To Protect and Serve, in 30 minutes or less

I don't remember how I first got into Dick Tracy so much. I always liked comic strips, and it may have been when I got the book "The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy" for Christmas, or it may have been earlier. The ongoing stories were compelling: I once saw Chester Gould, the creator, say in a filmed interview that he didn't write with any idea how the story would end: he believed if he knew how it would end, the reader could figure it out too. So Tracy and the grotesque criminals he pursued were often getting cornered in locked rooms or at the bottom of pits deep in the woods with no hope of escape only to suddenly discover a doorway that had just been wallpapered over, or the pit is (surprisingly) just above the new subway line being built. Very compelling stuff! I read Tracy in the daily papers, and collected whatever I could find, including many great Big Little Books my parents and I found at flea markets.

Sometime back in, I'd guess, the late 1970's, Domino's Pizza was new to Syracuse NY.  As a lifelong pizza addict I can recall
the larger than usual pizza they served up - very thin, but totally covered with pepperoni and very good.  We ordered them once in awhile but they became the pizza of choice for me when a flyer of coupons left on our door offered a Dick Tracy glass free with purchase.

I was enough of a Dick Tracy fan that I went around to all the neighbors houses - even people we didn't really know - and introduced myself as a Dick Tracy collector and asked for their Domino's coupons - all so we could get more glasses.  

(This is NOT something I recommend you allow children to do in this Brave New World of the 21st century.  Of course, now it would be much easier to buy a bunch of them on Ebay rather than introduce yourself to your neighbors).

It's funny, I started off this post just to share the glass, which I have ona shelf in the living room (below the Carrols stuff) - but now it's more interesting to me that I went around the neighborhood and bothered people, ringing their bells, asserting that it was of course important (let alone reasonable) that I interrupt their day because I was a Dick Tracy Collector, and they had the coupon I needed for my collection.  I must have those glasses!

Everybody gave me the coupons.  Most gave me the whole flyer, a few tore out just the glass coupon.  Now, I wish I had one of those flyers still; I'm sure we didn't use them all.  We ended up with about 9 glasses, I think, a couple of which I still have, some which we sold at a garage sale.  It doesn't look like any are left on the "fast food glasses" shelf in my parents' basement.

Hmm...next time I go home I should bring back the Superman, I think that was a giveaway at Arby's.  And the Casper, you don't see those so often...

To Eat or Preserve: The CollectorGeek's Dilemma

David wrote in to ask if the two "Dick Tracy" candy boxes in the last photo posted were empty or full. This is actually a problem that confronts collectors of things like cereal, fast food packaging, and other essentially perishable bits of Americana: Do you save the food?

While I've read of cereal collectors delighted to find 40 year old unopened boxes of Sugar Frosted Flakes, I also recall an account of one such collector waking up in a cold sweat from a dream of a dealer opening such a box and eating a bowl of the decomposing powder inside.   I have saved a few cereal boxes, but they're all empty.  As you've seen before, I save bottled liquids, but so far no real foodstuff.  Well, I take that back: at one time I had four boxes of PEZ flavored candy corn purchased at the 99 cent store for it's sheer bizarreness.  It stayed in a box in storage until the sticky sweet coating became rock hard solid and the boxes were as rigid as bricks.  At that point I threw them out.  

I remember getting a chocolate "Lois and Clark" trading card at the San Diego Comic Con - Laser etched with the show's title - and very wisely deciding it was better to eat the chocolate on the drive back to Los Angeles than to try and save it the freezer for years to come.  Better than what I did with the "Haunted Mansion" white chocolate card given out at an event for the movie that I attended.  (I am a big Haunted Mansion collector, this will be the subject of many future posts I'm sure!).  The card actually sat on a shelf in my bedroom directly below the Mystery Machine and, after a few hot summers, had a distinctly droopy appearance.  I decided then my collection would be complete with a mere phone camera picture of the card, and discarded the chocolate.  (No, I didn't eat it.  Blecch).

That's probably what inspired me to take a picture of the Cap'n Crunch milkshake currently offered at Carl's Jr.  Cap'n Crunch is one of the cereals I collect stuff from, but you sure can't save a milkshake.  This photo of the one I tried, though, does a pretty good job of suggesting

 the odd "slurp slurp crunch" experience of drinking one.  I also took a photo of the sign, which is good enough for me.  Even if I asked for and got one of these signs, it would just end up deep in storage.

Finally, in answer to your questions David, there are actually three Dick Tracy candy boxes.  (The backwards one here has Flattop on the front).  I ate two boxes of the nearly-pure-sugar-tasted-more-like-coloring-than-artificial-flavor candy, and as a dutiful fancollectorgeek, left one - "The Brow" -  in mint full of candy condition.

It's about 18 years old now, so...what say we give it a taste in another 22 years?