Back when Crunchberries would've been Magenta #F653A6

The Rose Bowl Flea Market is world famous as one of the largest places to buy used stuff.  It's also only about 20 minutes from my home.  As a collector, it's been tempting to go a few times.  On my first visit, I was in the middle of my cereal fixation, and I found this nifty coloring book from 1968.  

Once again the internet has made a cool connection by showing me a fellow blogger has the original art for this cover on his site here.  Very nice!  Well, while mine may be a run of the mill ordinary coloring book, I will point out the interior features one of a kind originals by an unknown artist, and it is Not For Sale.

Cap'n Crunch was always a favorite because, well, probably because it was very sweet, and because the commecrcials were essentially cartoons.  It's also the only cereal  I can think of that makes the roof of my mouth bleed if you have it too many days in a row.  I actually always liked waiting until it was on the verge of being soggy (I know, this is blasphemy, and I think the cereal company would have denied it was even possible).

My favorite Cap'n Crunch item is this cel, below, which if I remember correctly was the second cel I ever bought.  It was in a small animation art gallery on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, and it's one of the few I paid real money for.  I seem to recall I bought it to celebrate when I either got paid for a big writing job, or got a tax refund check.   It hangs on the wall to the right of the Rocketeer poster, over my computer.

I liked it because I thought the Cap'n looked like he was nostalgically remembering his younger days at sea.  A friend suggested he's waiting on the set in between takes while shooting a commercial.

I Don't Know Why I Save You, But I do

Being a cereal collector, I once in awhile buy those cereals that appealed when I was a kid - Cap'n Crunch, Lucky Charms, Trix, and especially Cocoa Krispies.  A cereal collectors magazine back in the 90's (believe it or not there were at least TWO magazines for cereal collectors, Flake and Freakie Magnet) had an ongoing debate about what was the best tasting cereal: Cocoa Krispies in whole milk, or Cap'n Crunch Crunchberries in the same.  It's a tough call, but the Krispies don't tear up the roof of your mouth so it's easier to get through a whole box).

Anyways, in a box of Trix I got last year, I found this little pamphlet, sealed in plastic.  I set it aside and put it in a box for storage - without even really looking at it.  My point is, I had this urge to collect and save the item in the box without even taking in what it actually was, it's Just What I Do.

Turns out it's a red tinted viewer for reading something off the back of the box it was in, which of course I'd thrown away.  No real big deal.  But - I still have the viewer, and it will always be somewhere in a box full of cereal stuff.

Or, if I display them on a shelf, it's a nice flat thing to go in the back.  Cool.

Aw Shucks, Mom

Generally my animation collecting has been about finding one fairly excellent - or odd - cel to represent a character and never really looking at any more.  Tony the Tiger seems to be an exception to this rule.  Even though I already have a great one of Tony & Tony Jr. as I shared way back in March, I couldn't resist this shot of Tony with his Mom.  A little-old-lady-hair-in-a-bun-shawl-wearing character that was such an archetype in the 70's.

This is actually my third Tony cel - I already had a practically perfect one framed and hanging on my wall before I bought either of these two.  It's from a 90s commercial, a little later than I generally would collect, but he's got the classic look and you can't beat the pose.  He's right in the middle of "They're great!"  (Please note the box-colored matte.  Good attention to detail, eh?)

Probably the funniest thing about my Tony collecting is... I wasn't that crazy about Frosted Flakes even when I was a kid.  Sure I ate them when I was a little kid, but it's one of the first cereals that was just too sweet for me.  The super-sugary milk was not a fun way to end my complete breakfast.  But obviously, the character meant more to me than the product he was selling.

Aliens in America: A History of The Error Collectible

From Aliens in America episode "Mom's Coma" first aired 5/25/08:

INT-SPORTS COLLECTIBLE STORE-DAY

Justin (voice over): Every year, for my father's birthday, my Mother got him a piece of sports memorabilia from his wish list.  The whole thing had never really made a lot of sense to her.

Mom:What's the deal with this baseball card?

Clerk: It's worth a lot more because they misspelled "Yastrzemski."

Mom:  Well that's just stupid.

Ah yes, the error collectible: when something is rare because they made a mistake in production and some of them got out.  This is an odd sideline of collecting difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have the bug:  "So they screwed it up?  Wouldn't you rather have a good one in your collection?"  (Of course, any decent completist will have both).

One of the most famous error collectibles is the misprinted 1918 "Upside down Jenny" stamp with the airplane printed - you guessed it - upside down.  Only 100 of these were accidentally sold by the post office, all to a single collector at the time.  In 2005 a single one still in good shape sold for over half a million dollars at auction.

In 1987 Count Chocula released a box showing Bela Lugosi as 

Dracula, and some people protested that it looked like he was wearing a Star of David.  The box was pulled and corrected. Ironically, the story hit the news and hundreds (if not thousands) of speculators bought up the "Star of David" boxes before they disappeared, and saved them - but nobody saved the corrected version. It is now rarer than the error - I couldn't even find a scan of it to swipe online!

My own most recent "error" collectible purchase was this "Yoda and Mickey Mouse" Jedi pack of action figures sold near the Star Tours attraction in Disneyland.  Can you spot the Can you spot the mistake?  You can if you're a Star Wars geek...

Yoda's light saber is blue.  It's supposed to be green.

I bought this mainly because I heard about the mistake and 

happened to be down there, so I just couldn't resist.  It now resides in my storage unit.  I can't find a single error set selling on Ebay, so it's either very rare and valuable, or it's so rare that nobody knows about it - and it's kind of worth nothing.  I'll hope for very rare.

One time in my memory, though, an "error" collectible turned out to be nothing special through the simplest of reasons.  When I was a sophomore in college, a bunch of us got teaser posters for Star Trek IV that listed the release date as December 12, 1986.  Sometime later, though, we heard it was changed to November 26th.  Oh boy, we collectively thought, our posters are going to be worth a ton when they print the correction!  

The only problem?  They never corrected the poster, so all the copies of it have the same wrong date, and the "error" status is negated by being the only one available.  Oh well.  Like so many collector's who delight in the value of their items, I had no real intention of ever selling it anyways.

Aliens in America, by the way, is a great show on the CW.  Very funny - and surprisingly touching at times - about being a teen, high school, families, and being a Muslim exchange student in the midwest.  I don't believe it's been picked up for a second season, so try to see it now while it's running repeats, and hopefully the "complete series" will be available on DVD soon.

Double Collectible

If you collect cereal stuff, and you collect Star Wars stuff, you HAD to be pretty excited when Toucan Sam has a mail-in offer for an exclusive Han Solo action figure back in the early 90's.  I wasn't even collecting these Star Wars figures, and I think I sent away for two of them - and kept the cereal box (empty).

One of the Solo's is in storage somewhere, still sealed in the plain brown package he came in.  The Froot Loops box has actually been in a cupboard in my kitchen for over ten years, as if I didn't want to admit to myself I was actually saving it...

Well, it's finally old enough to be a little cool, I think.

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?

No, really. They're great.

So this represents what is likely my most active collection: animation cels. About ten years ago I started picking up cels from cereal commercials and old cartoon shows. At first, I found them pretty much only at the San Diego Comic Con. Later, of course, Ebay became the place to go.

This is my latest cel, just bought it online a week ago, just got it in the mail.  Usually, I only buy cels that have a certain importance for me - like from cartoons or ads I myself watched as a kid.  Black & White Tony here is from before my time, but he was just too cool to pass up.  And, a steal at only ten bucks with no other bidders.

One thing that may discourage investor/collectors from this

 purchase is that the cel is Tony's head only. and the rest of the image is a color copy of the rest of the setup - Tony's body, the Frosted Flakes (Frosties!) cereal box, and Tony Jr. were probably all separate cels, and the table a painted background.  But considering all that would cost several hundred dollars (or possibly more) for a piece that essentially looks the same once framed - I'm ok with my 10 dollars purchase.  (Note that in person, the color of Tony's head and body match very closely, unlike in the scan here).

One rule I have about the animation I buy is that it pretty much all has to go up on the wall.  The kitchen - dining room - office end of my apartment is pretty much filled with cels like this, all nicely framed.  This means that I either have to end my collection in only one or two more purchases, or move to a bigger place.  Hmm.