Well, the Christmas Season is upon us yet again, and I'm happy to announce a few things:

1) School's ending basically next week, so I'll have more time to blog!

2) I actually have some goddamn Christmas Cheer this year. I'm actually looking forward to Christmas.

On a subject of Christmas that I haven't covered yet, we come to the almighty Children's Bible known as the Sears Wish Book Catalog. Yes, for those of you who don't remember or too young, Retail stores such as Sears and J.C. Penney's had catalogues that would come out in mid-November called Wish Books. Well, they still do release these books, but they no longer come in the mail, are called Wish Books, nor are as kickass.

For one thing, these catalogs had EVERYTHING known to man, especially stuff that you'd never find in an actual Sears, like the Toys & Games sections. Also, at its peak in the mid-80s, early-90s, these books were in excess of 500 pages (the 1985 Sears book clocks in at 532 pages ). And yes, these catalogues date back to Sears early days since before 1894. A catalog from that year only had 322 pages.

Before I digress, I, as well as the rest of my generation, as well as the older ones that gre up in the 70s and 80s, considered Wish Books to be one of the holiest books imaginable. This was well before Amazon and the internet itself where you could just click on the thing you want, and then order it by clicking again. All we had to do was search all the pages, or like most kids, skip right to the good parts with the toys, games, electronics and high-priced novelty items, and just circle the pictures of what we wanted. And if we were lucky, our parents had to call Sears up on the phone to order it. But most of the time, they just went to Toys R Us and got the stuff themselves.

And through the 20 years I've been on this Earth, obviously I've gotten a lot of gifts, even moreso since i'm an only child so my parents had more money to concentrate on gifts for one person. And out of all the gifts I had gotten, there was that tiny few ones that I had never received, and most likely never will even scouring collectible shops and flea markets. After reading Matt of X-Entertainment.com fame's article on gifts received and missed from the 1985 Sears Wishbook, I have decided to do the same.

What are my favorite gifts that I have never gotten? I shall show you.

Green DragonZord - Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

Yes, after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze died off, there was basically no boy back in the day that never had an argument about which Power Ranger was the best (Green/White for me!) and the occaisonal discussion of which of the girl Power Rangers were hotter (I was a Pink Ranger guy myself, mostly because the Yellow Ranger sometimes sported a package). Back in the day before my Transformers obsession took off, I had many a Power Ranger Christmas (aka, all the presents being centered around one central theme. Besides PR Christmas, I've also had TMNT Christmas, Nintendo Christmas, and in recent years, Transformers/DVD Christmas). And as the geek I was, I thought the show was incredibly awesome, so I had to get all the toys.

The concept behind the "Zords" were that they were the Giant Robots piloted by the Power Rangers that combined into a bigger "Megazord" that fought the Monster of The Day when it grew 1000x its size in the last 5 minutes of the episode. Sounds a bit like Voltron? It should, as Voltron basically a cartoon version of the various Super Sentai series in Japan made around the same time, which the American Version takes all its footage & concepts from.

The above toy is of the Green Dragonzord, piloted by the Green Ranger, and it was the most kickass zord of them all in the first season. It was Green. It was a Dragon. And it was a fucking Robot. You couldn't lose, and being able to combine with the 4 supporting robots of the original Megazord (Triceratops, Pteradactyl, Sabre-Tooth Tiger, and Mastodon) to make an even more kickass Megazord, while the red Robot T-Rex just stood there as it really couldn't do much on its down despite being a robot T-Rex, certainly helped its cause. For several years, I had all of the various Megazords and supporting vehicles with the exception of this one. I have no idea why, but it had somehow escaped my clutches. My cousin had it, though, and I am still jealous about it. (Yes, the very same Cousin that I mentioned a few blogs back that owned the collection of GoBots).

This brings me to mentioning its companion toy that I also didn't have:

The Dragon Dagger. It was used by the Green Ranger not only as an awesome dagger weapon, it was also a flute that was used to summon the damn Dragon bot. Once again, I had collected all of the weapons in the early PR series, except for this one. For one thing, believe I remember not knowing it existed until a kid showed up with it one day at recess, and by that time it was too late to find it.

Classics Megatron

Now we come to something a bit more...recent. This version of Megatron was released in the Classics line of Transformers in 2006. Out of all the non-recolor figures in that entire line, this is the only figure that I don't have. The problem with this is that this is the first Megatron since the original released 20+ years that transforms into a fucking gun! A futuristic Nerf Gun, but a gun nonetheless. Damn Anti-Toy Gun Laws, we can't even import the G1 Rerelease from Japan!

Because of this, the figure went from "Hard To Find, but Still Possible" to "OMFG! NONE LEFT IN THE WORLD!" status in the span of a month, and I unfortunately did not forsee this. "Why can't you just go on Amazon?" For one thing, Hasbro had moved on with this series ever since the Movie and the subsequent figures arrived, and now they fetch a high price an any Transformers buyer's market, even Amazon where the Toys section is now carried by an independant toy company instead of Toys R Us, which basically equates to "Enormous Ripoff" at a respectable site like Amazon." Also, I have most of the Megatrons that have ever been released in the U.S., save for the Galvatron recolors (not needed), the smaller "Heroes of Cybertron" line or any smaller, inferior scale figure, the Megatron from Machine Wars (KB Toys exclusive series from 10 years ago, but the figure was subsequently recolored for the Robots in Disguise line, which I own), and any variation of the Movie Version of Megatron. I need my completion status, damnit!

Garfield Cat Tales 3-DVD set

And now we move to the realm of DVDs. This set serves a purpose in which to remind us all that there was a time when Garfield was great and funny. Besides the great "Garfield & Friends" tv show, there had been 12 Animated Garfield Specials produced between 1982 to 1991, with quite a few of these specials predating the show itself. I already own the "Garfield Holiday Celebrations" DVD which has the legendary Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving specials, while this set has...the other 9. I've asked for this last Christmas, and pretty much the year before, but still didn;t get it for some reason, but I still want it.

Slave I

Going back a little further in my childhood, we come to Star Wars. Back in those great years in my generation growing up in the mid-90s, Kenner decided to re-release the Star Wars figures & vehicles just before everyone's lives were tarnished by the Re-releases, and then Episode I. But the toys...Damn, they re-released all the great ones, especially the vehicles like Millennium Falcon, X-Wing, AT-ATs, AT-STs, TIE Fighters, Landspeeders, Snowspeeders, etc. I think my generation was the first to have figures of B-Wings and TIE Bombers, as I'm starting to see them on store shelves again along with all the other mainstays.

And then there was Slave I, the spaceship driven by that kickass bounty hunter Boba Fett. I don't really need to explain its awesomeness, you can see it for yourself and tell yourself "That's fucking awesome." Dear god, you have no idea how much I wanted this. The story that I have behind this is that I explicity told a friend of mine in elementary school to get this for me for my Birthday, so I would know that I'd get it and not get another Stupid, Thoughtless Gift. That's when my mom gave me this "message" that it was wrong to flat-out tell someone what present they should get you, and just suck up the surprise of getting a Stupid, Thoughtless Gift.

In the end, I think that friend ended up giving me a Stupid, Thoughtless Gift. That, and he's no longer my friend

A Metal Detector

Oh, come on, there hasn't been a time in your life where you asked yourself "Wouldn't it be awesome if I had a Metal Detector?" I sure have several times. You'd have fantasies of re-enacting that one episode of "Pete & Pete" where the dad used his Metal Detector to find what would become the Family Car buried in the sand at the beach. I'd always hope to use it to find some lost treasure in the sand, varying from Buried Treasure to Gold, to simply enough coins to spend on a soda. It doesn't really help with all those "Fantastic Buried Treasures and Where To Find Them" shows running on the Travel Channel to help your obsession either.

Just imagine, someone buried Wolverine or Collosus in the sand and forgot where they were and hired you and your metal detector to go find them. And then they'd reward you with the Pete & Pete car. Good times...

And now, the final gift from my childhood that I always wanted but never got:

Knockout

Knockout, my one burden on life. Don't recognize this game? I'm not surprised, it's one of the more obscure board games that Milton Bradley put out in the 80s, and then again in the early 90s. The game worked as such:

It worked as a variation of that game "Don't Break The Ice," where all the multicolored blocks are stacked up like so in the picture above, and then you roll a die to decide which color block you knock out of the wall with that little Electric Pouding Hammer. You lose if the wall collapses or if that big "Knockout" block falls off in any way. Sounds awesome? You know it did! And I wanted it so bad, I had specifically told my parents to get it for me the Christmas where I saw the awesome ad for it. For that entire season, I had been impatiently waiting until the 25th where I could finally play with it at last.

And on Christmas Day, guess what I open up?

A totally different game called "Wipe Out." This game is so obscure that scouring the internet comes up with absolutely no pictures of it. To describe it, it was a game where we have this big cardboard wave, and you had to get your little Surfer Dude down that wave before time runs out and a big cup of slime is released, coating everything in it and you lose.

Yeah, I was really thrilled getting this and not Knockout.  I only played this game once with a few friends, and long story short, slime got everywhere, from my clothes, to my friend's hair, to damaging the carpet which later led to its replacement about a year afterwards.