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We’ve talked before about digital collections & how they are both practical, saving the collector money and space, and an act of posterity, keeping information & items safe yet ‘alive’ and accessible. While some of us collect audio files for listening pleasure and others scans of old papers for posterity, the folks at Internet Movie Cars Database combine a love of automobiles (and other vehicles) with film (and other moving picture media), creating a resource for the rest of us schlubs who wouldn’t know that Chevy Chase drove a 1983 Alfa Romeo 2000 Spider Veloce in Fletch in 1985.

These guys & gals not only watch the films and shows for vehicles but take screen shots and identify them. Cars & trucks, motorcycles & farm equipment, golf carts & street sweepers — virtually any vehicle, worldwide. It doesn’t matter how obscure or seemingly insignificant that vehicle is — a blur out the window of a car chase, a truck parked at the side of the road in an establishing shot, the 1981 BMW 320i E21 following Chevy in Fletch — they find it, capture it, and identify it (even if that means a little friendly debating) — and document it online.

A real labor of love; some insanity required.

And you gotta love ‘em for it. You don’t have to be a research nut like me to have fun digging ’round the IMCDb; it’s just too cool.

Thanks to these guys & gals at the Internet Movie Cars Database, I bring you this quiz:

Can you guess the vehicle’s make, model, year — and the film/TV show/video it appeared in — from these 13 images?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

The Answers:

1 Elgin Pelican in Pretty in Pink, Movie, 1986

2 1975 Chevrolet Camero in Wonder Woman, TV Series

3 1956 Chevrolet Two-Ten Handyman in The Wasp Woman, Movie, 1959

4 1998 Chevrolet Metro in Drawn Together, Animation Series, 2004-2008

5 1966 Shelby GT 350 H in Guns N’ Roses: Don’t Cry, Music Video, 1991

6 1960 Buick LeSabre in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Movie, 1982

7 AEC Regent in They Met in the Dark, Movie, 1943

8 1970 AMC Javelin in The Junkman, Movie, 1982

9 1982 Nissan Stanza [T11] in Police Academy, Movie, 1984

10 1950 Allis-Chalmers Model CA in Flags of Our Fathers, Movie, 2006

11 1916 Packard Twin Six [135] in The Penalty, Movie, 1920

12 Harley-Davidson Servi-Car in Carnival of Souls, Movie, 1962

13 1958 Edsel Pacer in Peggy Sue Got Married, Movie, 1986

How well did you do?

If you did really well, at least with the vehicles, maybe you should help identify these unknown vehicles — 179 pages and counting need your help!

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San Diego Comic Con is something of a mecca for anyone remotely interested in pop culture, and it’s again come and gone, and I’ve again remained firmly nestled in the green crevices of the Hudson Valley. And that’s okay. Crowds give me the screamies.

I skimmed the reports from the safety of a computer in an air conditioned room, which is a far more ideal situation than being undulated against by a tightening, after-lunch-burbling nerd crowd. While newsbits filtered in about upcoming movies and toy lines and comic stories, I was really only interested in one thing : exclusive toys. Those magical and elusive things that can usually only be obtained if you’re in attendance – rewards for making the journey and standing on long lines – and up until recently, there were only three options to get these things : go to the convention, pay a premium on eBay, or have a friend on the inside.

Alas, this collecting hassle resulted in an enormous toy collector upheaval and a surge of complaints. Unable to complete their toy collections with these rare (but important) pieces, collectors would quit their collections. Making something ‘exclusive’ would be certainly special for those who obtained it, but aggravating to those who could not, and with conventions spread across the US, someone was always going to be unsatisfied folks. Toy companies heard the collective moan, and responded using the wonders of the digital age.

There were about 300 different ‘exclusive’ items at this year’s SDCC, from comics to posters to toys and dolls and variations on existing things. Fortunately, almost every ‘exclusive’ toy that I coveted was offered up for sale on the internet by the very companies who were distributing them, and very soon after the convention wound down. Buying company-direct always a more reliable, less expensive option than eBay. Here’s what I scored online from SDCC, and how I got it.

Sideshow Collectibles was offering a miniature, metal Iron Man helmet that I needed to have. Don’t question it. Sideshow has dealt with collector demand by offering a ‘Priority Pre-Order’ system on their website, weeks prior to these events. Comic Con attendees place their orders for the limited items via the Sideshow website and pick them up on the day of the Con. However, Sideshow also opens up online orders to non-attendees at a very specific time and date, and for about five dollars more. The website shuts down except for an order page, people swarm to the site, and orders come in by the hundreds. After a few server crashes and website deaths early on, Sideshow has adjusted their technology to reflect the demand for these items, and the ordering process is a pleasure – just make sure you’re signed up for their newsletter 24 hours ahead of time, or else you’ll be booted from the pre-order line. Sideshow send my helmet, and I’m the proud owner of #100 out of 2000 produced.

Other exclusives offered by Sideshow included a Star Wars Jedi Aayla Secura in 12” scale. No, she’s not original trilogy, but she’s a Jedi AND a Twi’lek – two of my favorite parts of Star Wars, post-Lucas Insanity or not. Also, be sure to check out the Diane Kamahele Memorial Auctions being run by Sideshow this week, which include incredibly rare original sculptures, prototypes, and signed items. As someone who knew the awesome Diane Kamahele from many Toy Fairs, these annual auctions are an excellent thing that Sideshow does to help support her family after her untimely death.

Mezco also offered some exclusives via their website, among them ‘Future Hiro‘ from their Heroes series of toys, and a clear, blue version of Hellboy II’s Liz Sherman. These have not yet shipped, but were available through Mezco’s website, with absolutely no ordering hassles at all. NBC’s booth (and website) offered an exclusive ‘Painter’ Sylar figure from Heroes.

The Four Horsemen’s ‘Time Keepers‘ mini figures were available at the convention, but have yet to arrive on their website for the ol’ post-SDCC shopping rush. They’re creepy little skull-faced guys, so of course, I’m all up on that.

Of all of the summer toy exclusives, Hasbro’s and Mattel’s were the most coveted. Hasbro offered, among other things, an exclusive My Little Pony, a GI Joe Cobra Commander with a COBRA podium (in both blue and black), Mighty Muggs featuring an Indiana Jones fertility idol and a movie-based Iron Man, and an excellent Marvel Legends set based on The Savage Land, featuring Ka-Zar, Shanna the She-Devil and the tiger Zabu. Also offered was a large boxed set of eight Hulk action figures and the mighty Fin Fang Foom, as well as a small Star Wars diorama of Darth Vader talking to a giant holographic Emperor. There was a lot to take in, and a lot to hunt for, and Hasbro never seemed to give a clear answer about whether or not they’d sell these from their website, post-Con.

At noon, on the day after the convention ended, the items appeared on the website, and hundreds of collectors descended like plastic-hungry locusts. The site was brought to a stuttering crawl, and by the end of it, after many ‘page cannot be found’ notices, I emerged with my Savage Land Set and the two Mighty Muggs. I didn’t suffer the same woes as other collectors, whose items sold out just as they were trying to get the checkout page to function properly. I commend Hasbro for making these things available, but their servers need to be able to handle the frantic refreshing of pages by their fans.

Plus, I kinda need a fertility idol. I’ve been lonely.

Mattel has offered convention exclusives in the past, but has never offered them online until this year. Responding to fan inquiries (and protests, whinings, frothings, and the occasional body part sent through the mail), they whipped up the brand-new MattyCollector.com, announced the launch date and time, and in a Hasbro-esque feat of internet power, collectors converged and pushed the site to a crawl. Mattel offered four exclusives : a He-Man figure of The King of Greyskull, A DC Universe Classics Lobo, a Justice League Unlimited Giganta, and a Pixar’s Cars ‘Lightning McQueen‘ car. It seems that everyone who was present at the launch emerged with exactly what they wanted – and MattyCollector only promises to expand. They’ve already announced a site-exclusive set of He-Man toys that’ll be produced at a rate of one per month, and more DC Universe Classics, including Adam Strange and Starfire. For a first effort at a storefront for such a popular company, it looks very exciting.

So, SDCC was just as exciting for us at home, and I’m going to keep on telling myself that. I got the stuff I wanted, got to buy it while wearing nothing but my underpants, and no one was the wiser. They weren’t so thrilled when I tried that at Target.

Many years ago Wifey and I had a discussion about our most recent vacations, always going to the same island off Florida, even after our daughters no longer went with us. “Where do you want to go?”, “No you tell me first where you want to go.” So each of us took paper and Crayola in hand, turned our backs so we could secretly write all the places we wanted to visit for vacation, each listing fifteen picks. When finished we compared lists, and to no real surprise our lists were very similar.

Over the years we set out to try and cross off one place from our list each year. While it’s taken more time than we anticipated, most spots have been visited. Now one is left on the list, the area of the Northwestern corner of the US.

Our focus on vacations over the years has shifted. We have added extra days to our auto travel time to stop along the way at antique stores or when flying to a destination, carrying extra suit cases, for shipping items home.

Knowing before we travel where the best antique shops are located allows us to map out a route and arrange places to stay. I have described mapping out a route, then writing a letter to one shop requesting brochures for other locations in the area. We also use listings found on web sites to help find places.

We recently went through Central Wisconsin and Minnesota, and earlier we had a trip down through Western Illinois, across the center of the state and into Indiana, always searching for that special bargain for our collections or resale. Our spring trip to Florida was by air, but we did have a small chance to peruse several old favorite places.

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When one of our readers gave me a link to her web site in a comment on one of my blogs, I naturally had to check it out. And will wonders never cease, the site is for advertisers with antique and collectible shops and shows from Washington to California. Jim and Bliss Cochran publish a book, available free at any of the advertisers or on line at their web site created by Jim. Started twenty years ago in California, the book features maps identifying locations in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, Idaho and Arizona. Bliss shared with us that they are not much into collections because of their life style and limited space.

Now I know that this year’s vacation time is either used up or allocated for later this fall so again we will have to put the thought on hold for another year. But hunting out in our Western states remains on the radar and with my interest raised by checking out the Cochran’s site. For more info see their site or email them.

If you have a favorite mall or shop, or web site that features locations in your area, please share them with me in the comments below, and I will be adding to my list of places to visit and will inform all our readers in the future.

Before the days of Electronic Talking Battleship, and before the fabled era of Crossfire and Domino Rally and those gluttonous, snap-jawed Hippos that I grew up with (but still around the same time that all of those pesky Mice that needed to be Trapped in the most circuitous fashion ever)… there was Mr. Know-It-All. His head was a lightbulb.

When I came across this 1967 Mr. Know-It-All board game on the mega-cheap, I was entranced. Not only do I usually feel like I was born in the wrong planet decade, but these older games have a certain resonance with me, even though I have no childhood experience with them at all. Call it a love of design evolution, a desire for simplicity, or call it reincarnation, but either way, these things come home with me. I’m enchanted by the idea of ‘used to’; how kids used to play, how doors used to be left unlocked, how life used to be a heck of a lot simpler.

The game consists of a set of multiple-choice question cards, all of which have SAT and IQ test-style questions on them. Below these questions are a set of three answers, each one positioned by a hole in the card itself. Once the player figures out their answer, they align their question card on a special cardboard grid that’s covered with a whole bunch of colors. Whichever ‘answer hole’ matches up with a green spot on the grid is the correct answer, and presumably, said player gets gloating rights, fame, and fortune. The set that I acquired is missing the instruction manual, so for all I know, the winner might officially get a swift groin-punch for becoming the dreaded and much-maligned ‘Know-It-All’… never a title that a sensible, social human being would covet.

So, the game mechanics are charming, but how do the questions measure up, 40 years later? While the game box states that it’s designed for ‘ages 7 thru 15′, I’d have a hard time finding an ‘average’ 7-year old who’d be able to complete a complex arithmetic sequence, understand fulcrums, estimate spatial relations and solve riddles about familial relations. This leads me to believe that either we’ve become a whole lot stupider, or just a whole lot lazier. Mr. Know-It-All has become Mr. Know-It-All-If-It-Relates-To-Hannah-Montana (Or High-School-Musical). And yes, you can find quiz games relating to those two subjects in today’s toy aisles, but nothing even close to the original brain-squeeze of Mr. Know-It-All.

Is this because thinking isn’t really regarded as ‘fun’ anymore? As someone who grew up with copies of GAMES Magazine lying around the house, I embraced the sport of thinking far more easily than I grasped superbasket or sportsball games. Of course, this was well before I realized that I’d make more money running around hitting things than by thinking about them – a decision that still haunts me today. Still, I can’t help but think that if my Freshman Year bullies had grown up with a copy of Mr. Know-It-All in the house, I’d have had a few less pieces of fruit ever-so-athletically hurled at my head.

The game itself was prepared by Robert M. Goldenson, a ‘known psychologist’, and ‘T.V. Personality’, back from the days when they still used dots in the word ‘TV’ like it was an abbreviation or something. He later went on to write a million dictionaries about sex, so he was clearly diversifying his output to all ends of the psychological spectrum. Goldenson is quoted as saying that, “Play is the way the child learns
what no one can teach him”, and as a teacher, I should have known to disguise my lessons as games. It’s all so clear now.

Here’s my call to see a resurgence of ’smart’ games like Mr. Know-It-All. And not just ones that are marketed to ‘gifted’ kids via catalogue and specialty shop – I want to see them right alongside those Harry Potter DVD trivia games. If your kid can recite every spell that Hermione ever cast, surely they can figure out a set of tangrams. Seriously.

(And the answers are all B, for those of you keeping track.)

According to The Bible, God created just about everything in a week. Obviously, he didn’t have a day job to get in the way of his creative impulses, because it takes me about a week just to finish up a single comic page. When you don’t have to eat or pay for car insurance, you can pretty much rock ’til the break of dawn without any consequences. So, what did this God do BEFORE he slapped together The World As We Know It?

Dave McKean asked this back in 1998, and it pretty much changed my perception of film forever. He answered his own question with a 23-minute film called ‘The Week Before’, which I subsequently passed around to all of my family, friends, girlfriends, classmates, congressmen and pets. Seriously – I was merciless, because I felt as if I’d found gold. After a while, my VHS copy did what all VHS copies do and started to fuzz out, losing definition and the return on my investment, but I’d seen it enough times to pretty much be able to reenact it myself if I had to. For a while, the VHS was even worth a whole fistful of money.

As an (over)active Dave McKean collector, I found that his books were always relatively easy to hunt down and purchase, either through Amazon or contacting his publicist, Allen Spiegel, directly – but McKean’s films were not easily accessible. I ended up purchasing enhanced-CD singles from the UK by obscure bands because the Dave McKean music videos inside, or CD-Rom projects by The Residents because McKean had illustrated a short story hidden somewhere on the disc. Mostly, I hit a thousand dead ends – grasping at rumors of new McKean projects, scanning press shots for clues, and finding nothing. Even as the age of the internet rolled around, there was very little to find. It wasn’t even until this month that the computer adept McKean even had a website of his own.

So, I’m pretty thrilled that McKean has finally released Keanoshow, a DVD compilation of all his major works, even if it duplicates my hard-fought collecting victories of the past decade. You might recognize his work from the film ‘Mirrormask‘, or the occasional CD or comic cover – but even as you recognize it, it shifts into something completely new and beautiful.

McKean’s film work has many recurring visual themes – a layering of images so dense that it’s almost unfathomable, scrawling ink drawings on things that aren’t usually drawn on, wrinkled paper, expressionless masks somehow emoting, and a cloud of dark surrealism surrounding everything. Sometimes he’s narrative in his works, and sometimes he goes relatively abstract – but he never completely abandons the narrative that’s inherently implied by juxtaposing objects, and the way that they are observed by the camera.

The DVD includes just about every major and minor work that McKean created since 1998, including commercials, music videos, a few odds and ends, and his five ten-minute-or-more short films.

‘The Week Before‘ is the first on the disc, and reproduced great clarity – so much so that certain portions of the film that I was never able to clearly make out on the VHS (even before its ritualistic abuse) have finally presented themselves. Also included is ‘N[eon]‘, a plodding little film about a naked ghost wandering the streets of Venice, and the man who loves her, mostly inspired by McKean’s love of Venice and the font of artworks that came from his visit there. ‘Displacements‘ is a set of six digital ‘rooms’ that McKean constructed for another filmmaker, who subsequently tore them apart and filmed the results. They present themselves as these claustrophobic, slow crawls through the finite landscapes – and are somehow a lot more fascinating than I expected. Because of the digital nature of the rooms, things change while they’re out of view, and the ‘viewer’ can zoom infinitely into any detail, finding secrets and losing them at the same time.

Also included is ‘Whack!‘, which you probably won’t want to watch after dark. Inspired by McKean’s work with Neil Gaiman on the graphic novel Mr. Punch, Whack! is a live-action staging of the ultra-violent Punch & Judy show. Hilarious when it’s made of puppets (as most things are), but terrifying when it’s made of people – made moreso by the camerawork, which darts around the room as if trying to avoid the spastic violence – all taking place in a small tent, which feels smaller and smaller as Punch progresses through his serial killings. Finally, there’s ‘Dawn‘, which is a typical (excellent) McKean narrative about thought, the nature of the universe and our place in it, presented with McKean’s grace and humor, and narrated by McKean’s genuinely soothing voice. For all of his work illustrating things for Neil Gaiman, I’ve always found McKean to be a vastly superior author. Dangerously obsessive Gaiman devotees, please direct your rage to the comments section below and you will be dealt with in kind.

Not to be concluded there, there are four very short commercial works, 2 semi-sarcastic mini-documentaries that McKean made about his artistic process for Kodak and Adobe, a sampling of film from other incomplete projects, four music videos, and absolutely best of all – Show and Tell, an hour-long film that Dave McKean shot of himself without the usual subterfuge of surrealism and layered imagery that he usually shrouds himself in. He unpretentiously talks about his entire filmmaking career, even sharing super-8 clips that he made with his friends as a kid, running around in superhero costumes. Within the ‘Show and Tell’ segment, he answers every question I’ve ever had about his rumored half-projects and even shares what they would have looked like were they completed. I find myself unable to want anything more.

Keanoshow is absolutely an essential part of my library of great and inspiring film shorts – the Wholfin collection, The Brothers Quay, The Animation Show, The Director’s Series Michel Gondry. Plus, obscure artsy DVDs are always a great way to get a girl back to your room and impress her with your sensitivity to alternative film. You know, at least the worthwhile girls. It was worth the decade-long waiting period.

For the DVD. Not the girls.