Sunday 26 June 2016

The Real Ghostbusters - Choose Your Own Adventure (Free With Trio Biscuits)


Trio biscuits were named as such due to three amazing types of food-stuff being smooshed together...chocolate, toffee and a biscuit-base! The topic of today's post was a similar melding together of three awesome things...and although it doesn't work out being quite as great as Trio biscuits, the fact it was free meant it was still pretty decent...


The trio of stuffs that make up this crazy other thing, are all things I loved towards the end of Primary school...the aforementioned biscuits, The Real Ghostbusters cartoon and choose-your-own adventure style role playing books! 


For some sort of promo-campaign, the free comic you can read below was the result of this particular smoosh-up, and as I've already said, whilst it's a bit rubbish and not very substantial, it was still a pretty cool thing to get as a little extra with your snacks!

Now, remember not to read this straight through or it won't make much sense...go to whatever page your choices direct you to interact and follow the story!













Although I've only got the above comic, there were another five to collect, as can be seen in the pic below. I've never ever seen any of these other ones....not even the covers, until I found this pic online whilst putting this post together....so if anybody knows if scans exist of these somewhere online, gimme a shout as I'd love to read them all!


I used to read the actual Real Ghostbusters comic too, but I've probably got enough to say about that, the toys and the cartoon for another blog post somewhere down the line, so yeah.....keep an eye out for that sometime this century! 

Oh, and I just discovered whilst looking at the Trio Wiki-page that they've apparently brought Trio biscuits back after 13 years! So have a look for those in the shops too, if you want to reintroduce your tastebuds to them or have never sampled them before!





Sunday 19 June 2016

Rock Lords Comic (Free With Toys)


Back in the eighties, the Transformers weren't the only transforming toys you could get your hands on...there was a whole heap of clones and competing brands trying to get you to part with your pocket money and buy them instead of saving up for Optimus Prime

Transformers biggest rivals were the Gobots , who actually came out as toys before Transformers properly existed (Transformers were created from merged Japanese toy-lines with different names)! They also had their own cartoon  (also before the Transformers cartoon) and later a couple of movies...


It was after the release of the movie Gobots - Battle of the Rock Lords, that a spin-off set of toys known as Rock Lords appeared! Despite never owning any Gobots, something about the fact they were rocks instead of cars made me want to pick up some Rock Lords, and so my brother and I got a few each!


The few that I got (and still have in my flat somewhere) were Boulder (leader of the good rocks), and Sticks 'n' Stones and Slimestone, two evil rocks! They were a lot simpler to transform than quite a lot of the Transformers, but still came with that worry that you'd snap a bit off if you tried to transform them wrongly! 








Along with each toy, you got a free mini-comic...and it is one of these comics that is the real purpose of this post, as I just found it hidden away in one of the many boxes from my cupboards I'm currently working my way through sorting out! Here in all it's splendor then, is said comic...








Rock Lords only made it to three series of toys before being cancelled, but I reckon they should bring them back, along with the Gobots,  in the next Transformers movie...just to shake things up a bit! 

Anyhoo, this wasn't the only comic-type thing I found in the box, so check back soon for some more random scan-type posts!



Saturday 18 June 2016

Recent-ish Pick Ups (Part 2)



Okay, finally got another weekend where I'm not doing stuff, so here's the next lot of recent-ish pick ups! Remember to click the pics to make them go big!

Been finding lots of cool old books in charity shops lately! First up we have The Golden Turkey Awards!


I picked this up purely because it reminded me of Michael Medved's Worst Of Hollywood series that aired back in 1983, where he'd come on a talk about whatever movie he was about to show and why it was one of the worst movies ever...I couldn't find it anywhere online for years, and then I noticed some guy on Youtube posting ads from the middle of one of the episodes, so I asked him if he had the intro..and lo and behold, he posted it to Youtube for me, so here it is to start a flood of memories for anyone else who used to watch it...


So yeah, before that came the book...so here's a few more pages from it! It's a great resource if you're looking for brilliantly-bad films to watch!





I've been trying to catch up with the X-files due to the new series appearing from nowhere, so I also picked up Seasons 1-3 on DVD....


...but I actually managed to get up to Season 6 by watching them online! Only another 3 seasons to go till I get to the new stuff, so I should be caught up by the time they make Season 11...

I found these books in a charity shop recently too. They're basically just short adaptations of different episodes, but as I've seen them all now I'll probably just stick these up on Ebay at some point...



Next up are some PS2 games I found, again in various charity shops....


Star Wars Super Bombad Racing is actually a fairly decent Kart-racer, Fur Fighters is a re-pick-up for me after I stupidly sold my original copy a while back...great wee plattformy shooter! Smarties Meltdown is quite possibly one of the crappiest and weirdly-licenced games I've ever seen, so that might get a look at some later point in the blog...and Eve Of Extinction is a pretty rubbishy action adventure that seems to have nicked the lightsabers from the cast of Bombad Racing while they were faffing about in their super-deformed spaceships... 

Another cool thing I picked up was The Butterfly Ball & The Grasshopper's Feast, which is a brilliantly illustrated book, loosely based on the 1802 poem by William Roscoe! The illustrator of the book is Alan Aldridge, who worked with the Beatles and Elton John, and did a lot of stuff for Penguin Books!







The poem and book also influenced a concept album and subsequent rock opera by Roger Glover which featured a huge cast of rock and other entertainment legends, including David Bowie, Twiggy & Vincent Price! The cover of the album was the same as the book, and a single sung by Ronnie James Dio was released from the album, and had a rather groovy video, which I've stuck below for you to watch!



I found another cool set of books in an Oxfam that I remember wanting to buy from the Book Club when I was in school, mainly because they were Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style things.....



I was actually a bit undecided on picking them up when I saw them in the shop...until I looked inside them and saw the picture below of a robot-clone Maggie Thatcher! That made them a must buy!!





Anyway, that should be enough for now I reckon....I do have loads more stuff to show you, so there'll be some more pick-up posts soon-ish (you know the drill..give me a month or two!)...but before that, there's some more scans I need to put up of stuff I've found in random boxes! ;-) 
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