Images of Comic Con '09

Dr. Henry Jones Jr. meets Dr. Henry Jones Jr.

There's a cute li'l snake in the plane, Jock!

Indiana Jones has always been big to me.  I don't remember exactly when I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I was fifteen when it came out, and I know I saw it in the theaters in Syracuse (probably Shoppingtown or Fayetteville Mall - Fayetteville sounds right)  many, many times.  In a high school art class when we had to draw a self portrait, I drew myself as Jones, from the famous close up poster by Amsel, but with a garden hose wrapped around my shoulder instead of a whip.  You know, to be funny.

(With an unsettling flood of repressed memories resurfacing, I suddenly recall that I naturally chose to draw myself as Jones because I had taken up the habit of wearing an old fedora in high school to emulate him!  Oh, the 1980s.  I would have been the perfect background extra in a John Hughes high school picture.  I also had sideburns down to my shoulders Because I Could Grow Them).

I also don't know how I started collecting Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff  but one day when boxing things up to move I noticed I had acquired quite a lot of it without even realizing I was building a collection.  I guess I just kept seeing things and thinking they were neat and buying them.  That sounds silly like that, but to think that I was collecting so many different things I wasn't aware of one of the collections... it's amazing to me.

At Disneyland this weekend I spotted these new cute li'l Indiana Jones figures and had to have them.  Indy, Marion, and Belloq with the most adorable li'l deadly cobra you ever saw.  (You can't call stuff like this little.  It's li'l).  These follow a similar line of Star Wars figures that I also bought quite a lot of, until they started doing li'l bounty hunters and li'l ewoks and li'l background muppets you don't remember even seeing, just like the original Kenner line.   After the main characters and a few vehicles, my interest petered out.  They're packed away in storage now.

Also in storage, though, are some of the truly magnificent original Kenner Indiana Jones playsets, like the Well of Souls here.  The Indiana Jones action figures back then were clearly modeled on the Star Wars line, but somehow people weren't as interested in buying Nazi truck playsets as they had been X-Wings.  There was something a little odd about the plastic depictions of archeological digs that led to the line not selling so well - at least, I had the opportunity to pick up several of the sets on severe markdown at Lionel's Kiddie City (a similar

 store to Toys R Us).  Severe markdown was a blessing to me as a teenaged collector, because I didn't have all that much money.  I'll show more of these playsets at a later time.

One thing Kenner never came up with back then, though, was the Cutest Li'l Spirit of God's Wrath Action Figure the new line has. Aww. 

Don't look, Li'l Marion!