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.
Imagine you are a kid, at home, after a long day of school in 1986. You are sitting mindlessly watching the TV enjoying your favorite cartoons when the announcer says to stay tuned for the Ghostbusters. What? Hellz Yeah, Ghostbusters cartoons? Bring It! You are sitting there with your pouch of Capri-Sun ready to watch Slimer and the Ghostbusters kick some spectral butt. The show comes on and something looks off……..I didn’t realize the Ghostbusters hung out with …….is that a……..gorilla?! WTF?! This is what happened to me when I was about 12 years old. I was greeted with a Ghostbusters cartoon that was foreign to me. Was this just simple greed by a company looking to ride the wave of ghostbustin’ popularity, or was there more to it? This cartoon even used the actual name GhostBusters. What was this cartoon’s story? Well, after much research, I finally found out.
The Ghostbusters are pop culture icons. Ray, Peter, Egon and Winston. 
The phenomenally successful movie that spawned this group has entertained people of all ages. However, surprisingly enough, Columbia did not have the rights to the name “ghostbusters” before or during the filming of their titular 1984 blockbuster. Who owned the rights to the name, Ghostbusters? It was a production company called Filmation. After Ghostbusters hit it big in 1984, imitators began coming out of the woodwork. Companies were trying to ride the coattails of the hit movie with toys, games and cartoons with a similar theme. As stated earlier, if turned on your tv in 1986 you may have caught a show involving two friends and their gorilla using crazy equipment to capture ghosts. This cartoon was called Filmation’s GhostBusters. This series was created by Filmation, the aforementioned rights holders to the name Ghostbusters. Why did they have the rights and how did this cartoon come about? It all starts in 1975.
During the ’80s and ’90s, the Filmation studio was an immensely popular Saturday morning cartoon producer. They created the cartoons He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Fat Albert, She-Ra, Star Trek The Animated Series, The Batman/Superman Hour and many, many more. With this pedigree, and the fact that they owned the name Ghost Busters, they naturally thought that they would get first crack at producing the animated Ghostbusters show. After much negotiation, Columbia backed down and said that they were going to focus on a live action Ghostbusters sequel and not do a cartoon series. Rebuffed, Filmation decided to capitalize on the Ghostbuster name by creating their own cartoon but based it on their original tv series. The cartoon’s premise had the sons of the original tv characters inheriting the business and continuing the fight against supernatural evil. For the first five episodes (technically a mini-movie), Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker reprised their roles and voiced their characters for the first time in 10 years in order to pass the torch to their sons. Bob Burns, the actor behind Tracey the Gorilla, would continue to voice Tracey in the new cartoon. The concept was set and the show debuted in February 1986.
Columbia, having gone through some changes in management since the negotiations with Filmation, were a little perturbed that another studio would get a cartoon bearing the name of their cash-cow movie franchise on the air before them. Especially the studio that owned the name Ghost Busters. This lead to Columbia partnering with cut-rate studio DIC Animation to get their Real Ghostbusters cartoon on the air. Filmation had to add “The Original” to their cartoon to make it stand out from Columbia’s cartoon. Needless to say, this still causes confusion amongst Ghostbusters fans who have no idea about the 1975 tv show.
Cavalcade of Awesome 