I don't like yer mug.

Mugs strike me, personally, as generally uninteresting - probably because I rarely drink hot liquids, and usually intake a larger quantity than your typical mug can hold. Still, a few mugs made it into my collection and stay there permanently. From left to right:

Bluth Company: Fox made this available on their web site early in the third season of Arrested Development, just as Michael Bluth began sipping from one at his desk on the show. Remember an easy way to build on your prop budget is to develop merchandise that works on screen as part of the show. Even so, I don't think there're too many of these around.

Oceanic Airlines: This belongs to the airline from Lost, and like the Bluth mug above, appealed to me as a prop replica. If it's something a character on the show would hold, I usually want one.

Drew Carey: This, on the other hand, appears to be a cast and crew gift, meaning there are very few around. Found it in a Salvation Army store in Pasadena.

MST3K: I inherited 2 Mystery Science mugs, one with Mike and one with Joel. Interesting, and just meaningful enough to hang around.

Oh - and Happy New Year! Hoping 2011 is a considerable improvement over 2010; it's already looking like an improvement.

'Big Bang' creators given science honors

'Big Bang' creators given science honors

French Fries Parmesan, please?

I have been very neglectful of this blog of late, but for good reason. I recently started a new job after 17 years in the same place. The curious thing is that, in my old position, I enjoyed writing at home for a change of pace. Now, I write in the daytime - incredibly satisfying, but it does burn up that creative urge. 'Nuff said.

In any case, I wanted to take a moment to share these images from my visit to Syracuse earlier this year. My mother and I went out to dinner to a small Italian restaurant in Liverpool (north of Syracuse) that she had long liked. While eating, I happened to notice something odd about the stained glass windows in the front of the restaurant. Take a look.

That's right - Fry guys from the old McDonaldland characters of the 1970's. At some point, plastic windows from a McDonalds were salvaged and placed in this restaurant. they make a nice enough accent, as long as you don't take close notice of the bug-eyed little sneaker wearing freaks jumping around in them.

That's all. More of a placeholder and a hello than anything real to say. I hope to be back soon.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: No Spoilers, and a lesson in swag

About a week ago, I had the opportunity to see the new movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. This is a good time to state my Rule #1 for this blog: no spoilers, ever. I have no interest in seeing something early to run home and write out my synopsis of the movie or show. If I like it, I like the way they told the story, and I don't think you're going to appreciate it better by reading my truncated summary. The most you'll get from me is "it's good. I think you'd like it if..." In this case, gamers, comic book fans, and music fans are all likely to enjoy this film. From the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. 'Nuff said.

The funny thing is, only after leaving the theater and seeing the poster in the lobby did I realize I had picked up a ton of swag for the film at Comic Con. in fact, my fiancee and I stood in a line across from the convention center to each get a bag of stuff:
See? Stuff. They were giving it away right at the "stuff" sign. I didn't make it upstairs, so I don't know what kind of party / immersive environment they had going on up there, but it looks like more t-shirts were involved. Here's the free stuff they gave us:

T-shirts, a bag, post cards, free online stuff - all sorts of things. notice the bag says "Scott Pilgrim vs. Comic Con." These are the kinds of things a completist collector of Scott Pilgrim will be wanting to track down.

In fact, if you were really serious about wanting to collect all Scott Pilgrim stuff, you'd have to track down the Comic Con badge from somebody who stood on that line, because they stamped your ID with an oh-so-neat Scott Pilgrim rubber stamp to make sure you didn't come back in line the next day and get another bag of stuff.

If it sounds ungrateful of me to not know I already had all this stuff from Scott Pilgrim (or at least, maybe, that their promotion was unsuccessful in my case) it may help to consider all the free stuff that is given out at the San Diego Comic Con. To help, I laid it out on the living room floor and photographed it:
Free comic books, cards, magazines, buttons, t-shirts, patches, Dexter cheek-scar tattoos, trading cards, Mad Men paper dolls, Archie wedding invitations (both Betty and Veronica), etc. Somehow, I managed to be given four copies of a comic called "radical" over the week without realizing it. Granted, much of these are advertising flyers and catalogs, but it shows how the stuff adds up.

(Collectors note: even though I am not particularly interested in collecting the "Showtime" buttons for Dexter, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Californication, it does bug me that I got 3 Weeds buttons and no Nurse Jackie. Just a little bit of OCD manifesting itself...)

A lot of stuff, right? But that doesn't include all the bags I was given there, shown below (with a t-shirt from the "Green Hornet" car garage that I forgot to include above):

Some people list their Comic Con swag on Ebay and try to sell it all for 50, 100, even 200 dollars to recoup their expenses for attending - and I guess people do pay it. Let's face it, if you collect Mythbusters, there isn't all that much different stuff out there to collect, so you'll be wanting their oversized Comic Con bag.

Oh - and to be fair, the above didn't include the free stuff for The Big Bang Theory that I already pulled out into that collection:

No, I don't need four copies of the TV Guide - I'll probably end up giving or trading some to other collectors. But looking at all of this stuff, it occurs to me someone could have a very interesting collection of stuff if all they ever did was go to Comic Con every year and save all the free stuff they got. That would be an interesting cross-section of pop culture.

Hmm. I wonder where those free pogs I got there back in '93 are now...

Post# 150: Our "Secret" Identity Revealed

For our first 149 posts, fancollectorgeek has been curiously anonymous - "curiously" because the only people who likely noticed it was anonymous all knew who was writing it, and no one else likely cared. It has been easy enough to figure out who's writing, either from my Dad's obituary recently linked, or from the many links from the excellent (and personally inspirational) blog of Jim Fanning, Tulgey Wood that identify me by name.

The reason for this (however transparent) anonymity has currently been suspended, making this an excellent time to share the collectible, below, which bears my name:

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the moon, in 1971. It also happens that his first and last name are the same as my first and middle - a coincidence, I'm named after my father's uncle, Edgar Mitchell Davis. Still, that coincidence was enough to make me very interested in the space program when I was a kid. I was only four years old when Mitchell walked on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission, but I vividly remember watching it on TV while visiting my grandmother's house in Akron, NY that summer. I had never heard of anyone that had any name in common with myself (well, unless I had heard of Edgar Allen Poe by that age), so I was very interested in his exploits.

When I heard that you could order an autographed photo from Mitchell's website, I decided I wanted to own one myself. Like actors like William Shatner and June Lockhart, many astronauts charge a premium for signed items. The high demand from fans who want to be sure they're getting the real thing makes it a very lucrative sideline for them. It's my understanding that for years Lockhart didn't do autographs at all until finally, in the early 90's, she acquiesced to sign at a Lost In Space convention in Los Angeles for the then unheard of price of fifty dollars a pop. Fans lined up by the hundreds keeping her busy the whole time she was there.

Now, if she was signing at the same rate that Mickey Rooney was (every 12 seconds, five signatures a minute) when he put his scribble on a Fox and the Hound photo for me, she cleared about fifteen thousand dollars an hour that day - slightly less if she took a break to stretch her wrist or get a drink of water.

Nice work if you can get it!

(Just for the record, Mickey Rooney charged 20 dollars a signature, and for charity. not bad).

Bazinga-fest 2010

San Diego Comic Con 2010 is officially here, with preview night done and gone. Regular readers know I always enjoy the con, and right now I'm glad to be able to update you on The Big Bang Theory's presence at the show. Judging by the t-shirt vendors, licensees are putting a lot of stock in the show, expecting Sheldon's face to move much merchandise. This is amazing - these t-shirt dealers are a regular feature of the SDCC, and I don't ever remember a single theme dominating so much of their stock all at once - not Star Wars (well, to be fair I wasn't going back in the late 70's), not Harry Potter, nothing. While "Bazinga" far outnumbers the rest, "Sheldon Cooper Supervillain," "Knock Knock Knock Penny," and the friendship algorithm are well represented too. (I have to confess to being a t-shirt snob. I prefer, if I can, to wear a shirt almost nobody else is likely to be wearing. I was given an "Oh My God, they Killed Kenny!" South Park shirt ten years ago, and I'm saving it to wear at least eleven years after the show is off the air.
I wasn't sure if I'd get the new BBT bag at the con, and was prepared to go to Ebay for it, when good friend (and regular reader of fancollectorgeek) Jason Ryan showed up - he had traded his Batman bag for the BBT one just as a favor for me. (Note: good advice to collectors is to know good people. It makes it much easier). The bag is shown here next to the Khan Mego-sized doll I picked up today for size reference. (It's well known that Mego-sized dolls are the standard unit of measurement for oversized bags). If it goes like the past two years, this will be the artwork on the season 3 DVD set (first season to also be available in blue ray!). Does anyone out there know if they're parodying a specific film poster or album cover or something here? Penny vaguely re minds me of Barbarella, but I can't place it...
Jason also nabbed for me these sharpies on lanyards that were given out at the CBS booth to promote the show's move to Thursday night. They made sharpies because, um...I guess smart people like to write with things tied around their neck?
Just the back of the CBS booth. Odd expressions on all the actors. There's supposed to be a signing here tomorrow - we'll see if I get in, or if it turns into another huge siege like last year. Yikes. I'll keep you posted, probably after the show.

Take care!

Cheers! (Pretty clever, huh?)

I have been a huge fan of the show Cheers since I first found my parents watching it late one night during its first season - we're talking late 1982 here. (Dates me a bit, huh?) To be honest, I don't really remember if I liked it right away, but I did get into it pretty quick. Back in those days, if you missed an episode, you just might never see it again, and I soon began taping it on Beta tapes, and trading with others who had taped episodes I missed. (It's funny: tapes were expensive then - as much as 10 dollars apiece - so pretty much everybody paused during the commercial breaks to save tape. It was a valued skill to be able to anticipate when the show was coming back on and start up without missing the first seconds of act 2 and so on. Now, in the days of DVD series releases, it's the commercials that everyone wishes they had recorded).

Generally for a sitcom, it's rare for there to be much to collect. The shorter the show runs the rarer (explaining why I treasure everything I've ever found for the 7 episode show Quark. Cheers lasted 11 seasons, so eventually it was not hard to find games, t-shirts, and of course beer glasses emblazoned with the series logo. Of more interest to me is ephemera (which I define as "stuff nobody meant to be saved for long) like the unused show ticket, above. When I first moved to Los Angeles I lived one block from Paramount Studios, and before I had a job I'd wake up early to stand online trying to get into that night's show. I went three or four times before I made it in (Cheers Has Chill, aired March 14 1991 - Rebecca wants to turn the pool room into a tea room). I saved the tickets from the times I didn't get in, I also got to see the Arsenio Hall show once when I was too late for Cheers tickets, with musical guest Iggy Pop.
Back to collecting: also collectible are items from the Bull and Finch pub in Boston, which served as Cheers in the exterior shots of the bar during the credits. I got to visit during my tour of duty as a knee brace salesman soon after I came to LA, a job that let me travel most of the country. This button was a little freebie giveaway, and I know I have a matchbook or two from the pub somewhere. (Sadly, I didn't have a beer when I was there - I had a hamburger. )

This catalog that I picked up there is full of merchandise, and could be considered a collectible now itself. I have always naturally saved stuff like this, and you have to wonder, almost 20 years later, how many of these exist. Either a handful of them or spread out with tourists around the globe like myself, or someone in Boston has hundreds of them in mint condition in boxes in their basement or store room. Either way, they're only a thing of the past, as merchandise is now available online from the pub's website.
Of special interest to anyone who liked my now-classic post on the dilemma of saving and collecting food is this page offering Cheers logo chocolate bars. I wonder if any of these still exist? (And does hanging out in Cheers t-shirts really make you that happy?)

Up next: Penny's last names (Big Bang Theory) and just around the corner, San Diego Comic Con 2010!