I was a major sucker. Honestly though, I just wanted the mail. I really didn't care about what was in the package. As long as I could have neat boxes with my name and address on them, it could've been alligator shit inside for all I cared. Ironically, what I received was usually pretty close to the 'alligator shit' genre.

Truly, there was less regulation on what you could say in a comic book advertisement than there was on who could buy a gun from Wal-Mart. Time and time again I'd fall for it, scrounging for loose change under the couch cushions to have my mother convent into a check. Here are some of my worst errors ever in choosing to purchase things from those wacky comic book ads..

Sea Monkeys: Everyone should know about these. The concept of Sea Monkeys would actually be pretty cool if it was presented to you as what it is - tiny brine shrimp swimming around for two days till their inevitable death. That's all they were, but the ad above suggests much more.

Firstly, notice that the Sea Monkeys looked like humans w/ tails and accessories. The potential to buy a family of little, swimming, human monkeys for 1.25 was way too hard to resist. In truth, Sea Monkeys looked like pieces of lint stuck to your black sweater.

Secondly, note that the ad says they are 'trainable'. Now, unless you could convince yourself that it was you who trained the Sea Monkeys to occassionally move, or it was you who trained the Sea Monkeys to remain looking like microscopic scallions, no, you couldn't train them. In fact, training them would be the last of your worries. Seeing them was a much bigger concern.

Note the family watching over the fully-accessorized bowl of full-grown Sea Monkeys. Nuh uh. What you got was a plastic container with a historically easy-to-fall-off top, and a bag of 'eggs' that were surprisingly much larger than the Sea Monkeys would ever grow to be.

You've really got to wonder how many kids cried their eyes out after realizing they were duped - that owning mini-people in a little water tank wasn't only impossible for 1.25 - it was impossible in general. Cursed comic book companies.

The 88 Cent or 50 Cent Ads: The ad above only vaguely depicts what I'm talking about, but most of you should know what I'm referring to. Those old stupid ads from Johnson Smith, Abracadabra, or Mike's Fun Shop, that would allow you to pick any number of 'great gag and novelty items' for 50 cents each. (or 88 cents, depending) Now, this was a dream come true for me. I could buy LOTS of stuff with only a few dollars. Unfortunately, I could also go out a pick up lots of free, muddy rocks. It doesn't mean I'm getting a sweeter deal.

One of the staples of this type of add was the Whoopie Cushion. And oddly, the possibility to create phony flatuence for fifty sense was the best bargain in the entire ad. Then you had Surprise Packages....those were *especially* fun. To this day, I still can't figure out exactly what my surprise packages were supposed to be. Usually they'd be two pieces of metal chained together. The apparent surprise was that you've wasted your money.

Trick gum was another favorite. Garlic gum, hot gum, you name it. You bought it with the intent to offer your friends it to get them to chew on something silly. Unfortunately, even a moron would realize that a package marked 'YUMMY GARLIC' or 'Fun Gum: This Gum is HOT!' would realize he shouldn't put it in his mouth. So what'd we end up doing? Chewing it ourselves. And actually, it wasn't all that unpleasant. It was like watered down Big Red or Juicyfruit. Unfortunately, you can *still* get that for a quarter, so you were paying double the price or more for really awful chewing gum.

There was other stuff. Fake vomit, fake dog shit, fake viscera, fake everything. Now, I understand the myriad of possibilities to actually *own* phony projectile vomit, but c'mon...was it really worth the time to save your pennies and wait for the mailman everyday for 6-8 weeks? I think not.

THE GLORIOUS SUBMARINE: This one is my absolute favorite. This is the end-all, be-all in child dissapointment. If you got this for Christmas, you would've been better off with coal. The legacy of this horrible item is so great, Chris Elliot immortalized it in an episode of Get A Life. Now, by my time, someone had cracked down on this company I guess, since the ads for this one were few and far between, and I never had a chance to buy it. Unfortunately, my older brother wasn't so lucky, as he was subjected to quite possibly the worst kid's toy in history.

Now first off, just by looking at the picture you can tell there's a problem. I can't imagine *anyone* believing they were getting what you see above for seven dollars. It just defies logic. The sub appears to be better put together than a Volvo, and far more fun. It promises rockets that really shoot, a working periscope, etc. It sounded like a kid could start his own army to fend off enemy nations with a week's allowance.

So what did you really get? A lot of cardboard. Basically, you put this thing together, and you ended up with a big box that, if you really stretched your imagination or were on a hallucinogenic drug, may have slightly resembled a submarine. The 'working rockets' in most cases were flat pieces of cardboard that you'd push out of slits. The periscope was usually covered by the inside-cardboard from a wrapping paper roll. Contents varied from each company that carried the sub, but the one generality is that they all sucked.

The claim that the sub was big enough for two kids was also a little lacking. If the kids were two weeks old & dwarfs, sure. If the kids were remotely healthy and able to walk under their own power, you might've run into a problem. That's actually how my brother's met his demise. Him and a friend got in the sub, just like the ad says they can, and the thing's sides just broke open. Course, they could always return it for a full refund, but that would entail packing all the *unused* cardboard back in the box and returning it to the sender, and then waiting another 6 months to get back the lousy seven bucks back. Ick.

The final one I want to take a look at today are the infamous X-Ray specs. I fell for this ruse over a dozen times in my early years. X-Ray Specs were advertised as being able to give you the ability to see the bones under your skin, through women's clothes, and so on. Truly, at this low cost, I had to have them.

What did I get? Well, the ability to squint my eyes to peer through the tiny holes in the specs to notice that, in all actuality, it was really just a piece of flimsy dark plastic with lines running through it. Not X-Ray vision. Actually, no vision at all. It's saving grace wasn't in it's high fashion either - X-Ray specs were actually more of a social suicide to wear than those Groucho Marx disguise glasses. And they were far more irritating.

We did have a little fun with these though. My friend and I put them on my neighbor, and told them that he had to look upward for them to work right. He protested that nothing was happening, so we told him to take two steps to the left, three to the right, and so on. After 5 minutes of making him dance around his lawn like a buffoon, we sealed the deal by having him take an extra step back into a pile of dog shit. Then we went inside to compare techniques on Super Mario Bros. 2.

1.- Anything under 5.00 will not grant you special powers or access to owning sentinent beings or robots.

2.- All illustrations of the product can be described as 'conceptual art' at best.

3.- There's better ways to spend your money. Burning it, eating it, giving it to your dog, etc.

Beware the comic ads!

- Matt

matt@x-entertainment.com

PS - Multimedia and PicThis! will be updated tonight!