When I was a kid, there was a store like no other, and it was called Consumers Distributing.

Consumers Distributing was Amazon before the internet. It was either so sensationally ahead of its time that one wonders if Jack Stubb was in fact a visitor from the future, or so permanently wedged in the intransigent spaces between true marketing trends that it was essentially the Laserdisc of its day. Consumers Distributing was shop-at-home shopping, where you still had to actually go to a store. But what a store.

Once a year the heavy, industrious Consumers Distributing catalogue - like a roided up Ikea catalogue, with extra sass - would THUMP on the door step, and it'd be off to the races. Given my age at the time (well, given my age anytime ever), the races was toys. To the toy section of the catalogue I would flip, and like Eisenhower planning D-day, I would chart out the accumulation of plastic men into my forces. After all, going to a traditional toy shop is such a horribly risky affair for a lad - will they have Dusty? What if they only have one, and my best friend Geoff gets his hands on it first? Who wouldn't want the sensational security of those gloss-bound catalogue pages, and their promise of systematic, gentlemanly shopping assurance?

Of course, it was never quite like that, but the ideal was beautiful. Off to the C.D. you'd go, and belly up to one of the geodesic kiosks littering the showroom floor; the catalogue would match the one you had in your house (you would already have memorized the relevant page numbers, to accelerate the process); the golf pencils would scribe the 6-digit code on the tiny slip of paper, and the guy in the wicket would take your slip into the back, and out would come your toy. Sometimes.

Well, there was the plot hole, anyway. Perfect idea; unreliable execution. After all, if (with catalogue in hand), you had to call the Consumers Distributing beforehand to find out if your 6-digit code was actually in stock, and tangible reality instead of a dream on paper, what separated C.D. from the animal magnitude of the Hudson's Bay Company, or Toy City? Nothing, that's what, save for the rank anarchy of the toy aisles and the bloodshot look in Geoff's eye when he - and you - realized simultaneously that there was one Dusty left, and it would be a foot race to determine who got it first.

A few times a year when I pass Sunnybrook mall, where the former Consumers is now a drug store (? - and don't get me started on what happened to Boots), I can't help but become nostalgic over the brief window of time where golf-pencil buying was the sport of kings, just like I occasionally miss the feel of a big CAV laserdisc in my hand as I laboriously flipped it over to get to the next 30 minutes of analog-cum-digital content. The times, they were a' changin', and the weirdest and most amazing shit was constantly happening.

Posted by tederick at 1:01 PM in arcana & toys!
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When I was in grade 9, my English class was made up of 27 boys, 3 girls. Our teacher was Mrs. Venton, and as the urban legend goes, she later went insane. In the hindsight of adulthood I can tell that, generally speaking, she withstood the unending onslaught of pubescent testosterone (the strongest, and stinkiest, brand of testosterone) with relative stability over the course of the 10 months in which we hollered, hooted, and kicked desks clean over in her miserable, third-floor afternoon English class. And yet, there is a seductive quality to the notion of Mrs. Venton's eventual, rumoured nervous breakdown. Confronted with the baboon-like yowling and staunch academic dispassion of 27 male bodies fitting and starting to find their way to full adulthood, she lost her cool more than once ("ya stupid fools!") and after we were done with her, she was never heard from again. Except for the legend, which stands thus:

Shortly after we were done with her, Mrs. Venton came upon a loonie which had been accidentally sealed into the newly-made hallway floor of North Toronto C.I., and went insane trying to pick it up.

I am relatively sure this did not happen. When asking Mr. Waldron about it years later, he said this did not happen. But lordy, lord, what a story. What a clear, precise concept: a grade 9 English teacher, nearly obliterated by we horrible, monstrous boys, confronted with a single immovable object and completely doing her nut trying to move it. It may not be "true," but it'll be true till the day I die.

Posted by tederick at 7:33 AM in arcana
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On Friday, before the wedding, I was downtown anyway dropping off the rock star's dress, and I had about an hour to kill before I had to get dressed, so I went for a burrito - I am all about the halibut lately, belated obsession though that be. I hit the Snail en route, as is my custom, although nothing I read shipped this week so my pull bin was empty. But there it was as I came through the door: the Gargan action figure. Which here matters because, as mentioned previously, she is the last one.

It's actually been thirteen years, give or take. Thirteen years back I got off the Steeles bus outside my grandmother's condo, took a walk across the street (it was snowing), and into Toys R Us, because I'd heard that Hasbro had re-established the Star Wars action figure line - they were calling it "Power of the Force 2," the sequel/continuation to the line's failed attempt at continuing past Return of the Jedi, circa 1984. And... hey, what else am I about if I'm not about about that? So they had a few of the new figures there, including this Ben with a really long lightsabre, and they all looked goddamn weird and awkward but I bought the Ben anyway because he generally looked the most like a human and, c'mon, it's Ben. Then Light & Magic happened and I bought a few more, and then at some point in 1996 I was standing in that same TRU with Adam holding a Jawa 2-pack in my hand, and Adam said something along the lines of "I'll take one, you take one, we'll split it" - yes, these are two 20somethings here - and as far as I'm concerned, the deal was done. Something kicked off in both of us (though he turned back far sooner than I), and the avalanche began which, a baker's dozen years later, lead to something in the neighbourhood of six hundred of the things as a final tally - although right at this moment, over half of them are gone again. Still... six hundred. Droids and jawas and Jedi and pregno-Padme; Jabba aliens by the fucking bucketfull, so many that I even started making my own; and Lukes and Chewies and Slave Leias and Bens beyond measure; and insignificant characters, lord man howdy, how I loved the insignificant characters. Sio Bibble and this guy and Aunt frickin' Beru with her blue milk.

And this stated a bunch of other things too, what with Sideshow and Simpsons and really expensive pirates and I even have a vintage Toht, and one on card too, yeah. But the best of all of it was always and ever shall be Darth Vader with Removable Helmet, which they've re-made a dozen times since but never come close to making as cool as they did on the first try, the tiny piece of plastic in which a shred of my 10-year-old soul permanently resides. And that was in... 1997? Early '98? When the best year of your hobby is ten years back, it's time to look for an exit. Gargan seemed like a good fit - they tried to make her back in '85, but as I recall the prototype got shitcanned because she has so many boobies. Six of them! No self-respecting toy line should ever have a six-titted prostitute as part of its character line, one presumed, at least until whatever phenomenal conversion shift I myself was a part of in the late 1990s, when toys stopped being made for kids and started being made for me. They made Gargan, the Fat Dancer, and I'm out.

(If they ever make Bea Arthur, I'll come back.)

And with all that done, I came home with my action figure firmly in hand and, upon entering, found one of my Jack Sparrow dreadlocks lying on the floor in the doorway to my room. Thinking at first that Zam had - as is her way - destroyed something I cared about, I became riled, and then I had a look at the wig. And, in what can only be described as a rather perfect little Pirates of the Caribbean moment, I turned the thing over in my hand to find the back of it eaten out by grubs. Some unholy combination of the heat, the humidity, the age, or just the primordial fucking filth we now live in at 3QF, conspired to turn my custom-made Jack Sparrow pirate wig into a couple months' worth of food for a colony of mealworms. And as the thing literally decayed in my hands while I stared at - the sheer action of bringing it down off the shelf upon which it has sat since my rather lovely Hallowe'en, was enough to tear apart the few remaining strands maintaining the wig's shape - it ceased to be a thing, and became a former thing, nothing more than a cluster of digital photographs, really warm memories, and at least one Jack Sparrow bolt-in-terror moment when that damn Obeah woman asked for my number.

Here's the thing: I hang on to things. Tangible relics of stuff that otherwise live only in my head, or in my eyes, or on movie screens across the nation, literally clutter the very ground I walk on. My grandmother used to have a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary next to her bed; I have a glow-in-the-dark King of the Dead. It comes to the same thing, which is a talisman by which to channel some inexpressible force that flows through my life; without the relics to hang on to occasionally, I become nauseous and indistinct. But this is, after all - and today was not the first time I have realized this - an imperfect solution to a larger problem, because all matter is so frustratingly impermanent and vague. I used to say there was something I liked about having a tiny, perfect Luke Skywalker standing on my desk with his lightsabre in hand, that it said something to something in me in a language beyond arcane. But that same relic melts, turns sticky, gets dusty and loses its colour, gets handed down to kids (because kids are supposed to have these things) or thrown out with the trash. Matter doesn't matter. These are all just signposts on the way to the larger, glowing somethingorother.

Posted by tederick at 3:45 PM in ADAM & arcana & death & galaxy far & pirates & poetical & toys!
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The new Indy figures have at least one thing going for them that I really admire: a genuine mail-away offer. God I miss those things. When we were kids, Adam and I collected our proofs-of-purchase on Star Wars figures so we could mail away for Nien Nunb and the Emperor. He got the latter, I got the former. I don't think you even had to pay shipping and handling - it was like they were rewarding you for giving a fuck about the toys, not trying to make a secondary buck on exclusive merchandise. (Well sure: getting kids to ante up on five figures to get the free one wasn't the stupidest marketing ploy of all time. But it seemed more innocent then.) In fact I think my entire fondness for Nien Nunb as a character in Return of the Jedi came from the process of collecting those five blue circles and then getting a free figure in the mail 10-12 weeks later. I mean he's just a mouse with giant ears, but in mail-away form, he was cool. I wonder if there's a kid out there who's going to think a Crystal Skeleton is just the cat's fucking pajamas once he gets his in the mail in a few months.

Here's a Nien Nunb ad, to take you back.

Posted by tederick at 6:16 PM in ADAM & arcana & galaxy far & toys! & youtubery
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Oddly enough, they both look so much happier and better-adjusted, post-fight. And so do I.

Posted by tederick at 12:09 PM in arcana & megatron & toys! & youtubery
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