Of minimum wage and robots

[davemerrill]

A short story about working at K-Mart and picking up toys from shows that wouldn't get released here for 20 years is up today at Let's Anime!! What's the robot toy? Well, it looks like a bug, and usually it's purple.



Once again we dive into the wonderful world of obscure and irrelevant at Let's Anime. No no, don't thank us, just doing our job, ma'am.

Comments

[tohoscope.livejournal.com]

And you still have that toy, right?

[(Anonymous)]

Down here in the south, we had KayBee Toys, which was the major place to pick up off-the-wall imported toys. I dunno why, exactly, but they had the Dunbine/Dougram stuff when nobody else did. In fact, some of them still had those cool Dougram imported toys for years after Robotech came out. They were fairly high-priced compared to, say, Transformers toys, so maybe that's why they lasted so long on the shelves.

And totally OT, another part of my childhood died:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/arts/television/11clokey.html

RWG (I had a bunch of Gumby stuff that got lost in our various moves)

[cmndr-x.livejournal.com]

I believe I saw a toy very much like that one at a flea market recently, at a booth loaded with toys which seemed to be split between Japanese robot cartoon toys from the 80's and the sort of cheap-o generic robot toys you'd find on the shelves at a dollar store for the past few years. The booth was being tended to by a very rude, surly guy who looked like he'd take eight place in a Harry Knowles-lookalike contest.