Birthday Bounty 2023: Into the Archives

 

Yesterday as part of the ongoing celebration of my 60^th birthday (on the day itself Susan and Andy took me to the Chinese Buffet with Kameron and Kelsey and Ryan, and afterwards there was cake and company and a card with a present), my brother John treated me with a voyage to Kerrville (over 100 miles away) to visit a wondrous store called EntertainMart (as well as other discount stores, and a meal). I later found out that this is a franchise that has at least 11 stores here in Texas, most in the northern part of the state; the one in Kerrville seems to be the closest to us. I don’t know if this their standard operating procedure, but this one seems to have come to inhabit the building of a defunct Hastings, like a hermit crab taking over an empty seashell.

It was a beautiful, almost nostalgic experience, as it featured (both new and used) books, movies, action figures, and video games. I came away with fun memories with family and the following swag my brother bought for me.

These figures of Pete and Chip and Dale as they appear in the Kingdom Hearts games was almost the first thing I saw but the last thing I put on my ‘pile’. This was because I had assumed that such a big figure would easily be in the $30 range; but looking at it again before we left, I was happily shocked to find it was discounted to a mere $7! Having it at home and unwrapping it, I was once more reminded of the worst aspect of toy ‘collecting’ (if my random heaps could be called such a formal term as a ‘collection’), which is taking things out of their packaging without harming the toy. As action figures became more and more slanted towards ‘collectibles’ the containers have grown all the more secure. Once opened, I was particularly pleased that the smaller one-piece figures of Chip and Dale (dressed in their little engineer aprons) were actually so well made that they could actually stand on their own feet, which doesn’t always happen with figures like this.

Almost the first thing on my pile was this figure of Sauron from BST AXN (which I can only surmise means “Best Action”). I already have a Gandalf in this line, it is LOTR, so this was a no-brainer. It was $12.99. They had an Aragorn and a Legolas as well, but I felt no compunction for them; I already have so many variations of those characters in the Toy Biz line. Oddly enough, as I snatched it up and carried it around for an hour or so, I thought it was the Witch King because I was so busy with the wonder and variety of the store.

On the book front, I picked up these older versions of Tolkien books when John pointed out how inexpensive they were: The Tolkien Reader ($1.99), The Two Towers (99 cents) and The Return of the King ($1.49). At these prices I couldn’t afford not to get them!  I had other opportunities to get this run multiple times but avoided it for various reasons: I never liked the cover art, it seemed an unnecessary expense for buying what is the essentially the same thing I already owned, never found them so many of them altogether, and so on. But they were the first authorized paperback printing in the US (after a pirated edition), issued in the Sixties and early Seventies, and so relics of the First Wave Fandom. My editions were the ones with covers by Tolkien himself, and I had the run by Darrell K. Sweet, which came out after The Silmarillion (I gave the Trilogy to Kenny when he left for Florida).   I wonder how many more years must pass before I try to collect other editions, including the 50^th Anniversary run that produced this abomination:

There at EntertainMart they also had super-duper new hardback editions of The Silmarillion and the 1-volume LOTR, in the $130+ range. Ultra desirable, but quite impossible at the moment. In the meantime, I think I will simply order a nice cheap copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to complete this series. If this goshfurshlugginer month will ever end.