Those who seek out thrift stores and consignment shops in the hopes of locating chunks of the past for a lower-than-retail price, take note: you're limiting the options. In addition to surfing with the hags at the Salvation Army on a quest for Freezy Freakies, you may wanna check out your local mom & pop video store. That is, assuming you still have one left.
I don't. There's one left around here, but I screwed up that account years ago. It wasn't until this past week that I found another - a short drive into Jersey, and there it stood. 'Easy Video.' Though it would've been presumptuous to assume that 'Easy Video' wasn't really a franchise with dozens of stores in the area, the fact that the illuminated 'D' in the store's marquee was broken helped me keep the faith. 'Mom & Pop' stores, by the way, refer to the privately owned and run establishments who don't need to follow a chain's specific guidelines. When it comes to video stores, Ma and Pa frequently serve as trips back in time. Even the big video chains have a hard time staying afloat these days, so the mostly family owned varieties have really declined in numbers. In this city, if you're lucky enough to find one, it has probably been around for a long, long time. And the stock of videos? Well, that hasn't changed much in the past 10-20 years.
I realized that 'Easy Video' was a winner within moments of browsing the aisles. Lined up, almost endlessly, were films so obscure and tough to find these days that they usually fetch fifty bucks or higher a piece. Unless you're willing to monitor eBay constantly while offering up exorbitant amounts of money in an effort to outbid the insidious 'tuttifruttimama,' these aren't movies you'll soon see again. From the children's section to the three red-railed shelves full of shitty horror flicks, I was in heaven. I never thought that would happen so close to Newark.
Thing was, this wasn't your ordinary mom & pop video store. It had all the things one of those places needs to be considered 'great,' but Easy Video went well beyond the call of duty. The title no longer does it justice. Aside from the legion of obsolete cassettes and dusty promotional posters for Tootsie was the growing notion that this joint hadn't restocked their 'impulse item' selection for ten years. The candy selection seemed odd, since I was certain some of the offerings hadn't been produced, at the very latest, since the early 90s. Others seemed more recent, but some were even older. Everything else was a little long in the tooth, too - trading cards, books, sticker packs, toys, you name it. Now the place was damn near immaculate - easily cleaner than most of the big chains' stores. Somehow, even during all those adventures in intense vacuuming and mass window washing, none of the employees realized that 'Jurassic Park Dinosaur Cookies' hadn't been produced since 1992.
In a fit of confusion, I regained my senses long enough to assess the situation. Not wanting to offend the friendly folks who ran the place, I simply purchased everything in sight - while snapping pictures, and occasionally shouting 'holy shit, that's OLD!' I went into Easy Video with my highest hope being a rental of Sleepaway Camp II, but came home with a whole lot more...
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In this bag, a bountiful bounty. I spent somewhere in the realm of 15 bucks, which is only as much as I put in the tank if I'm driving someplace new and assume I'll get lost. The guy at the register seemed a little curious as to why I was buying all this obviously old candy, and having done this before, I could tell that he was more than a little concerned, too. See, it's not that these people expect anyone to buy the old crap. Letting it sit there helps them avoid the costs of restocking stores that are usually just fronts to sell cigarettes or beer to minors, anyway. Besides, Easy Video's business is easy videos. Candy and baseball cards are secondary, maybe even thirdadary. When someone does try to buy some of the outdated crap, they panic.
Honestly, it might seem harmless and usually is, but that's the kind of thing that invites lawsuits, especially from predators looking to sue their way into financial stability. There must be at least a few laws broken when a store knowingly sells chocolate so old it's mutated into a form of non-chocolate flesh with googly eyes and the ability to attack people.
In the end, the transaction went through just fine. I guess my fifteen bucks far outweighed the risk of a massive lawsuit claiming negligence, endangerment, and poisoning from holy shit old candy. I bought way too much to completely catalog in this article, but here's some of the highlights...
The 'Shaq Size Mr. Big' candybar, from 1997, is indeed big and Shaq-sized. Devouring Shaq would probably be more healthy, as the nigh foot-long bar weighs in with almost 20 grams of fat and enough carbohydrates to ruin the law of averages utilized in any version of the Atkins Diet. Though old, you wouldn't guess it from the picture of Shaq on the wrapper. The only thing that ages on that guy is the ability to convincingly do sports drink promos. In the last one I saw, he literally motioned for the guy holding the cue cards to move a little closer. If that was the usable take, I'd hate to see the rest. As for the Mr. Big bar, it's big and it's harder than most diamonds.
The breakdown: a layer of chocolate covers other, thicker layers of rice crisps, wafers, caramel and peanuts. I had to take a home run swing against the wall to break Mr. Big in half, proving that old candy could double nicely as prosthetic legs for really short victims of shark attacks. Priced at 1.39, Mr. Big was fairly expensive as far as inedible candies go.
I would've considered it a little gross if the store left out their candy offerings from this past Christmas, but they spared no expense in disgusting me by leaving out their selections from the 1995 season. Also 1.39, the 'Bubble Cane' was a beastly stick of bubble gum with a gimmick: it bends, but it don't break. That's only half true. It don't break, but it certainly crumbles into tiny, crystallized pieces at the first hint of movement. Obviously, nothing to come out of the Amurol Confections Company is the result of a ten-year study.
'The Incredible Hulk Sour Green Apple Bubble Gum' is one of the first things I saw upon entering, and I first assumed it to be just more promotional hooplah for the new Hulk movie. Wrong. It's from 1995, and it ain't pretty. A sheet of uncut green bubble gum pieces are your main course, with the appetizer being an included mini-comic to be read with an also-included pair of the World's Tiniest 3-D Glasses. There was nothing in the package to really support the then-pliable form of the gum, so the age is duly noted by the fact that it's now stiffer than morning piss dick.
This one could be trouble. I envision kids, not wise to the shady ways of Easy Video, carelessly buying the gum and eating it, assuming that it's a brand new movie-related item. Once that shit starts cracking into razor sharp shards of green apple murder and slicing up kids' throats, I might lose the only place on the planet that rents out copies of the Go-Bots movie.
You've probably seen Nestle's 'Wonder Ball' candies, which are usually themed to match the latest kiddy movie or cartoon craze. Along a similar line is Nestle's 'Armegeddon Asteroid.' At five years old, it's practically the freshest dish served in Cafe Easy. Even if it was new, the candy would remain an interesting find -- it's a hollow, chocolate ball with oodles of Nerds-like 'meteoroids' resting in the middle. Not the most perfect of pairings, but at least it had a cool wrapper fashioned after a supernova. Plus, I always thought there should've been black Nerds. I like my candy mysterious.
This was one of my favorites. Jurassic Park Dinosaur Cookies, in a color-faded box way back from 1992. That's right, they're actually selling animal crackers a full decade old. I shouldn't be too hard on the store, since it is in part a collectibles shop. It's entirely possible that the owner just considers the aged candy part of that side of the business. The deciding factor happens only when we see if he'll sell Mr. Big or the stupid Tyrannosaur cookies to a hungry six-year-old. Until then, everything's speculative.
Notwithstanding that, the cookies were beyond stale, almost fossilized. I don't think it's an intended trait, even if it does fit in with the whole 'dinosaur remains' thing. I bought two boxes, which unfortunately were their full stock. I feel heroic - maybe I've saved some poor child from the perils brought on by eating ten-year-old food. If not, the box is still pretty cool to look at.
I didn't want to go overboard with their vast selection of strange trading cards, so I decided to just stick with two packs - one from Terminator 2, the other from Robocop 2. I always pity the sequels. The packs were only a quarter each, so restraint was essentially if I didn't want to go home with enough cards to wallpaper a church. I got a pretty decent selection, too - even a card depicting Arnold sacrificing himself to the fiery pool of lava with a look on his face that suggests strong difficulty in taking shits. The Robocop 2 cards weren't quite as interesting, even though every second of that flick rank among the weirdest moments in cinematic history. Still, the lack of good Robocards was made up for by a stick of gum from 1990.
They also had movie cards for Dick Tracy, but I was too afraid of getting one depicting the scene where Paul Sorvino eats all those oysters. Or the one where Warren Beatty is Dick Tracy.
'Danish Ribbons,' otherwise known as Delfa Rolls, are rolled-up bunches of masking tape-wide strawberry licorice. I'm not sure how old these are, but had to mention that you were eat them in the same manner you ate the leaves of an artichoke. And anyone who didn't eat them that way were eating them all wrong. It's the truth.
Here's three more candies -- first, a box of 'Chewy Gobstoppers,' which haven't been sold around these parts for at least the past five years. I think they still make 'Whatchamacalit' bars, but I don't recall them being hardy enough to break through a plate glass window before. X-Men, hot off the premiere of their new movie, took a time machine back to 1995 to distribute strange gummi candy all shaped like various mutant heads. The package claims that they're fruit flavored. I'll take their word for it.
The worst part about it is, I know there's gonna come a time when we haven't gone grocery shopping in weeks and I need comfort food after stubbing my toe on the ironing board. I know I'm going to eat these gummis eventually, dying a death too embarrassing for the obituaries. I wanted my obitruary to be special.
More Hulk madness from the mid-90s: 'Super Chews!' Even if it's old, this one is pretty neat. After taking off the shrinkwrap, which I was very thankful to see, the gum flopped out as a pile of 'security cards' with characters from the Hulk's comic book printed on 'em. The back of the pieces even have a printed bio, and in the past, this was all completely edible. Being able to claim that you ate a piece of gum shaped like a 'Wendigo' ID card was certainly worth the money, if not even a little more than what people paid. (price: 1.39 -- Easy Video really loved 1.39)
My greatest find of the day was half a box of Nintendo Tattoos from 1989, at just 25 cents per pack. Whenever I'm on the hunt for trash like this, I usually remember to play it cool. There's been times when people have balked at selling me something, because they rightfully took my enthusiasm to mean that it was worth more than they were selling it for. It's a fine art of nuance, really -- you've got to look interested, but not too interested, all the while keeping yourself on a 'show level' that didn't suggest retardation since you were becoming giddy over chocolate bars from 1997 with Shaq's big head stamped on the wrapper. Taking pictures in the store was bad enough - I looked like I was either collecting evidence or preparing to pillage the store for something secretly valuable. I put on a good performance up to this point, but completely lost it at the sight of the Nintendo tattoos. After snatching up the entire box, I paced around the store with my hand drawn in a threatening, clawed position to dissuade anyone from coming near my find.
When I regained my composure, I casually strolled up to the register, handed over the pile of tattoo packs, and calmly inquired... 'CAN I KEEP THE BOX TOO THERE'S NO MORE CARDS LEFT ANYWAY MIND IF I KEEP THE BOX I'D REALLY LIKE TO KEEP THAT BOX!'
He agreed. They wanted me out of there in a big way.
The tattoos reflect Nintendo's initial rise to power. There's sixteen different sheets of tattoos in total to collect, each containing oodles of Nintendo characters from games now universally regarded as classics. Like most faux tattoo kits, Nintendo's worked by placing the transfer sheet on your dampened skin, then peeling it off to reveal a perfectly rendered Bald Bull staring up at you from your left hand. Aside from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!, Mario and Link's respective games were also represented. I purchased enough packs to cover my entire head with piranha plant tattoos, which incidentally is just what I had aimed for.
Our final item was a strange one - 'Crazy Dips' based on the now-defunct WCW's then-popular wrestling stars. I picked up two - one featuring Ric Flair, the other featuring a woman who didn't wrestle, but had ample breasts which warranted her placement on the shows. These are from the late 90s, when pro-wrestling enjoyed one of its biggest boom periods ever. On the whole, wrestling is far less popular these days, having bored and insulted enough of it's casual audience to where you never quite know if the business will survive for even another few years. That said, when you hit an opus like having your top stars grace the packages of foot-shaped lollipops that are sucked on and dipped into heaps of sugardust, there's really nowhere to go but down anyway.
I picked up some other items, but they were a little too offbeat to be worth mentioning. Some seemed to be local Jersey candies used as a vehicle to promote laundromats, while others were just too rancid to show you. The store itself still had a few more tricks up its sleeve, so let's head back to Easy Video...
The 'Treasure Chest' crane machine promised a prize to every player, and yes, the game doesn't stop until you successfully grab something out of the pile. This would've been a much more attractive feature if 90% of the prizes weren't sample-sized bottles of bubble bath or packs of Prince of Thieves trading cards.
Easy Video also had a weird setup for their vending machine area. I'm sure these exist in vast numbers around the world, but this was my first experience with machines of this type. After sensing that plopping in a few quarters might grant access to a world of obsolete treasures, I began searching my pockets for magic coins. All I found was lint, an orange Tic-Tac which was odd since I've never eaten an orange Tic-Tac in my life, and a dollar bill. No quarters, no fun.
After seeing what I believed to be a dollar changer in the midst of the machines, I stuck in the bill and was surprised to discover that this was actually part of the vending process -- you'd select which machine you wanted something from by punching in the code number on the dollar-taking super-device. Best yet, the whole thing was set to the score of assorted circus beats and comical sirens blasting out of a small pair of side-speakers. To me, it seemed like an awful lot of effort to go through for a plastic egg containing a two-inch rubber alien.
Oh yeah - they had videos, too. While my current lack of a working credit card precluded me from becoming an official member of their club, I was allowed to purchase videos from their direct sale racks. After narrowing down my choices, I spotted a clamshell case hiding in the back of the store next to a wheelbarrow full of pencil-toppers from Disney's Mulan. It's the kind of movie that could only be offered at a mom & pop video store, or alternatively, Hell. Which movie is it? You'll find out tomorrow when it's reviewed. You won't be disappointed - Easy Video guarantees it.
