Tales from the Thrift Store vol.1

Hey everybody, welcome to the start of yet another series! For the no one who's keeping count, this is my third new series, with one still in the works.

I usually hit a couple of thrift stores a month, so with my continued effort to produce more non-card content in mind, I figured why not make a series to cover these purchases as well.

This inaugural edition will recap my trip to a new (to me) thrift store called, Hilltoppers, in Crossville, TN.

I found out about this place a few months ago, but every time I've been close to the store, I'm always running short on time. Last week I was finally able to make it in there, and I can honestly say it was worth the wait.

This series will hopefully contain plenty of variety as thrift stores usually plenty to offer in that department, but this particular post (spoiler) is going to be another VHS fest. Mainly because that was the most impressive section of this store, as I can't remember the last time (if ever) I saw so many videos in one spot. There were two back-to-back rows of at least six book shelves on each side that were just packed full of what had to be around 1,000 videos. For me, it was basically heaven!

For once I even remembered that I should try and take some pictures while I was there, the only problem was, the guy working there was stocking stuff on one side of the videos pretty much the whole I was there. And then when I got to the other side there was woman who came over and started doing that, what I call "I have nowhere else to be, so I might as well look", kind of looking -- which is very annoying, especially when they walk over and just start half-assedly picking up videos at random, right in the middle of a row. I seem to run in to those people all the time, their always the one's that seem to be milling around looking for someone to talk to, thankfully I don't give off the "hey, let's talk" vibe, so they normally don't try with me.

It took me a good 45 minutes to look through all the videos, which unfortunately was about all the time I had that day, so I can't really comment on any of the other offerings as I didn't end up looking at anything else.

So as I said, I expect future posts in this series to contain a great of variety, but this first one is nothing but glorious VHS:

Most of the time when I get a bunch of videos (or DVD's) from somewhere, there are always a couple that get watched within the first few days of bringing them home, and the rest usually get put with the rest of the "to watch" stuff. Well, this was the one that got watched the very first night. This was something I have been wanting to see for quite some time, and it didn't disappoint. I don't suspect that too many people reading this ever saw the television series Cannon, even if you haven't though, you still might enjoy this TV movie that was made four years after the series ended. Although my opinion may be slightly biased as I am a huge William Conrad fan so...

I had never seen this sequel to Romancing the Stone before, and after watching it, it's not hard to figure out why. This film seems to be made up of about 50-60% actual movie, and 40-50% filler. Overall I didn't particularly care for this one, but I did find some joy in Avner Eisenberg's character.

I remember watching an episode of Nature a couple of years ago that was all about crows, but I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be the same one, as I don't remember Patricia Clarkson being the narrator of the one I watched.

For the life of me I cannot remember if I ever saw this or not.

A straight-to-video release, with a terribly un-original plot, that also happens to star Robocop... how can you go wrong?

Like a lot of people, I was really in to dinosaurs as a kid. Even though I was starting to grow out of my dino-phase when Jurassic Park came out in 1994, I still saw it four times in the theatre, and had I been able to find anyone else to go with (anyone I hadn't already gone with that is) -- I probably would have seen it a few more times on the big screen.

Even though a lot more discoveries have been made since this episode of Nova aired in 1994, it was still packed with a lot of relevant information, and was still quite enjoyable.

Here's one I hadn't even heard of before, but I have yet to see a William Powell picture that I didn't enjoy, so I'm assuming this will be good as well.

You know those random memories, the kind that seemed to be lost to time and will seemingly  resurface out of nowhere, which can either be triggered by something similar to the memory -- but also can be triggered by something that has absolutely nothing to with what ever that past event was? Well, a couple of weeks ago while doing something probably very mundane (showering, teeth brushing, etc.), I had just such a memory come back to me.

I was around 8 or 9 years old and we were getting ready to move from Portland to Beaverton, OR (about 20 miles away at the time). My best friend at the time was named Larry, and he lived just a couple of houses away. For whatever reason, we decided to borrow a couple of things from each other literally right before I moved. From him I borrowed WWF Summerslam '92 (VHS), and the game Renegade (NES). And from me he got, Wayne's World (VHS), and the game MLB Baseball (NES). Well, we ended up only seeing each other one more time after I moved (20 miles when you're that age, might as well be 2000 miles), and I guess in our minds it was still too soon to give back the items we had exchanged.

Now that this memory has come back to me, I am resolved (don't ask me why) to try and find replacements for my never gotten back items. So even though I have it on DVD, when I came across this copy of Wayne's World on VHS, I had to buy it.

The good news is that both of my items that Larry borrowed can now be had for next to nothing, so with Wayne's World taken care of, all that's left is that NES copy of MLB Baseball...


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.