiet lately.  Hopefully I’ll be changing that soon.  During this time though I haven’t been just sitting on my butt and starring at the toys and crap on the walls of Branded HQ.  I’ve also been working on a small project for the Cult Film Club that any longtime reader of Branded will probably know is sort of like a dream come true.

So I really like stickers, like a lot, and in the back of my head I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have some of my own designs and drawings turned into decals.  Well, Tommy of Top Hat Sasquatch and Boxsome recently tipped me off to a company called Stickerapp.com that specializes in short-run glossy die-cut stickers for pretty affordable prices.  So I went a little nuts and had a bunch of stickers printed…

To say I’m excited about these is a bit of an understatement.  It’s a struggle to not apply these to every single bit of free wall space that I can find actually.  I’m not even usually all that crazy about my own drawings, but right now I’m sort of in love/lust with these stickers.  I can admit that.  But I have to control myself, because I have a plan for these.  Details to come soon for anyone who might be interested in picking some of these up and helping to support the Cult Film Club.  In the meantime, I’m going to try my best to NOT spread these out on the floor so that I can lay in them and make sticker angels…

Again, there are other things that I have that are more personal, my framed 1977 Halloween Horrors LP, or my sister’s collection of 80s era LPs, but these things by no means make up the bulk of my collection.  So, why am I bringing this up?  Well, I’ve been thinking a lot of what collections and collecting means to me over the last year and I’ve come to the conclusion that the desire to be a completist, or to focus on only vintage items is, for me personally, a fruitless compulsion.  That’s not to say that I’m giving up on collecting, or that I’m only buying a bunch of modern junk, it’s more of a realization that so much of the joy is not in possessing these coveted items, it’s simply the actual desire to own them.  It’s the hunt, not the trophy.  The trophy, if not the specific, actual item I possessed as a kid, is merely a representation, no more real than a memory of that same item held as a child, or a picture scavenged off of Google image search (for me at least.)  So many of the things that I desire to have back, those specific relics from my childhood, are way beyond my ability to ever secure them.  They are gone.  In a landfill most likely. That’s why the Atari system my friend re-gifted to me recently is so sacred to me.

Part of what drew me to this conclusion was another amazing acquisition I wrote about awhile back, the near complete set of vintage 1st series Garbage Pail Kids that I lucked into for free.  When sorting the cards that were given to me, and realizing that so many of them were 1st series my heart was a lump in my throat.  After I was done and I noticed that there were about 20 stickers missing, 2 of which were A&B sister cards (meaning there was one image missing from the set of John Pound paintings) I was sort of heart broken.  I’d been searching for an affordable set of 1st series GPKs all of my life and here was one given to me for free and it took me exactly 25 minutes to go from elated beyond belief to deflated and full of grief.  To my stupid credit, it only took me another half an hour to come to the realization that I was given two gifts that day.  One, the set of coveted sticker cards, and two, because it was an incomplete set, I was also re-gifted the hunt.  That desire to keep looking.  If that was totally stripped I fear that the urge to “collect” GPKs would diminish, and I’m not sure I’m ready to ever let go of that desire.

The other thing that really knocked home this idea of redefining what collecting means to me was when the absurdly cool Tommy Day of Top Hat Sasquatch decided to launch a new project recently called Boxsome.  In a nutshell, Boxsome is a site where you can purchase little packages of nostalgia in the form of 80s and 90s era trading card packs.  Each Nostalgia pack contains two wax packs of your choice from their inventory, and it comes shipped with a bunch of extra goodies including pogs, stickers, and little designer goodies that I believe will be rotating in and out.  At first blush one might think, what is the point?  Why would I want only two packs of Howard the Duck trading cards?  I can buy the whole set off of eBay for the same price!  But that’s just it, if I’m right, Boxsome isn’t about owning all the Howard the Duck cards (complete with a neatly folded wrapper and a set of the sticker card sub set.)  It’s about revisiting what it was like when you went to the store or gas station and you were only allowed to spend a dollar or two and you could only afford to pick up a few packs here and there.  How many kids ever completed their sets of Topps cards?  Sure, I know some of us did.  I mean I managed to complete the entire 700+ card run of the 1987 Topps Baseball card set.  But I also know that that experience is a lot rarer than we might think.  We might have a full run of a set or two, but most of us only had a handful of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, or Dark Crystal cards.  And you know what?  Maybe that’s all we really need.  Just a handful of vintage cards to remind us how neat these sets were, reminding us how it felt to collect them as a kid, and keeping the “hunt” alive by only buying a pack here and there.

Money buys a lot of things.  Hell, it can buy you all of the things.  But it doesn’t make one a collector, and the act of buying all there is to buy, that feeling of the purchase, will never feel as good as just the simple desire to own that stuff.  That desire, the hunt, that’s what’s worth preserving.  If you’ll excuse me I’m going to go stare at my collection of 19 Dark Crystal cards I’ve amassed.  And I’m going to dream about one day owning the rest…

For those interested, Tommy was kind enough to offer Branded readers a special offer of 20% off your purchase until April 16th! Just go to Boxsome and use coupon code “BRANDED”. Tell him I sent ya!