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My elementary school sticker collection Part II: More Mr T and bumper stickers

Posted in nostalgia, pop culture, stickers with tags collecting, nostalgia, pop culture, stickers, vintage on June 7, 2011 by Paxton

Back in March, I took a look at my elementary school sticker collection. It consisted of some scratch and sniff stickers, puffy Mr T stickers and a crap load of Michael Jackson stickers. It was pretty popular and I got several requests for more awesome 80s sticker goodness. So I’m delivering.

First off, I had a few requests for a better look at the Mr T puffy stickers on the front and back covers of my sticker album. To refresh your memory, here’s the cover to my sticker album.

So, I scanned the Mr T stickers again and tried to clean them up a bit with Photoshop. Here they are.

On the left we have cartoon, puffy Mr T bending a pipe with his bare, manly hands. The one on the right is probably my favorite, Mr T lifting a f’n semi over his head. It looks like the two truck tires are reaching down to hug the awesomeness that is cartoon, puffy Mr T.

Here are two stickers I didn’t actually share in the earlier article. They were on the inside cover of the sticker album. A full body shot of Mr T looking like he’s about to tackle some poor fool (left) and Mr T’s giant head (right).

So, those were the awesome Mr T puffy stickers. They are obviously based on the Mr T cartoon from 1983-1984 that featured Mr T traveling around the country with a group of young gymnasts (!?). Now, let’s take a look at another faction of this sticker collection, bumper stickers. I collected a few bumper stickers around the same time I kept the above sticker album. The majority of the bumper stickers I obtained as prizes/giveaways at my elementary school’s Fall Festival. They were an easy way to promote stuff to us kids.

Here are some of the better ones.

Here’s a Putt-Putt Golf & Games bumper sticker from the mid-80s. This particular Putt-Putt was located on Hwy 31 in Birmingham right in the middle of Hoover. It was there for me like a good friend all through elementary and high school. It later turned into a Krispy Kreme donuts and then something else which I can’t remember. I’m not sure what is there now.

These bumper stickers are great for the logos alone. This is a MADD sticker (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that is sponsored by local TV station WBRC6 and Big B Drugs. Big B Drugs was owned by the local Bruno’s Supermarkets and was the precursor to stores like CVS and Walgreens. Big B was bought out by Revco then CVS in the mid-90s. I love that they passed out drunk driving bumper stickers to elementary school kids.

What would an 80s bumper sticker collection be without a “Just Say No” sticker? It would be dead inside. So here’s mine, and it has a great 80s Pepsi logo too.

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Looking back at my elementary school sticker collection

Posted in 80s, collecting, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson, movies, pop culture, stickers with tags collecting, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, stickers on March 29, 2011 by Paxton

Shawn over at Branded in the 80s has a great feature called Peel Here that showcases his amazing 80s sticker collection. I was cleaning up my garage a while ago and found my own sticker collection in one of the boxes. It was complete with even some extra pages full of stickers stuck inside, plus my collection of bumper stickers and tons of my old Garbage Pail Kids.

So, in the tradition of Shawn’s Peel Here I thought you’d like to take a look inside a mid-1980s elementary school sticker collection. It could be awesome, it could be totally embarrassing. Today I’ll look at the main sticker collection. Later I’ll take a look at my collection of bumper stickers and finally I’ll go through a bunch of the Garbage Pail Kids.

So, without further to do, let’s see the types of stickers I liked to collect in elementary school. You can click all these images to see them bigger in Flickr.

Here’s the cover of my sticker album. I honestly can’t remember where I got this sticker binder. It was probably a gift from my mom or my grandmother. I covered up it’s puffy, purple-ness with badass, macho Mr T stickers. The Mr T stickers are pretty awesome. They feature Mr T doing manly things like bending a steel pipe with his bare hands and lifting up a f**king semi over his head. But, for some reason, they are…puffy stickers. Puffy stickers were the girly cousin of regular stickers. Mr T puffy stickers are like painting a Corvette pink. WTF? If you ask me, the makers of those stickers are sending mixed messages to kids.

I don’t remember what the giant white ripped sticker on the cover was before I tore it off. I apparently changed my mind about liking that particular sticker. I was a fickle elementary school child. The faded white stickers with the green border under all that mess were for Mr B’s delicatessen. It was located in Independence, KS and owned by my aunt and uncle.

Let’s look inside this awesome tome of sticker archeology. First up is a separate page (front and back) of stickers I had shoved into the binder.

These are not a part of the actual sticker album. I think I acquired them separately in a trade. They mostly consist of “scratch and sniff” stickers. You can see candy apples in the right hand page and cinnamon rolls and bumble bees in the left hand page. Okay, these pages are slightly embarrassing. Not exactly the type of stickers I remember liking. “Scratch and sniff” stickers of cinnamon rolls and candy apples are about as manly as pink fluffy toilet seat covers. That is to say, not very.

The yellow “Cheap Thrills” sticker and the white Putt-Putt sticker in the right hand page are mine. Cheap Thrills was a “mom and pop” record store a friend of the family owned in Birmingham, AL. The sticker was a price sticker used on LPs. We had huge rolls of these stickers at home. I remember putting them on nearly every surface in the house. Lightswitch covers, walls, furniture, pets. They were EVERYWHERE.

The Putt-Putt in which I obtained the white sticker was located in Hoover just off Hwy-31. It turned into a Krispy Kreme a few years later, but I think even that is closed now. The sticker appears to be a 1 free game coupon. I must have got a hole-in-one. I wonder why I never used it.

Here’s the front and back of the first page in the sticker album. It’s actually not a page, but a clear plastic case that would hold the actual page. I don’t know what happened to the page. However, I needed the real estate so I started putting stickers all over it. My favorites of this group are probably all the McDonaldLand stickers. In the center and in the corners on the left as well as the corners on the right. You’ll see forgotten characters like The Professor, The Captain, The Fry Guys, and Officer Big Mac. As well as stalwarts The Hamburglar, Birdie the Early Bird and Grimace. If I’m not mistaken, the Reese’s Pieces sticker on the right page is from a group of ET stickers. I’m not too happy with the hearts behind them, though.

Okay, here are the actual first pages of the sticker album. We start off with some Michael Jackson puffy stickers. I loved MJ so you’ll see a bunch of those (and of course, these are puffy). There is also an Orko (puffy!) on the left and two Ghostbusters stickers under that. The red and white “Mi” sticker is from a company my dad worked for, Motion Industries. The black and gold Racing Team sticker is taken from a remote control Smokey and the Bandit Firebird. You can see the top and bottom stickers from the Rubik Missing Link puzzle. On the right you can see a bunch of generic 80s “exclamation” stickers. Good Show! Fantastic! Dynamite! Super! I have no idea where those came from. Or the giant ice cream cone (the hell?). The two rectangle stickers in the upper right came from the Cracked Monster Party magazine. The tennis ball stickers came from my parents. They were avid tennis players when I was growing up.

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My Compulsion to Collect

Posted in collecting, comic books, humor, personal, soda with tags collecting, comic books, Garbage Pail Kids, personal, soda on November 17, 2006 by Paxton

I have a weird compulsion to collect things. Nothing outlandish like naval lint, body parts or other people’s souls, but things more under the pop culture umbrella. I’ve tried to collect things since I was a little kid. I remember having a bottle/can collection in our garage when I was 8 or 9. I was made to throw it away because my parents thought it was just “taking up space”. What the hell does that mean anyway? Doesn’t the car take up space? Or the hundred pounds of crap I push under my bed when I clean up my room? That takes up space, too. Hey, what do I know, I was just the innocent child permanently scarred by my uncaring parents (I see an episode of Oprah in my future). After that I collected Garbage Pail Kids for a few years. Those were AWESOME. I collected them in 5th and 6th grade. I think I still have them at my dad’s, but they may have been thrown out because…that’s right…taking up space.

In seventh grade I started my first big collection; comic books. From seventh grade through twelfth grade my friend Steve and I collected comics hardcore. We frequented this comic shop in Hoover called Curious George Comics and Arcana. It was run by this guy who I think is crazy, but I KNOW is a dirty hippie. I have no idea if his name was in fact, George, but Steve and I called him Curious George anyway. Years after his store closed I saw him at the mall. He was working as a telemarketer (surprise, surprise) and he was wearing a suit and tie carrying a briefcase….and he worked as a telemarketer. That’s what I’m talking about. I still called him Curious George when I talked to him. What a wacko (him, not me). But I digress (I do that a lot), I still have my comic collection in my garage. I thumb through it every once in a while. Looking through my hundreds of comics takes me back to a simpler time, a time before I was married, with a mortgage, and a job, no cat and no car. Damn, it certainly WAS a simpler time, I didn’t have anything.

Comic collecting faded for the most part when I went to college. Partly because I didn’t have the time nor the room to do it (nor the money). The only thing I could say I collected in college was books. I frequented a used book store and bought a ton of used books very cheaply to read. That’s the closest I came to a collection until my last year at Auburn; 1997. That is the year I started collecting Star Wars. That particular collection would consume me from 1997 until the end of 2004. I realize this may label me as a dork, but I’m sure I was labeled that before some of you knew this (haha). Many of you had seen my Star Wars Room back when I lived in Birmingham. It was a spectacular site, but it is no more. I stopped actively collecting Star Wars stuff when I moved to Jacksonville in Feb 2005.

So, what am I collecting now? Odds and ends. Kool aid packets and soda cans (stop laughing, that was serious). I enjoy finding oddball sodas you can’t find in a lot of places. I have old cans of Pepsi Free, Crystal Pepsi, Mountain Dew Pitch Black and New Coke. I have a can of Russian Pepsi Ice Cream and Taiwanese can of Pepsi Gold. Crazy ass things like that. It’s something to do. I’m weird, what can I say? I’m glad Steph married me when she did, I have her completely fooled (well, probably not). I’m also glad she puts up with it.