The League of Extraordinary Bloggers has been on hiatus for a while as Brian over at Cool & Collected has been “extraordinarily” busy with his C&C print magazine project, but it’s finally back this week with a new topic. To kick things off again Brian asks what our current obsessions are, and this just happens to coincide with a slight shift in my personal 80s collecting habits of late. Outside of a few sets of Garbage Pail Kids, I really didn’t start buying up stuff from my in and around childhood until I started work on this site. Then for the first 7 years or so of running Branded I focused most of my efforts on acquiring all sorts of ephemera, be it stickers, old magazines, or trading card wax pack wrappers that spanned all sorts of pop culture subjects from cartoons to food. I love talking about the 80s, specifically the marketing and “branding”, and I wanted to touch on all sorts of stuff from Sizzlean to amazing Return of the Jedi Jungle Gyms. Needless to say, digging up all of this stuff wasn’t cheap, so finding content to talk about on the site sort of dominated my collecting. The majority of the stuff I was hoarding storing in my flat-file, while awesome, didn’t necessarily always reflect the stuff I personally had as a kid.
Over the last year though I’ve decided to concentrate on rebuilding a small collection of things that I actually had as a kid. Whether it’s the reproduction Masters of the Universe figures Mattel put out just after the millennium…
…or picking up the occasional mint on card vintage toy like the super cool Transformers Afterburner I recently found.
I think this all started just over a year ago when I managed to get a hold of my original childhood Atari 2600 system. Reconnecting with that faux wood-paneled beauty really got me thinking about where I really wanted to spend my money when it came to my collecting habits.
Lately this turn towards reacquiring treasures from when I was a kid has morphed into some more obscure purchases. Instead of trying to get all the actual toys I had I’ve been cherry-picking specific pieces I owned from various toy lines, stuff that when put out on a shelf illustrates my childhood experience. This has led to some more obscure toy hunting leading up to snagging stuff like a Demon from Blackstarr, Warduke from the D&D line, and Tonto from the Gabriel Legend of the Lone Ranger line…
I’ve also started following this urge to round out my collection with more offbeat stuff by picking up some weirder childhood reading material. For instance, I was just recently reminded by my mom during one of our weekly phone calls about a cookbook she gave me when I was eight, the Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys and Girls (a version published in 1985 by Golden.) I immediately flashed upon the iconic cover and felt an insane desire to pick it up and hold it again. So I logged on to eBay immediately after the call an proceeded to track down and buy a copy…
I must have stared at those disturbing cheeseburger people a million times as a kid. Even though this isn’t my original copy (which is probably no longer in existence or mostly disintegrated in a landfill in Florida somewhere), mine was as beat-up and well read as this copy I now have on my shelf. Clocking in at just under 100 pages, this cookbook was my go-to tome when learning the basics of recipe-reading and trying my hand at some culinary concoctions that were always just this side of edible. Though I learned a lot from watching my mom in the kitchen, I always took pride in exploring on my own and trying to make lunches or breakfasts on the weekends, and a lot of that inspiration came form the dishes in this book. Speaking of, the recipes range from the ridiculous yet fun arrangement of canned fruit on a lettuce leaf like this Friendly Dog Salad below…
…to the surprisingly difficult to master (as a kid) Eggs in Bologna Cups. Mine never tasted right. In fact they were pretty noxious if I remember (probably due to over-use of the paprika which I practically caked on top of each cup…)
The book is filled with glorious 70s/80s era design, from the style and color of the cookware depicted in the recipes to the bodacious font choices. I actually kind of love it to death and am curious about seeking out some other more standard 80s era cookbooks for my kitchen…
Reading back through it I was surprised at the level of complexity in some of the recipes (like a giant baked ham loaf that required grinding up smoked ham steaks), and some of it actually looks like stuff I’d love to try today as a way more accomplished home cook. In fact I’m toying with the idea of trying to replicate all 120 or so dishes in the book at some point. I mean a lot of this stuff is pretty simple, but I remember it being sort of like comfort food. It might be easy to turn one’s nose up at it as an adult, but stuff like this Polka Dot Pizza (aka Hot Dog Pizza) looks like the perfect comfort food for a lazy Saturday afternoon…
If you enjoyed reading about my currently 80s collecting obsession, why not take a moment to check out some of the other League participants to see what they’re focusing on like…
Brian at Cool & Collected who is currently binge watching Band of Brothers and True Detective…
Lee & Linz at Pop Rewind who are obsession over McDonald’s Orange Drink…
Derek at Really Rather Random Guy who is having a an existential obsession crisis…
Victoria at Vikki Verka who is glad she found the sci-fi series Charlie Jade…
Tim at Flashlights Are Something to Eat is listening to the Scorchers, watching Breaking Bad, and buying some Atari games!
