July 21, 2003
Featured Article - Past Articles Second childhood The junk of your childhood has been saved
online.
By Tom
Prendergast
One day 15 or 20 years ago, my friend Steve
marvelled at the stacks and stacks of old records, vintage
magazines, baseball cards, and '70s memorabilia that cluttered my
little apartment. "You collectors are all the same," he scolded me.
"You spend your entire adulthood buying back your happy childhood."
Fine. Guilty as charged. And judging by
the mountain of evidence on the Web, I'm not alone. Fads, ephemera,
and plain old garbage from virtually every era up to the 1980s, and
even past it, are hot property, not just for collectors, but also
for nostalgia fiends and folks who just like to look back.
The most interesting childhood collectibles
are the ones that tended to get immediately trashed by their
owners--later driving prices for mint-condition specimens through
the roof. A good example is Wacky Packages, those silly, mildly
tasteless stickers that parodied real products. Surely you remember
Crust toothpaste, Horrid deodorant, and Awful Bits cereal, right? If
not, Wacky
Packages.org has an alarming amount of information, scans, and
various minutiae about these stickers. It also includes a rough
price guide, so you can eat your heart out over the fact that a mint
set of the stickers that you pasted on your loose-leaf binder in
fourth grade is now worth $500.
Speaking of disposable silliness, do you
know anyone who actually read and enjoyed those lame comics that
were wrapped around Bazooka bubble gum, let alone kept them? Well,
as with everything old, there are people devoted to collecting the
adventures of Bazooka Joe and His Gang. The latest members of the
gang are featured on the official Bazooka page, while a historical perspective can
be found at the Bubble Gum Comic Collection. The Bazooka Joe Page takes a tongue-in-cheek
intellectual look at the more recent Bazooka comics, which have
introduced characters like Metaldude and Joe's dimwitted girlfriend,
Zena.
Quick, what was on your lunch box when you
were a kid? Of course you remember. The dumbest things stick with
you through the years, but that's why vintage lunch boxes are so
sought after (by some people, anyway; my Peanuts lunch box had a
short life, and I don't miss it). Lunch
Box Pad provides much more than price-guide values and nostalgic
essays, including a nice slide show of some of the top collectible
lunch boxes and shopping links to the hottest new ones (watch out
for The Hulk).
Appropriately enough, one recent category of
toys that seem to be appreciating almost instantly are computer
games. Games and systems come and go so rapidly, so nobody hangs on
to them. But that mint-in-the-box 1988 Nintendo "Balloon Fight" game
you threw out ages ago is already fetching three-figure prices. If
instant nostalgia is your thing, there are numerous sites devoted to
Intellivision, Atari, DOS games, and other prehistoric sources of
amusement at the Classic Video Game Syndicate. While you're at it,
you can reminisce about "Dark Planet," "Fantasy Zone II," and other
favorite old arcade games at The International Arcade Museum. |