A couple of weeks ago, we went to an antique show in Maryland that is a favorite of ours, and for me the coolest thing there was the metal Disney sign. It was for sale from one of my favorite dealers at the show. He told me that he purchased the sign at a California flea market in about 1970, when he was living there. I suspect that it probably didn’t cost him much at the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if the person he had purchased it from picked it out of the trash. That is how it made it to the East Coast. I did a little research and found that Walt Disney Productions moved to their Burbank studios in 1940, so the sign cannot be older than that – or newer than 1970, the date it was purchased by the dealer. The clue to the actual age of the sign is with the cute little character decals all over it. The decals could have been added later but I doubt it. I think it was Disney’s way of adding a little magic to everything they did, including this mundane sign. There are characters that you don’t see much anymore such as the tortoise from The Tortoise and the Hare (1934) or Hiawatha (1937). The newest characters that I see are Uncle Scrooge and Bongo, the bear who appeared in Fun and Fancy Free. Both date to 1947.

Based on all of this, I think the sign dates to about 1950 – give or take a couple of years. If that is the case, Walt Disney Productions would have been working on such projects as Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. This sign may have stood guard when Davy Crockett was being filmed and when Disneyland was in the planning stages. It is also when the great man himself – Walt Disney- was still in charge of his kingdom. There is no shortage of vintage Disney items out there, but I suspect it will be a long time before I see another one of these. Leave it to Disney to find a way to say “Go Away” and make you feel happy about it.

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As an artist it is always my goal to own original art work from people I admire.  Of course, original art tends to get very expensive.  The two pieces I am showcasing today were relatively inexpensive, probably because they are unsigned, but their provenance is what I liked most.  They are a fascinating snippet of Disney history that a lot of people don’t know about, and kind of go against the family friendly, squeaky clean, Disney image.  This post is a little bit NSFW (Not Safe For Work since we don’t tend to post this kind of stuff on The Collector Gene).  You have been warned.  Don’t blame me if your boss catches you reading this nerdy article (Bet you never thought you would read Disney and NSFW in the same sentence!).

Disney animators worked long hours every day tirelessly animating those classic films of your childhood.  Sometimes those guys needed a break, and what did they do?  They drew pictures for fun.  It’s what working artists do.  They create art for someone else all day, and then in their time off they create art for themselves.  The Disney animators were known to draw caricatures of each other fairly regularly.  They would slip them under each other’s office doors to egg each other on, or comment on the events of a day.  These caricatures are highly sought after by Disney collectors, especially if they come from Disney’s Nine Old Men, his top group of animators from the 30’s- the 60’s.

I do not own one of these caricatures (though I happily would), but what I own is another fun tradition from the studios in the 40’s and 50’s.  Pinup drawings.  We all know the classic pinup girl paintings from the 40’s and 50’s.  Varga girls and Bette Page are well known today.  Well, the young men working at Disney Studios were just as fascinated by these paintings as any other red blooded heterosexual male of the time, but when they just drew them it happened to be with a Disney twist.

This one ain’t too naughty.  Well, on today’s standards it ain’t so bad.

Here’s the NSFW picture.  Again, not too bad on today’s standards but pretty racy for the time.

Okay okay.  Insert cartoon wolf howling and stomping his foot on the floor with his tongue hanging out.  Firstly, you might notice the holes in the edge of the paper.  These lovely ladies were drawn on perforated animation paper.  That’s the paper the guys at Disney had laying around.  These are beautiful quick sketches by a Disney artist who was happy enough with his work to add a little water color as well which makes them that much more beautiful and dynamic.  They have a ton of energy and life to them, where you can almost see their movement as they strike their permanent pose.  Clearly this artist was well versed in pinup imagery.

Unfortunately my Disney pinups are unsigned.  There is reference in the book “Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life” by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (two of Disney’s Nine Old Men) that references artist Fred Moore drawing pinups in studio, but looking at his work I don’t think these are his.

I have seen a signed Ollie Johnston pinup on eBay once before, so we know more than one artist was drawing these pictures.  In fact the eyes on both of my drawings remind me of the eyes on the Centaurettes in Fantasia, which were animated by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, so it is possible one of them could have done these.  This is probably wishful thinking on my part, but I’ll tell myself it’s a possibility.  I can only attribute the works at this point, but it is fun to think an important animator could have worked on them.

I find these fictional portraits to be very beautiful and well executed.  Frankly, I see most pin up drawings and paintings that way.  I also love that they represent a seedier side to the Disney animator.  Yes, Disney animation is family friendly and made for “children of all ages”, but I don’t think the goal of the artists was ever to make things perfect and squeaky clean.  I think they were artists trying to create the best possible quality of work that was possible at the time they were working.  The family friendly nature of things was more for marketing to make the money to create such elaborate and beautiful animation.  I think just like most young men of their day, they enjoyed thinking about naked women as much as the next guy.  Remember, Playboy didn’t come out until the 50’s, and these drawing seem to predate dirty magazines.  What’s an artistic lad to do but to draw naked women for himself?  It was a simpler time.  No one associates Disney with gratuitous sex, which makes these pieces of Disney history all the more interesting to me.  They are proof that these guys were human and had normal human flaws and needs just like you and me.  I guess when you stare at pictures of cutesy animals all day, you gotta do something to bring yourself back to reality.

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I was born in 1983, so I was about six years old when the Ninja Turtles phenomenon had really swept the nation. They were inescapable by 1989. Knowing the names of the four turtles was as essential as knowing the alphabet by the time I hit kindergarten.

There have always been hard core Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans, but I think that fandom has become much more mainstream in recent years, and a lot more collectors are hunting for key pieces. Certain vehicles and playsets in mint condition are commanding prices that I couldn’t have dreamed of years ago, regularly reaching hundreds of dollars. I think for many years, collectors were turned off because there’s just so much TMNT merchandise to collect. It was a very successful franchise and while not as daunting to collect as something like Star Wars, it’s certainly up there in terms of popularity and the breadth of items to collect.

I was very heavily into Ninja Turtles in 1989 and 1990, but by 1991, they were replaced by Toy Biz’s X-Men figures in my house. Like any phenomenon that gets as popular as Ninja Turtles, there are a few key years where EVERYONE is into them, and then they move onto other things. But my friend Brian was different. He was completely loyal to Ninja Turtles well into their popularity and stuck with them long after most of my friends had given up on them.

Brian and I remain friends all these years later, and since we bonded early on by our shared love of toys like Battle Beasts and checking out flea markets, we often bring up those subjects in conversation all these years later. During one of these conversations a few years ago, Brian made the kind of claim I hear a lot as an action figure collector: “I had EVERY Ninja Turtle figure.”

Not to brag, but I consider myself a pretty well-versed expert on the topic of action figures, so whenever someone claims they had EVERYTHING in a particular line, I immediately become suspicious. There are several incredibly rare Ninja Turtles figures that were released after most kids collected them, and even if a kid was still actively adding Ninja Turtles to his collection as late as 1994 or 1995, it’s entirely possible that they might have missed one of these rare figures.

Knowing that I was suspicious, he said, “What’s the rarest figure?” And without hesitation, I said Scratch. (I know some people will certainly debate this, but he is certainly among the top five rarest figures and is at the very top of most collectors’ want lists.)

Released in 1993, Scratch was one of a handful original characters released very, very late in the Ninja Turtles line. By 1994, the line became mostly variations of the main characters, both heroes and villains, so Scratch was one of the last completely new action figures to be released. He is literally a “cat burglar,” a mutant cat in a black-and-white jailbird outfit. While several other characters who were in the same assortment as Scratch are also very, very difficult to find, Scratch appears to be the absolute most difficult figure to find from this particular assortment.

When I described to Brian what the character looked like, he said, “Oh, I have that.” He probably knew that wasn’t good enough for me. After all, I had been led onto claims like fellow classmates owning Rocket Firing Boba Fett figures before. But Brian did have a particular advantage when it came to toys growing up: his mom worked at K-Mart, so whenever new Ninja Turtles figures were put on the shelves, his mom got first dibs. So it was entirely possible that with a connection like this, he could have gotten his hands on Scratch as a kid.

During one of his trips back home, he had me go down with him to his parents’ basement to look for his boxes of Ninja Turtles toys. We started rooting through, and sure enough, he held up a figure and said, “Is THIS the figure you were talking about?”

That moment was the first time I had ever held an honest-to-goodness example of Scratch. Brian wasn’t lying. His mom probably picked up the only Scratch figure that ever hit the shelves of our local K-Mart. While Brian clearly loved his toys, he was also about 11 or 12 years old by the time Scratch came out, so he was in much better shape than the rest of his childhood collection.

Seeing my excitement, he let me have the figure. Pretty cool, right? Still, I don’t consider myself the owner of the Scratch that I display on one of my toy shelves. Instead, I consider myself more of a caretaker. If I’m ever tempted to sell it, Brian gets the money. I mean, I HIGHLY doubt I would get rid of such a rare figure, and I’m honored that it’s getting proper display instead of sitting neglected in a basement. And it’s very cool that I can trace the lineage of the toy back to the original owner.

The moral of the story is that you should keep in touch with your childhood friends and pick their brains about their various toy memories. You might be surprised what you’ll find! Just don’t resort to Scratch-like antics and wind up in jail trying to get your grubby paws on some rare items!

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Animation cels are some of the best bargains on eBay. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, if you wanted to collect animation cels, chances are you’d have to go to an art gallery. I remember most cels, even for television series no one cared about, would routinely cost hundreds of dollars. However, for every cartoon ever produced, thousands of cels were created, so it stands to reason that there are an awful lot of them out there. I’ve seen sellers list hundreds of cels from different cartoons, with auctions starting at $9.99 each. The best cels with key characters in dynamic poses with their original painted backgrounds always bring more, but you can get your fair share of bargains online.

However, not all shows have cels that are easy to find. While cels from certain 1980s cartoons produced by Filmation are quite easy to find, cels produced by other production companies like Sunbow and Rankin-Bass are not nearly as plentiful, at least not on the secondary market.

That’s why, back when I was actively collecting Silverhawks toys back in the early 2000s, I was surprised to see a batch of them show up. More importantly, though, they had exactly the cel I wanted.

This is Copper Kidd, an alien from the planet of mimes, and he’s easily one of the stranger protagonists to appear on an action-packed cartoon from the 1980s. Since he didn’t talk, he communicated through a series of whistles. I don’t want to bash my favorite character from this ridiculous show, but the whole thing about mimes is that they communicate through body movement, not through any kind of speech. I know the creators of Silverhawks probably didn’t have the Internet for research in the mid-1980s, but I’m pretty sure there was a proper description of a mime in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Anyway, Silverhawks was on at a time when every cartoon had to have some sort of educational message at the end of it. The most well-known examples are most likely the public service announcements that were shown at the end of G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero, where your favorite cartoon characters advised children to stay away from strangers, put out fires, call 9-1-1, and all that fun stuff. Silverhawks was different in that the show tried to be educational by including a brief astronomy lesson. The cowboy Silverhawk Bluegrass would teach Copper Kidd about space so that he could be trained as a backup pilot for the Silverhawks’ ship the Maraj, which did happen on occasion.

This cel is one of the cels used specifically in that context. Since they often used the same animation for Copper Kidd from lesson to lesson, it’s very possible this cel was seen during the majority of these lessons, which, to me, makes it a lot cooler than an episode-specific cel. Anyone whose seen even one episode of Silverhawks has probably seen this cel.

I think I paid around $50-ish dollars for it on eBay back in the day. The framing, of course, cost a little bit extra, but I certainly love having it on display.

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