Timeframes III

Sometimes, when I find a pile of old comics in a charity shop, I like to go through them and pull out a few things of interest.

This particular pile of Dandys from the dawn of the 90s was a particularly lucky find, as they clear up a few mysteries from the previous times I did this.

A New Contender for "Weirdest Thing Found in Charity Shop"

I mean, I'm assuming it's genuine, but if it isn't that would be if anything even odder.

Fun and Games

So, there you have it, should anyone ever ask you then you can answer with confidence from this day on: Garfield's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop today, which is remarkably similar to Ludo but with the added twist of having certain 'safe' squares which you can't be bumped back to the start from.

Curiously, Dennis the Menace's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop a few weeks ago, from the same company, which is also remarkably similar to Ludo but with the different twist of an additional token representing Dennis' Dad, which patrols a section of the board and can also send pieces back to the start.

Funny how that works.

Wanted Poster

Looking around a charity shop in Bristol today, I find a cardboard poster tube on which is written the legend 'THUNDERBIRDS POSTER'. It's only £2.99, I'm already buying a book, what the hell, I buy it without looking at it and hope it's not from the 2004 movie.

Upon getting home, I discover it's actually really nice, and after I put it up I notice from the copyright dates at the bottom it was seemingly printed in 2015. I Google 'thunderbirds poster 2015' and... ah.

Well, that's a hell of a find.

Timeframes II

A short while ago, I looked through some old issues of the Dandy I found in a charity shop, and highlighted some things of interest in them. As you may be able to tell from the above image, I'm now back with another selection of DC Thomson comics I found just last week; these range from around 1990 to 1992, and there's Dandys, Beanos and even some issues of Beezer and Topper.

First up, please brace yourself for quite possibly the ultimate example of a story where someone thought of the title first...

Timeframes

If you go into enough charity shops (thrift stores or opportunity shops to my non-British audience), then sooner or later you will find a box of old children's humour comics. They'll generally range in date from the 70s to the 90s, and mostly be old Beanos and Dandys, those being by some distance the longest-lived titles, with the occasional wildcard -- a Beezer, a Topper, maybe a Fleetway title such as Whizzer and Chips or Buster. It's just the way of the world.

Whilst I am always grateful for what I can find in these boxes, I do find more of interest when the comics are from the early nineties, give or take a few years each way. These are issues I was a bit too young (or a bit too not born yet) to have read at the time, but they're very similar to the ones I did read as a child, with many of the same characters and much the same tone. These are also the earliest issues to feature adverts, which makes them of even greater value as a look into the past.

Here, then, is what I got from the above stack of a dozen more-or-less consecutive Dandys from 1991 I picked up a few weeks ago.

Weird Things I Have Found In Charity Shops

I like spending my weekends looking in local charity shops and, as the title of this post may indicate, sometimes I find some weird things in them. The image above, however, shows something I found a short while ago that wasn't just weird -- it was something I didn't even think existed.

Season 20 of The Simpsons was released on Blu-ray in America shortly after its original broadcast as a vanilla edition with no special features, to capitalise on the fact that it was the first season to contain episodes produced in high definition. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a Region 4 DVD version of the same release in a charity shop in Bristol. Asking Wesley Mead about it revealed that only Australia and Germany got this release -- which seems a very odd thing to happen at all, given the only reason the release happened was because the episodes are in HD. My conclusion was that this set's previous owner had taken the trouble to import this from overseas. But then, if you're donating it because you've just got access to Disney+, then apart from the fact that you'd expect to find other DVDs of The Simpsons or even other Disney+ shows alongside this one (and I didn't) -- wouldn't someone who went to that length to get hold of a copy be a pretty hardcore fan, someone who'd want to hang on to this as an interesting curio? Wouldn't they be aware that just because something's available on streaming now, doesn't mean it always will be?

Anyway, this got me thinking about other similarly inexplicable (to various degrees) things I've seen or even purchased in charity shops over the years. Here's a selection of them. (Not included: a surprisingly large number of adventure gamebooks and Doctor Who novelisations from the 80s and 90s that go for upwards of £70 online and which nobody bothered to do a price check on.)