As *spoon* as Arch comes back from vacation Hepcat will still be Hepcat. 8 8

[Hepcat]

Here's my second team of favourite funny animal comic characters:

 

14. Animaniacs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15. Pogo Possum

 

 

 

16. Daffy Duck

 

 

 

17. Uncle Scrooge

 

 

 

18. Mary Jane and Sniffles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

19. Crusader Rabbit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20. Buzzy the Crow

 

 

 

 

21. Little Roquefort and Percy Puss

 

 

 

 

 

 

22. Space Mouse

 

 

 

 

23. Pluto

 

 

 

 

 

24. Wile E. Coyote

 

 

  

 

 

25. Chilly Willy

 

 

 

26. Sourpuss and Gandy Goose

 

 

 

 

[sagii]

Cool line up Hep  Some real animation icons in there! Funny, Road Runner got the top billing, but Wile E. was truly the 'star'. 

[Hepcat]

Interesting looking at my rankings by major studio group:

 

WARNER BROS.

11. Sylvester

13. Foghorn Leghorn

14. Animaniacs

16. Daffy Duck

18. Mary Jane and Sniffles

24. Wile E. Coyote

 

WALT DISNEY

1. Uncle Remus' Brer Rabbit

7. Goofy

17. Uncle Scrooge

23. Pluto

 

TERRYTOONS

5. Deputy Dawg

8. Heckle and Jeckle

21. Little Roquefort and Percy Puss

26. Sourpuss and Gandy Goose

 

WALTER LANTZ

12. Andy Panda

22. Space Mouse

25. Chilly Willy

 

[Hepcat]

I was a big fan as a kid of Monogram's three Fred Flypogger kits by Mouse primarily due to these cool ads that ran in DC comic books in the spring of 1965:

 

 

 

 

 

The Classic Plastic Model Kits book by Rick Polizzi also contains the following estimate of prices for boxed Monogram Fred Flypogger kits:


Speed Shift! $280
Super Fuzz! $280
Flip Out! $125


Here's a closer look at the box art from the three kits:

 

 

 

 

And here are pictures of these kits from my own collection:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[sagii]

On 6/21/2017 at 11:07 AM, Hepcat said:

Interesting looking at my rankings by major studio group:

 

WARNER BROS.

11. Sylvester

13. Foghorn Leghorn

14. Animaniacs

16. Daffy Duck

18. Mary Jane and Sniffles

24. Wile E. Coyote

 

WALT DISNEY

1. Uncle Remus' Brer Rabbit

7. Goofy

17. Uncle Scrooge

23. Pluto

 

TERRYTOONS

5. Deputy Dawg

8. Heckle and Jeckle

21. Little Roquefort and Percy Puss

26. Sourpuss and Gandy Goose

 

WALTER LANTZ

12. Andy Panda

22. Space Mouse

25. Chilly Willy

 

The interesting thing about this list Hep, is your list does not include 'company men' Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Even Donald Duck is missing. And Lantz Mascot Woody Woodpecker is not on it either. 

[Hepcat]

And of course Mighty Mouse is the lead Terrytoons character.

 

 

It's because I've always preferred the less commonly known characters! Shows I'm an iconoclast and a hardcore fan (or something like that).

 

Edited June 23, 2017 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

Rick Polizzi's book also contains the following estimate of prices for boxed Hawk Frantic and Silly Surfer kits:

 

Bopped out Steel Pluckers Havin' a Bash $85
Frantic Banana Punishing the Skins $85
Totally Fab $85
Frantic Cats $75

Woodie on a Surfari $80
Hodad Makin' the Scene with a Six-Pack $75
Beach Bunny Catchin' Rays $70
Hot Dogger and Surf Bunny Riding Tandem $65
Hot Dogger Hangin' Ten $65

 

Here are pics of some of these kits:

 

 

And here's a shot of some of my own:

 

 

[Hepcat]

The Pactra paint bottles that were sold in the sixties were quite a bit nicer in shape than the more common Testors paint bottles, and of course light years nicer than the little cans in which the Humbol paint was sold. 

 

These Pactra paints were sold either individually or packaged in sets. Here's a good picture of the Crazy Cool Colors Weird-Oh Paint Set that I lifted from Ebay:

 

 

 

 

Here are a few pictures of the Weird-Oh Paint Set from my own collection:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The set was one of my higher priorities for a number of years because the graphics are so wild cool!

 

Finally here are three other unused Pactra Paint Sets I have:

 

 

Pactra Paint Locker

 

 

 

 

 

Pactra Body Shop

 

 

 

 

 

Pactra Funnycar Colors

 

 

 

 

 

[Hepcat]

As a grade school kid in the 1958-65 years I was much more heavily into monster and Sci-Fi flicks than I was into Westerns. Part of the reason may have been that the squeaky clean good guys in Westerns rubbed me the wrong way. I'd often cheer for the bad guy. It wasn't until the emergence of anti-heroes such as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in the spaghetti Westerns from later in the sixties that I acquired an interest in Westerns.

 

That being said as a youngster I still wanted a nice cap gun and holster set like this one:

 

 

 

 

I mean shooting off rolls of caps!  Talk about cool!  

 

 

 

 

In fact even today I'd still like to add a good vintage cap gun and holster set to my toy collection, especially one branded with the name of one of my favourite cowboys such as the Lone Ranger, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid or Kid Colt Outlaw. I'd sit up there on my upper porch and shoot off my cap gun at the squirrels and birds in the branches of the maple tree overhanging my house! Of course these days I'm sure that one of the neighbourhood busybodies/killjoys would call 911 for the SWAT team.... Bloody hell! Nanny state. Nothing's allowed these days.

 

As kids though I remember we had firecrackers too!

 

 

 

 

Whole packs of little sticks of TNT for a nickel or a dime! What could be better for a red-blooded kid? Nothing's better I say than the smell of firecrackers in the morning. Well maybe modelling cement later on in the day....

 

 

[Batman1fan]

I echo the sentiments about the cap gun.  I used to have a pretty good vintage cap gun collection, but I sold them to further my comic book collection.  If you're looking to buy a vintage cap gun, I recommend the Nichols Stallion 45 Mark II.  They're not cheap, but they are as close to the real thing as I've ever seen, and very well made.  A mint in box example should run you between $500.00 and $700.00, depending on the condition of the box.

[Hepcat]

Wow! Nice gun!

Were these Stallion Mark II's sold as sets with holsters as well as in the boxes?

I would have loved a realistic looking six-gun like that one as a kid, but now I lean toward the somewhat tackier ones taking rolls of caps that would then protrude from the top of the gun after being shot off. The latter look more like the top notch toy six-guns I saw and admired as a kid.

 

Edited June 27, 2017 by Hepcat

[Batman1fan]

That's the One!  They did make them in holster sets, I believe, but those sets are way harder to find than the boxed examples.  The way they worked was pretty neat, but would have been a huge PITA as a kid playing with it.  The six bullets are 2 piece, the lead center piece, which has a hole through it, and the brass casing.  The caps were individual round caps, and to fire the gun, you would remove the casing from the lead bullet, place a cap on the back of the bullet and place the brass casing over the bullet with the cap between the 2 pieces.  You would then insert the cartridge into the cylinder, then repeat this 5 more times.  The hole in the bullet section allowed smoke to come out of the barrel when the gun was fired.  As cool as this was, after you fired your 6 shots, your friends who were armed with traditional 50 shot repeaters would kill you forty times by the time you could reload.  When I had my example, I did fire it 6 times, just to say I did, and I have to admit, seeing the smoke come out of the barrel was pretty darn Cool!  I don't know if I was more surprised that the gun worked the way it was supposed to, or that 60 year old caps still fired.

 

[Hepcat]

18 hours ago, Batman1fan said:

The hole in the bullet section allowed smoke to come out of the barrel when the gun was fired.  As cool as this was, after you fired your 6 shots, your friends who were armed with traditional 50 shot repeaters would kill you forty times by the time you could reload.  

 

 

Hmmmmm. Sounds to me as if I'd need a run-of-the-mill cap gun for everyday use to keep marauding squirrels and raccoons off my upper porch plus a Nichols Stallion 45 Mark II for display purposes.

 

 

Here anyway is a good video of the Nichols Stallion 45 Mark II in action:

 

 

Edited June 28, 2017 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

I don't think Adventures of the Fly 13 was the first copy of The Fly I leafed through on the newsstand as a kid:

 

 

It was probably the second or maybe even the third. What made issue #13 so special to me though was that it contained house ads for the debut of the mysterious Fly Girl and clearly very heroic Jaguar:

 

 

 

Wow! These ads left such an indelible impression on my young psyche that I still remember viewing them with awe at Lamont & Perkins Pharmacy that one fine day 56 years ago!

But now I keep asking myself why that issue of The Adventures of the Fly didn't therefore prompt me to seek out other comics. Here are scans of a half dozen other comics from my present day collection that I might have found on newsstands at the time:

 

 

The fact that I didn't actually buy that issue of The Fly though is a clue. I didn't have too many dimes to spend in May of 1961 even though I wasn't collecting that year's baseball cards which compared to those of the previous two years weren't very colourful and thus appealing:

 

1961 Topps

 

But Victoria Day which was commonly known to kids as Firecracker Day was on May 24th. Yes, that was the time of year you could hit your dad up for a dime or even a quarter for the purchase of mini incendiary devices!

 

 

Great stuff! Firecracker Day was certainly a highlight on every red-blooded kid's calendar in those days. The killjoys and philistines would put an end to that line of amusement a few years later but in 1961 variety stores did a brisk trade selling firecrackers to young boys.

Moreover a dime was a serious piece of currency anyway in those days. A Canadian dime contained exactly 0.06 ounces of silver meaning that at the present moment's silver price of U.S.$16.635 per ounce it was worth U.S.$1.00 or Cdn.$1.30 in today's terms. Two packs of cards containing a total of eight cards and eight flat sections of bubble gum, a ten ounce bottle of pop including the two cent deposit, a full size chocolate bar, a good sized bag of chips or a two scoop ice cream cone could be had for a dime in those days. That's right, two scoops or double the amount shown on the sign below:

 

 

Even a penny was a not insignificant bit of currency. A penny could get you a proper sized piece of Dubble Bubble or Bazooka gum:

 

 

Or a very decent sized gumball from a penny vending machine like the ones in this Bozo machine I scored at a toy show some eight years ago:

 

 

The only Bozo machine I ever saw as a kid was in Ken's Variety on Wharncliffe Road in London but it was so cool that it left quite the impression on me. I therefore had to buy the one above when I saw it at the show. 

Coincidentally the closest store to my house in early 1961 with a full-sized comic spinner rack also happened to be Ken's Variety. But what was the point of making the four block trek to Ken's to view comics I didn't have the money to buy? 

 

Edited July 2, 2017 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

It's tough to overemphasize how crucial a role the Aurora monster model kits had in turning me into a monster enthusiast as a kid.

You see unlike most of my fellow baby boomers on this board, I wasn't exposed to any of the Universal monster flicks as a kid. First of all, we didn't acquire a TV until sometime in 1961. Secondly our TV only picked up the one local London station, CFPL, until we got cable in 1966. I don't remember CFPL televising any monster movies while I was still in grade school meaning that any monster movies that CFPL might have aired would have been well past my bedtime. And there was certainly no horror host on CFPL.

Moreover I just wasn't a big TV watcher as a kid anyway. I doubt that I even watched six hours of TV a week, and most of that was cartoons when I came home for lunch and right after school. Watching baseball games bored me and Hockey Night in Canada was telecast only on Saturday evenings and initially only the last part of the games was televised between 9:00 and 10:30. I'd typically fall asleep before the end of the game anyway. Regular CFL telecasts on CFPL didn't start until a couple of years later. I remember listening to radio broadcasts of CFL games on CKSL radio in 1961 and 1962 instead.

The only horror movies I can remember seeing prior to mid-1962 were the following:

 

The Day of the Triffids (at either the Twilight or Sunset drive-ins).
The Monolith Monsters (at either the Twilight or Sunset drive-ins).
The Curse of Frankenstein & Horror of Dracula (double feature at either the Capitol or Loews downtown theatres).
Target Earth (at a Saturday kids' matinee at our neighbourhood Hyland Theatre).
The Quatermass Xperiment (at a Saturday kids' matinee at our neighbourhood Hyland Theatre).

 

 

Now I'd been exposed to the fabled Topps You'll Die Laughing cards in the schoolyard in 1959 but I didn't have any at the time:

 

 

And the Leaf Spook Stories cards were the first non-sport cards I collected aggressively as a kid in early 1962:

 

 

I had the complete set of the first series and a bit of the second series.

But it was an expedition with my mother to the Kresge store on Dundas Street in downtown London one day in late 1962 that proved truly pivotal:

 

 

That's when I first encountered the Aurora Wolf Man model kit:

 

 

When the Creature then turned up with the others at the Kresge store in 1963 my already fevered longing for these kits shifted into overdrive:

 

 

I couldn't imagine my mother buying me one of these kits so I just didn't ask. DC then stoked the fire of my desires with these two ads on the back covers of their comics hitting the newsstands in September 1963 and January 1964 respectively:

 

 

As it turned out, before getting one of these kits I managed to score a super cool Creature-Wolf Man wallet by meeting my sales quota of Globe and Mail newspapers one Saturday morning in the spring of 1964:

 

 

It was the Mummy that would actually be the first Aurora kit I'd then acquire and build:

 

 

The Bride of Frankenstein was the second:

 

 

All great memories of course, but not one of them has anything to do with watching the classic Universal monster movies on TV!

 

[Tony D]

Thank you for bringing back so many great memories, Hepcat. I built all those Universal Monster Model Kits and painted them with Testors Paint. They were all in my parent's garage for many years after I had moved out of their house, until one of my younger cousins asked my father for them to sell at a church bazaar. So, if anyone out there has a Mummy model with Imhotep printed in paint under the base, I built and painted it.

[Hepcat]

16 hours ago, Tony D said:

I built all those Universal Monster Model Kits and painted them with Testors Paint. They were all in my parent's garage for many years after I had moved out of their house, until one of my younger cousins asked my father for them to sell at a church bazaar.

 

 

What year was this church bazaar?

 

 

Oh well. At least someone didn't use them as a BB gun target, or take a magnifying glass to them.

 

[Duffman_Comics]

Hepcat, do you have any of your built models?

[Hepcat]

No. I think I left a Revell Angel Fink and an Aurora Bride of Frankenstein and Mummy at the boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine I attended for ninth grade. All the others just disappeared somehow. I guess somebody threw them out at some point.

 

Edited December 23, 2017 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

My favourite record store when I was in high school from 1966-70 was Bluebird Records on the south side of Dundas Street just west of Wellington Street in downtown London, Ontario. It was two blocks away from my high school and was perhaps my most frequent after school haunt. One of my strongest memories of Bluebird Records is of the three Rolling Stones' EPs that were always up there on the wall near the counter:

 

 

  

 

 

Bluebird Records is where in 1967 I bought my first record, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and perhaps all of the first half dozen(?) or so:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can recall only three different sales clerks. Two of these were always in the store and they seemed quite knowledgeable (and super cool and sophisticated!) to me at the time.

 

Bluebird closed its doors sometime in the mid-seventies in the face of other, perhaps better capitalized, record stores opening their doors in downtown London.

 

The other record shop I frequented in my early record buying days in 1967-68 was the Disc Shop in the Wellington Square Mall which was a block south of Bluebird Records and was anchored by an Eaton's department store. While prices were the same, the Disc Shop did much more volume than Bluebird Records because of the popularity of the Wellington Square Mall and could therefore be a bit of a zoo. As a result, the Disc Shop seemed more chaotic and less organized to me and I just didn't patronize it as much.