A Packrat-Venture

I've mentioned before that I have a curse of hunting. Keeping that in mind, some of my absolute favorite places to go to are Fleamarkets, Yard Sales, and Thrift Stores. I like to hunt in those places without even knowing what I'm hunting for. The other day as we were driving to our self-storage place, I saw this:



What kind of a self-respecting hunter-gatherer could turn that kind of invitation down? Especially since we failed to get into the self-storage. Fortunately the Unique Thrift Store (hereafter referred to as the UTS) proved to be all that and more.

There are a few prerequisites that Thrift Stores must pass before they earn the right to be called true Thrift Stores. First, they must have a vague smell of grandparents or cats. I don't remember UTS's smell, but since it was brand new it may not have developed it. Secondly...



There must be at least one Mountain of Naked Barbies. All of the Naked Barbies in the world end up in Thrift Stores. Maybe there's someone out there who collects Naked Barbies, but whoever it is I never want to see or know them. In addition to Naked Barbies,



There should be a generous helping of Stuff That Nobody Wants. There is a thin line between Thrift Store and Garbage Dump, and even though I believe in the "One man's trash..." ideal, there are some things that will probably never leave Thrift Store shelves. Like Golf Sims, for instance.




Occassionally the aforementioned thin line is crossed. In this case, the line has been left several miles behind in a cloud of dust by a pole-vaulting horserider with a jetpack. This is the category of "stuff no one should want." And finally,



...you have absolutely unbelievably bizarre junk. Where on Earth or Saturn someone got a dark green, limbless, purple-finned, orange-mustachioed alien cow chair is beyond me, but I really hope this is just a sign that science has been lying to us about Saturn being an unpopulated ball of gas. The other minor prerequisites, like having plenty of old electronics and abundances of McDonalds or Burger King toys, the UTS passed with flying colors. They only thing they seemed weak on was the Extremely Hideous Sweater area. I'm okay with that, though.

By the way, I forgot to mention that the UTS, besides being Unique, is enormous. It's easily the size of a half dozen normal Goodwills or Salvation Armies laid out in a neat grid pattern. I think it's the largest Thrift Store I've ever been to, beating out Mobile's "America's Thrift Store" and another one I went to in Illinois by a margin. Unfortunately the pile of NES or Genesis games I was hoping to find alongside a pile of forgotten game systems was not present, but I didn't go home empty handed...



This may just look like an unassuming bag of standard thrift store-grade toys, but remember, this is the UNIQUE thrift store we're talking about. The UTS won't allow itself to be one-upped by any standard bag o' junk. No sir, this is a bag full of dinosaurs. Now that may sound pretty amazing in itself, but the UTS further proved that it wasn't limited to just normal dinosaurs. Take a look at just some of the loot pulled from this bag of treasure:


Little Foot. How can you have a bag of dinosaurs and not have Little Foot? Because when you think about dinosaur cartoons, I'm sure Denver or that "Dinosaur" CG flop don't pop in your head. Unfortunately it seems the carnivors in the bag have already eaten Ducky, Petri, Cera, Spike, and whatever other dumb extra characters came from the 1000 sequels.

Starship Troopers Bugs. While the movie seemed to be little more than an excuse to show off CG effects and as much goopy blood as possible, apparently someone decided that enough unwatched kids would see the movie to warrant a toyline. I guess they aren't dinosaurs, but I don't think Little Foot is about to tell them that.

Reptar. I will admit I once enjoyed watching Rugrats, back when Nick was cool and Ren & Stimpy was on my mind and I didn't have cable TV. Reptar is a nice homage to the Big G, and this one seemed to previously have a sparkling mouth feature, but it's just about as gone as Rocko's Modern Life.

Godzilla? This particular dinosaur looks like Godzilla, and probably wants to be Godzilla, but is just shy of actually being Godzilla. It also looks like it desperately wants to be a wind-up Tin Toy, but alas is neither of those things. Actually, this bag seems to be beating around the Godzilla bush as much as possible without actually having a real Godzilla figure, since next we have...

Spacegodzilla. Yes, he's everything Godzilla is, but with extra teeth and giant space crystals to boot! It's not too strange to see him in this bag, since the now-defunct company Trendmasters released a line of Godzilla figures in America sometime in the middle 90s. Oddly enough the only movie featuring Spacegodzilla had not been released in America at the time. Clearly, the Trendmasters were Masters of something, but certainly not Trends.

Tri-Cera-Tape. Yes, it's a Triceratops whose dorsal area has been carved out to house a tape dispenser. Moving on...

A Street Shark. Okay, now this guy is flagrantly not a dinosaur. Actually, judging by his appearance, he was scheduled for another bag, but he was so X-TREME that he just X-TREME'D his way into the bag of dinosaurs, because he wanted to. Street Sharks were not cooler than Ninja Turtles. But they were X-TREME.

Beast Wars Dinobot. Because the Dinosaur Bagging People at the UTS thought they hadn't covered enough ground yet, they threw in a transforming dinosaur. As you might expect, this particular figure was most of the reason I bought this whole bag. He alone is more than worth the entire $5 the bag cost, even though he's sadly tailless.

Also included: a generous helping of Jurassic Park dinosaurs; a Star Wars Rancor; a T-Rex keychain which makes a sound suspicously like Godzilla's roar; one of those evil dinosaurs from Primal Rage; a nice spattering of those tiny plastic dinosaurs which have been sold by dollar stores and supermarkets since plastic was invented.

With this, the UTS has proven its name IN SPADES. I didn't even talk about the wooden Duck Phone my dad got for his brother (we had a good laugh about that one). I plan on visiting the UTS again, because...the hunt must continue!