What? Throw something away? BITE YOUR TONGUE.
So I’ll hopefully be back to business as usual on the site next week, when I will have a new variant cover-age post and get back to answering more of your questions. In the meantime, though, lookit this thing I found in my stack of old CD-ROMs:
This is a disc, provided by Diamond Comic Distributors in 1999, featuring thousands of images of products then in their Star System reorder catalog.
I don’t recall why I have it in my evil clutches specifically, other than perhaps to use some of the pics on the website for my previous place of employment. Which is, I think, one of the reasons why the disc was made in the first place. Also, I think it was to provide easy reference to the items available back in those pre-broadband days for anyone not wanting to dial up their internets and wait for the pixels to gradually load.
Some of the files are pretty good size…this is the actual size of the largest file on the disc (324kb):
And this is the smallest-sized file of an actual product, at 14kb (there is one smaller file at 13kb, but it’s for retailer cycle sheets):
While probably fine for whatever purposes they were put to at the time, most of the images on the disc are too small for modern purposes, beyond perhaps just providing tiny thumbnail pics for an online catalogue or some such.
It is kinda neat just to open some of the images at random to see what products they reveal. I remember most of what I’ve found, even some of the old gaming and anime stuff, but I’ll occasionally come across some item forgotten in the mists of time:
Or some book I wish was still in print:
Or some book I really wish was still in print:
Anyway, I’ll poke through it some more and see if I can find any surprises. Like this Sandman statue:
Boy, I bet I could still sell those.
I prefer to think that F3 was put in the smallest size out of shame, that whoever put the disc together was hoping no one would notice it…
I rented this, back in the day, when I was working my way through my neighborhood video store’s then-small selection of anime. It was my first exposure to hentai, and it did not inspire me to search for me.
You would probably prefer that I not write the following, but I will never have another chance to make this observation, so: What was most surprising to me was not the tentacle porn, but the casual incest. I later learned, through a review in the magazine VIDEO WATCHDOG, that this was the result of a bad translation, which turned sorority sisters and their house mother into actual family. I have since wondered if this was mere sloppiness on the part of the translator, or if he knew exactly what he was doing.
It did not inspire me to search for MORE, not for “me.”
I have to do a better job of proof-reading these posts.
When you made that post yesterday, I immediately thought about a box I have in my storage that indeed contains one of those Star discs and a couple of the old 3.5 floppy discs to make our order on. That box also has a half finished Capital order form because I screwed up a bunch of line items and I was using pen, so I just started over. No idea why I kept the garbage one. A bunch of other shop related promo stuff like our business cards, newsletters, fridge magnets and the like as well. Nobody but me even cares about that box.
If DC doesn’t have a ton of Sandman product available when the Netflix series airs then someone will have really dropped the ball. Funko Pops alone would sell like hotcakes.
Mike & John: I’m sure some researchers (and libraries/archives) care about this stuff. Hopefully it gets preserved somewhere at some point!