Sometimes, when you have been writing up a storm, you have to linger for a moment and rest in the storm’s eye. That’s what today’s post is. It includes a goofy metaphor that is basically all wet. It has a picture of my hoarding disorder collection of Monster High dolls… and some of my countless videos… I’m a movie collector and hoarder too. And there is not a lot of research or hard new thinking in this post. It is basically a random warble to fill a daily post, since I have posted every day now for a year and nine months. At 60 and in poor health, I probably don’t have a lot of time left to get the words out. But I have a lot of words still inside me. You may have to put up with a few days of babbling here and there. But I promise, the babbling will be quirky and excessively goofy, so it won’t be totally boring. Running in place doesn’t get you anywhere, but it is still good exercise.
One of the biggest problems with being an action figure aficionado with raging hoarding disorder is the fact that every new dolly has it’s own personality… and sometimes its own evil agenda. Once you own too many of these things, especially the evil ones, it is no longer possible to properly pay attention to what they are up to.
The last installment of Action Figure Comics had the hero, Captain Action (specifically Captain Carl Action) thwarting the evil Doctor Evil by taking away his evil removable brain. (I know I use the word evil far too often in describing the evil Doctor Evil, but he is also repetitively redundant.) I had thought this Achilles’ heel of Dr. Evil’s… er, rather, this Achilles’ brain of the evil Doctor Evil was just too convenient a solution to the problem presented by this irrepressible evil bad guy. But as a rule I find ignorance is bliss. I know now that I was wrong. That was a terrible rule to follow. As a former teacher you are supposed to know that ignorance is not bliss… it is evil. After 31 years of fighting the War Against Ignorance in my classroom, you would think I would remember this. I should’ve been watching Emperor Ming of Mongo more closely… or should that be closlier? Battle scars from the War have left me unsure.
One has to recall that Evil Emperor Ming is really just another incarnation of the evil Doctor Evil under his mask… although not one with a removable brain. Notice that his minion, the evil Doctor Mindbender is no less evil when it comes to redundant use of the word “evil”… and he even commits the further sin of repetitively saying “no-good goody-goody”. “Ach! Ja! Evil use of bad grammar makes my battle scars hurt more!” cries the former teacher driven to write this hopeless drivel.
What’s this? He means to destroy the new bargain bin wrestler doll… I mean, action figure that I just bought? I had meant to keep that as a mint in box collector’s item until the lucha wrestling fans of Sin Cara are as old as I am now. Then I will find one of them with hoarding disorder and sell it for possibly eight dollars. I will have made a whole dollar by the time I’m 109!
Yes, I should’ve been watching that dang evil Emperor Ming more closely! Now he has ruined my mint-in-box action figure by taking it out of the box. What bad thing will he do next? Stay tuned to this goofy old blog. You never know, I may actually continue this story if I can keep better track of what these goofy little dolls are doing.
This is the book I have really read, though I intend to acquire the rest.
Sylvia Waugh is a British writer of children’s books who has a lot in common with me. She spent her career as a teacher of grammar. In her late fifties she became a published author. Her book series of the Mennyma is a charming fantasy adventure about dolls so loved by their owner, they actually come to life… and survive her…. and then have to make their way in a world that would be horrified by them and might easily seek to destroy them.
Hopefully none of my dolls come to life after I croak. After years of collecting, they nearly outnumber humanity.
But rest assured, the dolls in this sweet-natured children’s book series would never prove evil. The books are more fantasy-comedy than horror story. In fact, they are impossibly far away from horror.
The original book.
Joshua Mennym is the head of a family of life-size rag dolls. He pretends to be a middle-aged man. He generally keeps his distance from the general public, because, up close, his basic rag-doll-ness would stand revealed. Rag dolls are not supposed to walk and talk, let alone have families and live in a home of their own. His wife is Vinetta Mennym, also a rag doll. Together they are parents to the ten-year old twins, Poopie, the boy, and Wimpey, the girl.
The teenage twins are Pilbeam and Soobie. Pilbeam is the girl and constant companion of the elder teenage sister, Appleby. Soobie is the boy and blue. Why their former owner, Kate Penshaw, made him with a blue head and blue feet and blue hands is a mystery both to the Mennyyms and to me. It causes him to be the one most likely to cause exposure of the family secret because even at a distance he does not look like a “real people” person.
Baby Googles is the smallest of the family, constantly cared for by the nanny, Miss Quigley, who is also considered a Mennym because she is also a doll.
Grandpa Magnus Mennym lives in the attic with Grandma and takes care of the household bills. He writes scholarly works on the English Civil War and publishes them for a modest income which comes through the mail. Granny Tulip is also relied upon for her wisdom and experience whenever a problem with keeping the family secret comes up.
Each book in the series contains a different adventure revolving around the realistic comedy generated by impossible people trying so hard to be real. I absolutely love the adventures, even the ones I haven’t read yet. And I know that the only way you could possibly love these books too is if you share my loony love of the fantastically impossible that turns out to be real. After reading these books, I fully intend to keep a very close eye on my own doll collection.
This is just an extra post to make up for one little oopsie I made. You couldn’t really read the speech balloons in the previous post because I made them too small for the post size. So I took a tiny bit of dynamite and blew them up. Besides, I need to test my computer security system as it keeps saying someone is stealing my WordPress posts.
The danger presented by Star Wars collectibles lies in the fact that there are so @#$%! many of them. If you try to collect one of everything, you will will be in the poor house for seven generations. (Yes, I intend to leave my collection to my children to do with as they please. I don’t expect the curse to go along with it. My kids are smarter than me.)
But this is only the beginning of the Star Wars crap that I have to share when blogging about collectibles. These are the Luke, Han, and Leia dolls that I have collected over time My Kenner Luke and Leia are not pictured here. Being the oldest 12-inch dolls in my collection, from 1978, they don’t look quite as good as the rest despite my repairs and rehabilitations. So I actually have five Lukes, two Hans, and four Leias. I threw in R2D2 because he and slave girl Leia were a set.
It is my intention to show you this soul-crushing collection bit by bit because it can be daunting otherwise. Stay tuned for further episodes… or be on the look out if you really desire to avoid them. I do realize that old men who play with dolls are a little off and likely have toxic cooties.
Buckminster Fuller is an intellectual hero of mine. As he said in the video, if you bothered to watch it, “I was told I had to get a job and make money, but would you rather be making money, or making sense?” Bucky was always a little bit to the left of center, and basically in the farthest corner of the outfield. That’s why we depend so much on him in times like these when the ball is being hit to the warning track. (I know the world doesn’t really work on baseball metaphors any more, but my life has always been about metaphors from 1964 with the St. Louis Cardinals playing and beating the New York Yankees. Mantle was on their side, but Maris was playing for us.) You have to live in the world that fits into your own mental map of reality. And if you’ve been whacked on the side of the head one too many times… it changes the way you think. You begin to think differently.
If you don’t know who Bucky is, as you probably don’t because he revolutionized the world in the 60’s and died in the 1980’s, Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. He is credited with the invention of the Geodesic Dome. But he was so much more than that. He wanted to build things that made better sense, in a practical sort of way, than the way we actually do them. He built geodesic homes because he felt a home should maximize space and use of materials and minimize costs and amounts of materials as well as environmental impacts. He is the one who popularized the notion of “Spaceship Earth”. He wrote and published more than thirty books, and gave us a variety of truly wise insights. He promoted the concept of synergy. He said, “Don’t fight forces, use them.” He also pointed out, “Ninety per cent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” He was a man full of quotes useful for internet memes.
So, lets consider an example from the mixed up mind of Mickey;
Here are three dolls from the Planet of the Apes part of my doll collection. (Two different movies are represented here, the 1968 original, and the Tim Burton 2001 remake.)
The world we now live in is increasingly like the movie, The Planet of the Apes. In that film the world the astronauts set down upon is ruled by talking apes. The human beings in that film are relegated to the fields and forests where they are no more than speechless animals. Much like the Republican Party and the wealthy ruling elite of this day and age, the apes control everything and, led by Dr. Zaius (seen on the far right) reject science and evidence as a way to explain things. They rely on the rules set down by the Lawgiver in much the same way that modern day Republicans swear by the U.S. Constitution to determine the truth of all things.
Here we see the apes capturing and enslaving Marky Mark… er… Mark Wahlberg rather than Chuck Heston from the original movie.
In the original set of movies, Charleton Heston, playing the astronaut Taylor, discovers that through hatred and warring, the human beings of Earth have bombed themselves back into the stone age and enabled the evolved apes to take over. How does Mr. Heston deal with that problem? He discovers an old doomsday device and blows up the world. Chuck Heston has always approved Second Amendment solutions to modern problems, so it is no wonder that he lays waste to everything, the good and the bad. I think we can see that old orangutan-man, Donald Trump doing exactly the same things now as he runs for President, or Great Ape, or whatever…
In both the previous series, and the current remake, salvation from the rule of the monkey people comes in the form of a leader among the apes. Caesar, whether he be played by Roddy MacDowell or by Andy Serkis, is able to solve the problems of apes and men by reaching out to those of the other species, assigning them value, and ultimately doing what helps everyone to survive and live together. Diversity is power and provides a workable solution through cooperation. The forces of hatred and fear are the things that must be overcome and threaten the existence of everyone. Donald Trump needs to learn from the lesson of The Planet of the Apes, and be less like General Ursus. We need Bernie Sanders to embrace the role of Caesar and show us how we can get along with our Muslim brothers… after all, they are more like us than the apes are, and Caesar builds bridges between apes and men.
So, there you have it, my attempt to build a new model based on an old movie… or on the remake… whichever you prefer. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always…
Collecting dolls and action figures can overwhelm someone like me with hoarding disorder (and a Grandmother and Great Aunt who hardly had room to walk around their homes because of piles of collected stuff that they simply could not part with). There have to be rules and limits to save me from myself. I try hard to keep Disney Princesses from flooding my home and drowning me in a sea of plastic. The toymakers are constantly updating and modifying their designs to entice fools like me to keep buying.
A round of new designs with glittered-up clothes and new faces. Can I resist buying them all? Well, not the first four times.
I have to stop and take stock of where I’m at. I rounded up all the Disney dolls I have that are not mint in boxes for collecting purposes and potential resale in the collectibles market. Here they are;
There are several ways that I can go about trying to limit and prune this massive obsession. First and foremost, I can break this gigantic feeding frenzy up into smaller bites and pick and choose how long I chew. This part of my collection, is based on the Tinkerbell movies and is limited to only one edition of these dolls. It took over a year to buy all four;
There are just four dolls in this set. I chose only the size consistent with the 12-inch figures I always choose. No little ones. No second editions. No doll costing more than $20.
Some of the dolls are rescue dolls, either bought naked at Goodwill or another thrift store, taken home to be cleaned, repaired, restored, and dressed (like the Ariel doll I posted first in this post). These are probably my most valuable acquisitions, because they are previously loved and played with. (The Jasmine doll in the middle belonged to my daughter, who had a tendency to mangle and experiment on dolls as well as strip them permanently naked. This doll’s survival is a minor miracle.)
The rescued dolls include two Snow Whites, a Jasmine that belonged to my daughter, and Mulan… mostly dressed in Barbie clothes.
The remainder of these collected dolls are recent edition Disney Princesses that I waited for some time to acquire so that they would come down in price. A couple of these, like Tiana and Repunzel, and all the Frozen Dolls are not also represented in my collection by mint in box dolls. I do have Belle and Aurora and even Tarzan’s Jane, but boxed only, so they are not pictured here.
So you can see what a trippy-type trial it has become to keep a collection like this from taking over the house. I have to impose limits on myself so I don’t become a weird old man living in cardboard box under a bridge with hundreds of dolls and action figures.
Cleaning in the library led me to rediscover an old project. Roy Rogers and Trigger had been sitting next to the TV in the library. I found them both on the floor between the TV and a book stack. Time to pick them up and put them back in shape.
The doll is a random military action figure rescued naked from a thrift store. I thought the face looked enough like Roy Rogers to turn him into that particular hero. The horse is from Mattel, and probably is part of a Barbie play-set. It was given to me by a relative. I dressed Roy in a Lone Ranger Captain Action uniform with a Tonto gun belt, both created by Playing Mantis Toy Company in the late 1990’s. The hat is actually from a Cowgirl Barbie because I wanted a Roy Rogers-style almost-white hat. The Lone Ranger hat is too flat-brimmed to look right and way too large to fit on Roy’s smaller head, and the only other cowboy hat I have for it is a Johnny West hat from Marx Toys in the 1960’s, and that is dark brown.
Everything Johnny West that I still have was salvaged from the house where I grew up back in the 1980’s. They belonged to my little brother, but ended up in my collection because he outgrew dolls and action figures long before I did. I wish I still had the doll himself, but I think Dabney blew him up with a firecracker when he was a teenager.
So, I have to be happy with only having Roy and Cowgirl Barbie to play with.
Being a doll collector with an advanced case of hoarding disorder, I am always finding new stuff to buy. And my mother made the mistake of giving me a gift card for Christmas. Well, after-Christmas sales are started. Toys that were mauled by Christmas shoppers are set out for clearance prices in slightly damaged boxes. The opportunities are endless.
I had thought my MLP collection was complete when I bought Fluttershy (on the left). But I found Lemon Zest (the pink horse-girl with lemon-yellow eyes) for less than ten dollars. Walmart is apparently trying to clear the shelves of the scourge of My Little Pony dolls that has infested them for about four years now.
Kristoff from Frozen and Deerla from the Netflix thing called Happily Ever-After High School were both clearance items for slightly more than five dollars.
Kristoff completes a Frozen set. I can die happy now.
But maybe not just yet…
I also found a twelve-inch PVC figure of Finn from the new Star Wars movie. Is that the beginning of a new collection? I guess I can’t die just yet. And I am still happy.
Yes, having hoarding disorder can be a pain. I channel it into collecting, especially things like 12-inch action figures and Barbie Dolls. But it becomes such a mania that even the rules don’t contain it. These mint-in-box dolls with mutant big heads and bean bodies are part of a wacky collection that has caught hold of me with about the same ferocity as the flu. They are Monster High dolls to go along with the TV cartoons and direct-to-video movies used primarily to sell these ultra-weird toys to little girls. Supposedly each of the girls in the series is the daughter of a movie monster. Operetta above is the daughter of the Phantom of the Opera. Isi Dawndancer claims to be the daughter of a deer-spirit… a Native-American-style monster thingy. I suppose there is a benign rationalization behind these things other than trying to get little girls to identify with and emulate monsters. Believe me, from my years as a teacher, no little girl really needs encouragement to embrace the monster within. And that sort of thing has negative consequences.
Yes, the picture immediately above is of my Monster High collection as it stood a year ago. I have now added to it. And am admitting as reasonably as I can that it is probably evidence of looming insanity. Let me show you the new acquisitions from the current collecting year;
Besides Operetta and Isi, I have added the daughter of the Loch Ness Monster, the daughter of the rat king, and, apparently, the daughter of the man-eating plant from the movie Little Shop of Horrors. What is even worse, there are more dolls out there and available to this collection. I have followed the rules and limited my spending, but I wasted birthday and Christmas money from my mother on this stuff… and probably will do so again. I suppose it is because I don’t spend my toy-money on more manly things like guns and political donations to Donald Trump. But I have to satisfy my lurking doubts with the notion that the most impressive collections of things like this in museums are probably put together by fools like me with raging hoarding disorder.
Catch a Falling Star 