Peel Here! #1

Okay, so for the next year or so I’ve decided that I’m going to attempt to do a weekly entry on the blog that will focus on one aspect of the 80s that I was pretty crazy about as a kid, stickers.

Like most kids I was addicted to stickers, and not just your straightforward stuff like the 6 billion different sheets you could buy at your local Hallmark store, but all stickers in every permutation imaginable. I collected everything from puffy stickers to the produce labels on bananas. Hell there was a short time when I contemplated collecting the S&H Green Stamps my mom would get for shopping at Publix. The point is, if it was made of paper, had any type of picture on it, and was sticky on the back, I loved it and kept it in an old picture album. Most kids did and I have to believe still do.

So I thought I’d share a bunch of stickers that I remember from the 80s in this new weekly feature I’m lamely calling Peel Here!

For the first entry of Peel Here I thought I’d share the first stickers that I remember buying with my own money. When I was a kid money would burn a whole in my pocket quicker that a pyromaniac wearing shorts made out of matches (and honestly it hasn’t changed much in the ensuing years.) The most I was ever able to accumulate at one time was $15.70, and that was only because Christmas was coming up and I had gifts to buy and I wanted to fly solo, no help from the parental units. So if I ever had a dollar or two it was immediately spent on what ever was handy at whatever store I happened to be at with my mom.

Well one happy day in 1984 while perusing the magazine section at my local Publix supermarket I came across a book that begged me to spend my eight hard earned quarters on it. It was the Ghostbusters movie story book, which was fast becoming one of my favorite movies, and best of all the cover exclaimed that there were 12 Collector Stickers Inside. A book and stickers?!? Hell I would have paid 2 bucks just for the stickers.

I handed over the warm quarters wet with palm sweat to my mom and put the book carefully in the baby seat part of the cart set aside for the fragile things alongside the bread and eggs. I couldn’t wait to get home and find twelve different places to stick my new found Ghostbusters stickers.

You know, even as a kid I kind of felt that Ernie Hudson kind of got the shit end of the stick as far as licensing and movie posters were concerned. I mean did we really need two of every SNL/SCTV alumni? Heck, I think I would have really dug a Rick Moranis sticker, or more importantly a Terror Dog or two. Hell even a “Back off man! I’m a scientist” sticker would have been pretty neat.

Little did I know that I was supposed to place the stickers in the actual book, like very uncreative-ly in the back of the book. There was a special page just for this. I think mine ended up on the side of my dresser.

The book itself is only all right. It’s about twenty pages long, with alternating text and a still from the film. Most of the pictures are blurry or super grainy, but I was very much in love with a drawing that was on the copyright page.

I kind of wish now that the stickers were done in this style, taken from the drawing like the real stickers were taken from the book cover. Oh well.

**Holy Crap, an update! Well when I was complaining about the style and image choice of the stickers above something just didn’t sit right with me. There was some memory like a popcorn kernel wedged inbetween my back molars that I just couldn’t pry out with my fingernails. Something about these stickers seemed off and I couldn’t put my finger on it until I got home tonight and scoured Ebay. The sticker sheet above wasn’t the only style that was available and it wasn’t the one I had as a kid. It was the “Back off man…” quote that I wrote that jarred the memory loose. My sticker sheet did have a “Back off Man!” sticker. In fact I remember not liking my sticker sheet because it was mostly quotes and not pictures, so even though I didn’t get the one I had as a kid off Ebay, I’m glad I got the one that I would have preferred had I realized there was a choice. Here is the sticker sheet I had as a kid: