When last we left the Captain Action Hero Team, they were busy trying to rescue Mickey’s beloved X-Box with the EA Sports Baseball ’04 game that Mickey loves. The Evil Doctor Evil had taken over the library and turned it into an evil lair for his evil minions of Evil. But Captain Carl Action had led his team into the fray and clobbered the Agent in Red with a kiss and the Grammar Nazis with bad grammar. Dr. Evil was feeling foiled.
The pretty Barbie doll (whose name was really City-Style Christie) was captured and at the mercy of Evil Doctor Evil.
Dr. Mindbender had an evil talent for bending minds. He possessed considerable talents of ESP (which here stands for Extremely Stupid Puddlebrains). The poor captive doll was bent to Dr. Evil’s evil will.
Suddenly Mickey’s blog stood on the verge of losing its PG rating (which was already on shaky ground anyway). Then, faithful Max Steele pulled an answer out of his… thin air… urm, yes, that was what I intended to say.
The day appeared to be saved by a good old bop on the bean. It was Captain Carl’s favorite problem-solving solution, as it is for practically all action heroes… definitely the ones with the hollow plastic heads in Mickey’s Action Figure Collection. But one important task still remained un-done.
Tune in next time for the only “Fight of the Century” in which Manny Pacquiao can’t possibly disappoint you!
Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer
You may already know about my doll-collecting mania. You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves. But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.
In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California. It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either. We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come. Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls. Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own. So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.
The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother. She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine. I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.
Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands. My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead. He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in. He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.
The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to. She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.
These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians. I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children. (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)
If it is inevitable that I will surely drop dead some day, and if it is likely that it will come sooner rather than later, then I hope to go out with a bit of style and leave something behind that speaks not only to my own children, but to anybody searching for truth and beauty, people of the future that I will never know who are living beyond the confines of my little life. What makes me think that I can do it? Well, I’m a writer… and Mark Twain did it… and I don’t have to be vain or loopy or maniacal or delusional to make the same thing happen.
On this day one-hundred-and-five years ago, April 21, 1910, Mark Twain left the world of the living. He caught a ride on Halley’s Comet (It deposited him on Earth in 1835, appearing in the sky when he was born, and took him away when it appeared in the sky again in 1910… He didn’t have to be some kind of suicidal Heaven’s Gate nut to manage that.) But it wasn’t the comet that showed me the truth… it was his books. I learned to take a wry view of a complex world that I could do nothing to change and tweak it with intelligence and understanding from the story of racism and justice he left behind in Pudd’nhead Wilson. I learned the value of ingenuity and opportunity and how to use them properly from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I also learned a profound love and understanding for small town people like me and the people of my little hometown in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Samuel Clemens, Mr. Mark Twain, left himself behind in stories to speak to the ages. He spoke to me… directly to my heart, and he had been dead for 46 years before I was even born. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
media.npr.org
Now, I am not a fool (wait a minute! I know you have proof to the contrary if you read my blog posts, but I am not an UNINTENTIONAL fool), so I do not think that my words and wisdom are ever going to have any sort of effect on the entire world the way Mark Twain’s have. I can accept reality. This whole world is dying and may not long outlive me. There are a large number of talented fools… er, I mean writers, out there who have put out a number of published good books, and have, like me, made diddly-zero-bupkiss in dollars on the deal. I have no delusions. My work is good enough to turn into a best-seller or maybe two, but I do not have the time or the backing to make it happen. If anything other than obscurity embraces my books, I won’t live to see it. Only eleven per cent of published authors make a livable wage from writing and I will never be one of them. But I have ideas that resonate. I can write in ways that touch the heart (as you may have seen if you have read my post “When Compassion Fails” that was a minor hit with the 1000 Voices Speak For Compassion group).
So, I am satisfied to confess my girly addiction to Barbie Dolls and My Little Pony… talk about cartoons and cartoonists on WordPress… make people giggle a bit… or even guffaw, and put together books that my family will read, and only be mildly embarrassed by, and maybe one day will reach and touch the heart of some boy or girl who really needs to read what I wrote at a time in their lives when it can actually help… the way so many other philosophers, wits, and word-wizards have helped me. (How’s that for some prime purple-paisley prose?)
I was foolish enough to share with you all in my post “The Quest for Pinkie Pie” that my insane Hoarder’s Disorder has led me into a world full of Bronies
This is a really terrible first fan art of My Little Pony. I gave Pinkie Pie insane cereal killer eyes, and Rainbow Dash is too fat to fly.
(seriously maladjusted men who watch My Little Pony; Friendship is Magic and love it, making fan art and buying dolls). I have been on a quest to put together a complete set of MLP’s and an accompanying set of Equestria Girls (ponies put through a magic portal that turns them into teenage mutant horse-girls).
I have been making steady progress since my mother sent me $50 in a gift card for Christmas and I blew it all on ponies. I would like to report that I have finally brought this terrible mental illness thing to a proper conclusion. (And, no, I did not explain the problem to a psychiatrist or anything.) I completed the collection. Now I no longer have to buy any more of the terrible things.
I was able to find Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy both together on the bargain shelf at Walmart. Both were less than fifteen dollars. Together they didn’t bust my monthly maximum. So I put together the entire set of twelve and the compulsion has begun to dissipate.
I am writing this post today to celebrate two things. My doctor’s visit today not only came back with positive post-op results, but it was free. And while I waited at Walmart for my prescription to be filled at the pharmacy, I found the two Equestria Girls that finish my collection. I spent the co-pay that I didn’t have to pay on Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy (I made that rhyme without a try!) Yay me!
But I have also come to the sobering realization that my collecting mania may actually be a form of mental illness. After all, my daughter is now 13 and not really interested in My Little Pony any longer. That excuse no longer flies. My wife has lost interest in collecting also (although she still collects clothes and shoes with a gusto that shames Imelda Marcos.)
So why do I do this collecting thing so relentlessly? Is it a serious mental disorder. As always I turned to the internet to diagnose myself with life-threatening conditions based on one, or possibly two symptoms. I may be doomed. What I found was an explanation of Hoarding Disorder.
Yes, I inherited it from Grandma Beyer. She hoarded all sorts of stuff in her little house in Mason City, Iowa. In her basement, when they cleaned out the house, she still had wrapping paper from Christmases in the 1930’s. It was in stacks. neatly folded and ready to be re-used. According to the Psychology Today website article about extreme collecting, one of the first signs of the disorder is the inability to part with personal possessions no matter their actual value. Never in all the years we spent Christmases together did I ever notice Grandma re-using wrapping paper. She actually kept that stuff for the memories they invoked and the sentimental value they held for her. My mother ended up throwing out all that wrapping paper when the house was sold.
Another indicator is the extreme cluttering of the home, to the point of rendering living spaces unlivable. One glance at the upstairs hallway sends shivers down my weak little hoarder’s spine.
There are any number of things that might concern a psychiatrist in this hallway. Of course, the blocked door in the back is where the old non-working air-conditioner is stashed, so there is no room in there for stuffing more stuff. This picture reveals that I have a vast collection of collections… not merely one. I collect stuffed toys, HO model railroad stuff and trains, Pez dispensers, stamps, coins, comic books (in the boxes in the back corner under the stuffed toys), and books… gobs, and gobs, and gobs of books! (“Gobs” is Iowegian for “lots”, not “sailors”.) In fact, the door on the left is actually the door to the library.
A quick scan of Toonerville along the tops of the bookshelves reveals the full extent of my madness. Here you see HO-sized buildings, most of which I painted myself or built from kits. You also see the Pez dispensers that suck money out of my pockets at $1.50 a shot. My trains have been around for many years. I shared that obsession with my father (Grandma Beyer’s eldest son) when I was a boy and most of these trains were either gifts from him, or purchased with allowance. (I haven’t bought anything new in seven years.)
So, the evidence makes it clear. One day soon I will be locked up somewhere in a padded room. I hope, at least, that my children still like me well enough to sneak in Pez dispensers when they come to visit.
The day before yesterday I wrote a post for 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion that basically tore my heart out. It made me relive one of my worst defeats as a teacher who cares about teaching and students. I have to admit that I spent an awful lot of time crying the past three days. But I am not a sorrowful Sad-Sack with a sourpuss’ simpering sarcastic smile. Not I. I come back from downers by doing silly stuff… kinda like over-dosing on alliteration in that S-filled sentence. So what silly stuff am I up to after a triple-down darkness-dealing downer like the one from that post? (When Compassion Fails) I took up the Quest for Pinkie Pie.
I borrowed the My Little Pony image above from Jessica Ann Hughes whose very eloquent post laments the series update as a sexualization of the thirty-year-old toy franchise in the newer series, My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic.
But I have to argue that it doesn’t sexualize anything beyond the surface. After all, these ponies are really little girls that have charming little-girl personalities and act in stories that have little-to-nothing to do with sex. Yes, I have seen the wedding episode where Twilight Sparkle’s big brother gets married, but that episode is about trusting your own instincts when something seems wrong. If somebody like me is getting sexual vibes from that cartoon, then something is seriously wrong and that somebody should seek therapy to avoid becoming some kind of pedophile. I mean, it is important to self-censor. When I was getting a soda at QT this afternoon, I was happy to see two pretty girls in short pants for the first time in a long time. Texas weather has been rainy and dreary for the past few weeks and the sun has finally come out. But… wait a minute! Why am I looking at middle school girls’ legs? I am a miserable, broken-down, spotty old man. And I have been busily watching this My Little Pony show on YouTube where all these little girl ponies are walking around naked all the time! But, am I not over-reacting? Yes, the ponies have big eyes and shortened muzzles… but I haven’t been obsessing about ponies because of hormone imbalances or something. I thought the whole Brony thing was ridiculous up until a very short time ago. I mean, grown men watching a cartoon about little-girl ponies and singing the songs and buying the toys and wearing ponies on T-shirts. Is there therapy for that? I am hoping so… because I think I’m going to need it.
My doll-collecting mental illness began, as I tried to explain and tell lies about yesterday, when I was a child who had been given dolls for birthdays and Christmas (I meant to say Action Figures… No! Really!) and only really had sisters to play with at home (my little brother was eight years younger than me, and my friends from school lived in the country, miles away from town on farms.)
As a young man, I regained my dolls… I mean Action Figures, and tried to restore them (not play with them… I never said play with them). When I got married, my wife and I actively began collecting them. She was initially charmed by my love for my old pieces of plastic. We began looking for what was out there. Captain Action and G.I. Joes for me, Barbies for her. When she lost interest (or found a cure for that particular mental aberration), I kept on. The rules for collecting included; Twelve inch tall figures. Never pay more than $20 for a toy. Never spend more than $50 a month. Find rare dolls for little money. Rescue dolls who somebody once loved and played with, or that are on the verge of the ignominious end to be found in the department-store dumpster.
Rainbow Dash started me down the slippery slope to Brony-ism. I just happened to find, on an after-Christmas clearance table at Walmart with all the other damaged toys that didn’t realistically survive the seasonal play-with-it-in-the-store-while- mommy-shops damage, a cheap and forlorn Rainbow Dash with extra hair. She looked at me with those big, sad eyes and pleaded with me to buy her and save her from the dumpster (or the sadistic little girl that would buy and dismember her because she was just a cheap thing from Walmart). I’m too stupid to resist.
Then I began examining my purchase because I didn’t really know what it was… the Brony-thing warning lights were going off somewhere in the back of my goofy-old-man head, but it took some research before I learned what Equestria Girls were and that there were six of them. Six of them! A set of six to collect! But also the original ponies! A set of twelve!
And the disease had me.
So, here you see the tangible evidence that I am acutely infected. Brony-itis? Possibly. Fatal? Hopefully not. If you’re counting, they still are not all here. Apple Jack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash as Equestria Girls. Apple Jack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie as ponies. But no Fluttershy at all. And… what’s this? No Pinkie Pie? The most popular pony with little girls, I could not find her in Equestria Girl form? Well, I could… but not for under $20. I went shopping at Toys R Us yesterday with the Princess in tow. We bought toys, but no Pinkie Pie for less than twenty one. And this collection represents $14 in January, $30 in February, and $25 already this month. I’m guessing the rules might save me from this disease yet. Does that mean no Pinkie Pie ever? Well, I watch the stupid cartoons incessantly now on YouTube… I’ve learned that Friendship is Magic and as long as you can remain true to your friends, you can overcome almost all of life’s problems… together… with love. And Pinkie Pie is totally random… and funny… and everyone’s friend. There are good lessons being taught to little girls and old men who watch these things. Pinkie Pie’s is probably the most important one of all… So Pinkie is my favorite. I haven’t found her yet in a way that stays within the rules, but I am not some creepy old man who breaks the rules. I have the rest of my life to complete this quest.
My daughter the Princess and I went to Toys R Us this morning to spend a little of the money I had earned by proofreading a technical paper for a grad student. I bought a My Little Pony Equestria Girl named Rarity (I already have the pony, I just needed the girl to add to the collection.) I also bought a Minecraft sheep thing that the Princess promptly named Jed. Apparently, in the Minecraft game online, if you name your sheep Jed, it turns rainbow colors. And I know I didn’t slip by you the fact that the Pony Girl was my toy. In this post I intend to explain to you why I play with little girls’ toys… and hem and haw… and rationalize… and lie… because it is really not what it seems.
It all began in 1965, on my ninth birthday, because I had discovered in the Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog the first Action Figure, G.I. Joe, and I begged and begged and begged it for my birthday. There were four different flavors of G.I. Joe to choose from, representing the four branches of the U.S. Military. You could get either a sailor from the Navy, a soldier from the Army or Marines, or a pilot from the Air Force. Of course, I was wild about the Air Force, but I was clever enough to ask for a sailor Joe because my father was a Korean Conflict Veteran who had been in the Navy on board the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. Dad actually liked the idea and got the Navy Frog Man uniform to go along with it. I could change Joe’s clothes and make him a cool undersea adventurer. It only took a half hour to change him from a sailor into a frog man, and another half hour to change him out of his swim fins and wet suit back into a sailor. It was a doll with sets of clothes to change him into just like my younger sisters’ Barbie and Tammy dolls. Wait… what? I had been tricked into playing with dolls? It is like I lost my official man card even before I earned it… or even before I knew what it was.
Oh, well… it was all about the stories anyway. Yes, I was a story-teller even then. I built a submarine out of my Erector Set (a cherished toy from a previous Christmas) and my Joe led adventures through the vast undersea areas of our parents’ bedroom using Barbie (actually a Midge doll) and Tammy (little sister’s knock-off imitation Barbie doll) as crew. We added to the stories and adventures as time went on, and birthdays and Christmases passed, and we accumulated more dolls. I added Fritz, a Soldiers of the World G.I. Joe from Germany, an Air Force Pilot Joe, and an Astronaut Joe. My sister Nanette added a Francie doll, a Christie (the first African-American Barbie), and a G.I. Joe nurse. Little sister Maggie added a Francie of her own, a regular Barbie, and a Skipper doll to the submarine crew. And then the stories went through the roof when I got my sweaty little hands on Captain Action and his Super-hero costumes!
Captain Action was the creation of the now defunct Ideal Toy Company as an answer to the incredible success of G.I. Joe. You could take the basic Captain Action figure (seen above on the far right… this is the actual first figure… what’s left of him. The right hand is long gone. He has no fore arms. The uniform that he is wearing is not his original. It is basically holding his severed body parts together. I did successfully re-attach the head) and put him in a new uniform to turn him into Batman or Superman or… Aquaman! perfect for submarine adventures with sisters!
In the 1990’s my parents gave me the box of my old G.I. Joes. It was like a re-awakening of childhood passions. Several of my Joes were in terrible shape because my little brother and his semi-simian deviant friends had used fire-crackers on them a-la-Sid from Toy Story. I began cleaning them and restoring them. And then the internet happened. Old guys like me that grew up with these classic toys were now trying to recapture their youth by buying and selling the toys on E-bay. Seriously, check out this price for vintage Captain Action stuff (mint in box);
Aquaman on E-Bay (Oops! That $2000 toy that you can’t even play with has already sold!)
Collecting and trading dolls has become a fascinating hobby and potentially profitable (at least until age and death and bankruptcy winnow out all the old crazy guys like me who collect this sort of stuff). And why the added obsession with Barbies and things like My Little Pony dolls? Well, my sisters’ dolls had all been kept in a metal box. Attics in Texas can reach 600+ degrees Fahrenheit in the Summer. Have you ever seen a melted Barbie? Nostalgia made me do it… that, and having a daughter… well, that’s my story, anyway. And I am sticking to it.
At dawn on Friday the 13th in the year of our Lord 1307 King Philip IV of France ordered Knights Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and as many other members of the Order of Knights Templar as could be found in France to all be arrested. They were accused of crimes against God and the Catholic Church like spitting on the cross, indecent kissing, homosexual practices, and worshiping false idols. It was said they had found the mummified head of John the Baptist during their brief tenure as the rulers and defenders of Jerusalem. It was also said they used it in pagan rituals of black magic. The charges were assumed to be false, even by Philip, but through torture numerous Templars were forced to confess, and their confessions were accepted as evidence by Pope Clement. De Molay and the rest of the Templars in France were burned at the stake before the Vatican could mount an appeal (numerous Templars recanted their confessions as soon as they were out of the torture chamber). Templar property throughout France was seized and Philip’s war debts to the Templars were canceled. One suspects that this was a grand financial power-play worthy of a Bush family member. (Oh, no! Did I just say that in a post? Here comes the NSA.)
You know that historians generally do not credit the Templar story as the true origin of the Friday the 13th superstition. I’m not sure why they have trouble making that connection, but historians generally think that anything that is obvious to the common man can’t possibly be true. I suppose they may be right.
So, I sit here at home alone with my beloved family still Spring Breaking in Florida. It is raining outside. It is cool, almost cold. And I am contemplating sour luck.
One of the things I routinely do is work on a collection when I am feeling blue and subject to diabetic depression. It helps to be able to make a little progress in completing a set or something. Well, I made the mistake of trying to do that at Walmart. The Walton family have something in common with King Philip (and the Bush family) (Hackers added that last parenthetic expression, honest, NSA!). They know a little something about mercenary financial evil. Their empire was built on the backs of underpaid workers which they excuse by claiming they have to do that to keep offering “Always low prices”. But they use all kinds of cheap tricks to keep the big bucks rolling into big pockets and little bucks being sucked out of little pockets like mine. Case in point, I was trying to score another fix in my recent addle-brained Brony addiction by completing a set of Equestria Girls. On the bargain-clearance-sale table was the perfect thing. Pinkie Pie from the Rainbow Rocks series next to a price that said $11. Now, I don’t have Pinkie Pie. I have Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, and Apple Jack, but Pinkie Pie is the one every little girl (apparently just like this crazy old man) wants first. So, Bazinga! For the first time I could acquire Pinkie Pie and come in under the $20 dollar rule. But, wait just a minute! This is Walmart we are talking about here. The nearest price checker was broken and hadn’t been fixed in months. So I asked a working Walmart minion stocking the toy shelves where the nearest working price checker was. Of course, they didn’t have one anywhere in the store. But shelf-stockers carry a portable pricing gun, and she checked it for me. $21.97! It was actually the same price it would normally be on the shelves. (Granted it is a lower starting price than Toys-R-Us, but it still breaks the $20 rule.) The $11 price was coded for the Rainbow Dash doll that was sitting there next to the Pinkie Pie. They count on me being stupid enough to run to checkout with the wrong price in my head and gleefully pay the higher price without thinking or looking too closely. So I outfoxed them. Rainbow Dash was sitting there at the shelf-damaged, clearance-sale price and it was (after careful inspection) mint in box.
So, that is essentially my point today. Conservative and mega-fearful paranoid people like your usual conspiracy theorist and distrustful Tea-Party Republican would pull back with venom and recount their Second-Amendment rights. Not me. Life gives me lemons and I make… frosted lemon cheesecake with a dash of rainbow. Sure, I think the Bush family are secretly Nazis… but you are not paranoid if there really is a conspiracy and you’ve seen the evidence. But Friday the 13th can be a lucky day. Good things can happen if you make them happen and use the talents and intelligence that God granted you for that very purpose. (I confess, I used to listen to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio and I actually believed his crap about the power of positive thinking.) Let me show you a few more of my bargain-purchase collectible accomplishments;
I do realize that I posed these dolls on Radasha’s face and that I ought to have put old drawings away in their proper portfolio place, not leave them out on the drawing board. But, what do you think I am? Some sort of irresponsible goofy old cartoonist who gets too caught up with playing with dolls, or something? Please don’t answer that.
The Tinkerbell dolls were also from the bargain table, only one of them was priced correctly on the table. The rest are showing you Barbie dresses on dolls I rescued from Goodwill and a Re-Sale store. These are dolls that were naked, abused, and previously loved and played-with by some little girl (or possibly confused little boy). I have a soft spot for rescue dolls that went naked into charity work at the risk of ending up in the garbage bin. They remind me of me when I went into teaching.
Ah, the power of positive thinking! (And I didn’t just add that last sigh to get over the 1000 word goal, either.)
In the last episode of Expelling Evil, Grammar Nazis, we saw the Captain Action Hero-Action-Guy Team move into Mickey’s Library with the speed of a Republican in Congress when there is legislation to be passed. The heroes were prepared to battle Dr. Evil and evil Dr. Evil’s evil minions. Captain Carl Action had encountered and pacified the evil minion known as the Agent in Red. He found ways to capture and interrogate her that, while not the least bit effective, were something that he really, really enjoyed.
So Carl, taking his time… an entire week if you can believe it! decided to extend his interrogation even longer, in spite of chapped lips and the total absence of lip balm. It was then that Colonel Komma and his evil Grammar Nazis decided to move in and attack the foolish hero-guy with Blitzkrieg word war.
It was true. I went back to that post and looked it up. The word wondrous was spelled w-o-n-d-E-r-o-u-s! Stupid Captain Carl! How could he be so heroically stupid? He let my wonderful, nearly perfect, purple paisley prose get possessed by a common, ordinary spelling demon. The Grammar Nazis had him in an impossible position. And his only response to the terrible situation? He misuses an apostrophe, placing it on a plural noun that is not possessive!
Then, just as Colonel Komma moved in for the editorial kill, Captain Carl came up with the perfect defense. He used his super-power of super stupidity as a shield. He successfully argued that you cannot be defeated by editing of your poor grammar if you don’t understand what they are talking about. Fortunes of war were suddenly reversed!
Captain Carl was not the only Captain Action present. Captain Bill Newguy Action stepped in to disarm the Grammar Nazi with his famous whack-a-doo smacketty-smack punch. The Grammar Nazis were defeated by the hypocrisy of trying to correct English grammar with such a thick accent that they were actually forcing the cartoonist to misspell stuff on purpose to accurately represent the weird sounds in their Grammar Nazi speech balloons.
Colonel Komma was no longer the kapturing konqueror he was hoping to be. Instead he had become the kaptured kook. But Mickey was still no nearer to having his X-Box back for playing EA Sports Baseball ’04. Dr. Evil still had control of that.
Goofy-guy doll collector, me, will now give you a grand tour of the Barbie Shelf. This is a place in my home that was originally created by the previous owners of the house. It was a place in the upstairs play room apparently meant for the things that needed to be kept out of little girls’ reach. Maybe pampers and baby wipes. Cleaning supplies. And possibly toys that were not to be broken immediately and had to be regulated. I don’t know why else you would grace a playroom with a shelf up near the ceiling and above the only door into the room. It was, however, perfect for the plastic people who were destined to take it over as their own.
It begins above the bedroom door. My wife has a thing about keeping her dolls mint in box. She has more of an eye to their value as collectible investments. The fashion Barbie nestled above the door in her box is a recreation of a 1962 doll that was reissued in 1999. You can also see the Teacher Barbie that the Princess once de-boxed and played with. And there you can also see the start of the Wizard of Oz collection. There are little munchkin dolls and the Ken doll dressed as the Cowardly Lion in the picture.
In front of Dorothy and Glinda from Oz, you see some of the recycled Goodwill Barbies that I bought naked and abandoned, cleaned and dressed, washed and tried to brush out their hair. One of them had some marker on her face that had to be soaked off with secret sauce to restore a more human look. The one in the middle is a 1980’s Asian Barbie. There is also a Cowgirl Barbie wearing an extra gun belt from a CA Lone Ranger set.
The kids are protected by Eustace the purple pottery dragon who was fired in my mother’s kiln during the height of her doll-making hobby and painted by me. The kids here include a tiny Tommy doll, three Skippers from the early 70’s, and Hermione from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. You can see the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in the back, and there’s also Goodwill Barbie that for some odd reason has purple hair.
Ricky (a 1960’s boy toy for Skipper) sits with Ashley Olsen between more recycled Goodwill Barbies. 1980’s Skipper is trying to push poor roller-skate Barbie off the shelf.
My newest My Little Pony in mutant almost human form, Rainbow Dash the Equestria girl, is the blue doll in the middle here. Mary-Kate Olsen can be seen in the Blue dress. All you can see of Britney Spears here are her legs and feet, probably a safety feature of this tour. The topless ballerina Barbie is wearing a jacket, but I could not close it on her extra large Barbie mammaries. Princess Jasmine, my daughter’s somewhat beat-up favorite begins Disney Princess Row.
Li Shang is still mint in box, but Mulan isn’t even on the shelf any more. Some of Mom’s dolls got played with by the Princess. Mulan lost her hair. There is one American Girl doll here, bought at a yard sale for 25 cents, but I found a dress to fit her at Walmart in a sale bin. Unfortunately I can’t name her correctly yet and she is barefoot like most of the Goodwill dolls.
Almost to the end of the shelf, you can now see Apple Jack and Twilight Sparkle, my other two mutant pony girls, discovered at an After-Christmas Sale at Toys-R-Us. They are standing on Grandma Beyer’s home bingo set from the 1930’s, and Disney Princesses are lined up behind them.
At the tail end of the shelf you will see Twilight Sparkle again to take the focus off poor 1980’s nudist Skipper (I robbed her of her clothes for one of the older, more rare Skippers that are worth a bit more to collectors). Seated between is Asian Rock n Roll Barbie (Leah actually). You may have noticed I am careful not to over-identify any of the members of the collection. I got taken to task on E-Bay about descriptions of which Barbie was which once. There are people out there much more rabid about doll collecting than I. The difference between a 1980’s Butterfly Tattoo Barbie and an Anniversary Edition Malibu Barbie can get you challenged to a duel… with rapiers… in France. I had to talk him into balloons and blunderbusses (an idea borrowed from Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines), and I lost. I had to settle for the price offered even though my own research suggested I was not wrong. (Well, okay, maybe I didn’t really go through with the duel thing, but the argument was just as intense and just as silly as that.)
So that is my long-winded essay on the essentials of the Barbie Shelf. I will be looking at it a lot for the next few years since it is in the room I am using as my bedroom. (Not in perfect health, I needed a room that I could completely seal up at night in order to breathe better.) I really didn’t think I could pull off 500 words about this one goofy shelf in the house, but I now realize that I have nearly reached 900.
Catch a Falling Star 