Colonel Sanders Is Attacking Tokyo!

You know, I'll tell you something. I grew up in an age when a grade school teacher could still slap a piece of masking tape across a talkative student's mouth and get away with it.

That's entirely apropos of nothing. It just came to mind a few minutes ago while I was in the bathroom here, and I figured I'd share.

Anyway, for reasons I fully understand, but that aren't really that important,

I got a notion in my head sometime around the middle of last week. I forget what I was watching?The Dunwich Horror, maybe, or The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake. Whatever it was, the notion lodged in my head that I needed?again, for reasons that aren't important?a Godzilla.

It's stupid, yes, and childish, but I just wanted one. Something to put on the desk, maybe. Something nice. I mentioned this notion to Morgan who, bless her, took it in stride. She understands.

Rather than scouring Toys R Us or FAO Schwarz, we figured the place to start looking was at the comic book stores. Comic stores, as I'm sure most of you know, are the places to go these days if you're in the market for a pop culture-related figurine. The array of products?as well as the array of people scrambling for these products?is mind-numbing. Up until about a year ago, I had no idea that this little subculture even existed, let alone was as big as it was.

Village Comics had your Star Wars crap, of course, and your Planet of the Apes, and your Lord of the Rings and your Harry Potter?but they also had Leatherface and Freddy Kreuger, and pop music stars and sports figures and wrestlers and GI Joes and comic book characters and old Universal movie monsters. Pokemons and Digimons and Betty Boops. Even little nudies! Everything, it seems, except Godzilla. (Well, they had two in a display case?one was not for sale and one was $200. I may have been a little obsessed, but I wasn't that obsessed. Or drunk. I have to be careful about getting obsessed with things when I'm drunk. Nothing but trouble and regret.)

Over the course of the next few days, we tried a few other places?Cosmic, Forbidden Planet, I went to a couple places in Brooklyn?all with the same results, and pretty much the same stock.

As we walked down Broadway after a mostly fruitless stop into Forbidden Planet, we were talking about the vast assortment of odd little collectable figurines?as well as my desire to obtain a Godzilla.

"They're kind of like Precious Moments," she said, "...of Destruction."

We both had mothers who collected Precious Moments and Hummels, so I knew what she was talking about. And she was right?the grownups who collected these things were just sort of creepy. And even though I was scouring these places with a fever similar to that seen in the eyes of these collector types, well, I figured I wasn't in that same class. After all, I was after one little thing, and one thing only. A small, simple thing, and after I found it, I would stop, and immediately become a functioning member of society again.

Until then, though...

"Quite by accident," I came across the website of a company that manufactured just the sort of things I was looking for. I didn't look any further into it, figuring that was all the proof I needed that such things existed. And if they existed, they existed someplace here in the city.

Then Morgan remembered?bless her again?that there were a couple places here in town that specialized exclusively in Japanese pop cultural doo-daddery. As it turns out, that very evening, after spending a few hours at a local tavern, we found ourselves strolling past just such a place, on 3rd Ave.

We went through the doors and up the stairs and through another door, where we found ourselves cast ashore on a very strange island. A kitschy heaven for collector geek and hipster alike. (And me?though of course I was there on a very serious and limited mission. A hit-and-run sort of thing.)

The walls and shelves were packed with toys, yes?but an odd selection of toys. The oddest selection of toys, you might say. From your basic Star Wars and comic book heroes, to a Snoopy aisle, a Hello Kitty collection, action figures from The Fly, Scooby Doo, Futurama and Wallace and Gromit to?Col. Sanders.

For some reason, every section of the store contained some sort of Col. Sanders figure. In the far back corner, there was even a Col. Sanders section. Big figures, tiny glass figures, nodders, wind-ups, dolls. Col. Sanders, it seems, had become a huge pop cultural icon in Japan without any of us knowing about it! Was the news of his devastating attack on Tokyo suppressed in the Western news media?

Morgan suggested that maybe it wasn't Col. Sanders specifically?just a white guy with glasses and a white goatee, wearing a white suit and a string tie. But I dunno?he looked an awful lot like Col. Sanders to me. It was all very troubling, in a way, and something that bugged me perhaps a little too much over the following days.

(Subsequent research has revealed the distant possibility that it might, in some way, be connected to Mel Brooks' Spaceballs?but I'm still not real sure.)

After making it through the nodders (Evel Knievel, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, Smurfs, hula dancers, tiki gods, Sea Monkeys, monkeys in fezzes), the robot section and the old superhero section, we finally found the Godzilla section?which was right across the aisle from the incredibly popular "dead child doll" section.

I couldn't help but be reminded of James Gunn's The Toy Collector as I scanned the shelves. It was all too much.

Morgan handed me a very nice one?a 2-inch tall, perfectly detailed Godzilla housed in a glass dome, all fancy-like. Yes, that would do quite nicely for my purposes, I thought. Then I flipped it over, and saw the sticker?$100. Oh my, no. I placed it gingerly back on the shelf and kept looking. Couldn't I find a nice one for, like, $5? What's wrong with that?

Of course, I guess a store like this would have plenty of customers who would pay prices like that. Thank God, again, that I wasn't drunker than I was.

Then my foot hit a cardboard box down on the floor, one that I hadn't previously noticed. I looked down to see that it was filled to overflowing with cheap plastic Godzillas. And not just Godzillas, either! Mothras and Baragons and King Ghidorahs as well! Then I heard another voice. A voice that wasn't in my head this time.

"Mommy! Mommy! Look! Godzillas!"

Just as I was bending down toward the box (a slow and laborious process, mind you), my passage was blocked by this little blonde girl, who savagely commandeered the box of affordable Godzilla merchandise.

I made a sound deep in my throat, a sound of panic and hatred, half-growl and half-whine, as she started pulling things out of the box and announcing them to her very patient mother.

I stood there, next to my very patient girlfriend, rocking from foot to foot, my hands clawing at each other, trying to keep myself from kicking this interloper in the ribs and yanking the box out of her hands. All these days of searching, only to be held back at the last possible moment by this squeaky-voiced little wretch! This little know-it-all!

"And there's Destroyah and Biollante! You don't see them very often!"

Errrrrr...

Morgan pulled other things off the upper shelves and placed them in my hands in an effort to quietly distract me before I did something terrible to this child. Kits of various kinds, wind-ups, plastic models. But in every case, there was something wrong. The eyes were too big. The colors weren't right. I don't have the manual dexterity to put things together. I wasn't going to pay $80 for one of these things. The proportions were off.

"And here's Mothra! Oh Mom! Look! A bank! Any real Godzilla fan would love a bank!"

Yeah, I'd like to... I began thinking, before realizing there was no logical way to end that sentence. So I decided to swing on the mother instead.

Funny thing was, when the child was finally dragged away (I'm not sure if my erratic behavior had anything to do with it) and I could breathe again without audibly whining, and finally gained access to the box, everything in there was wrong, too. Who wants a Godzilla spraypainted gold? Or a blue and silver one? It made no goddamned sense!

I gave up, and we kept looking. A few minutes later, in the back of the store, Morgan found another Godzilla collection. No hanky-panky this time?they were perfect. Vinyl, various sizes, properly proportioned and colored?ranging in price from $165 to $350. We decided to look at robots instead. And wind-ups. What a selection of wind-ups they had! Severed hands, astronauts, various monsters, Col. Sanders (of course) and doe-eyed, cross-toting wind-up Jesuses. They had a big display of those. Must've been popular.

We left, emptyhanded, not long afterward.

This whole thing was getting stupidly out of control. Why did I want something like this? Well, I knew exactly why, but it seemed so pointless. As if I don't have enough dreck cluttering up my apartment as it was. Too many things to kick and knock over. At the same time, however, my minor obsessions were like food cravings or those songs that get stuck in my head?the only way to dispel them once and for all is to fulfill them.

So the next day after work, I stopped by another Japanese toy store that "I just happened to discover" was right around the corner. Walked through the door, the Godzillas were there to my right, I grabbed the one I wanted and took it to the register. It was all sort of anticlimactic, but I was glad to finally be done with it. Once at the register, I found myself standing behind a 55-year-old fanboy complaining about the color separation in an Akira poster. In a moment of horror, I saw myself in 20 years. I keep finding myself in places and situations that would seem to confirm something about my character that I'd simply rather not know about. I shook it off, though, and dropped the 6-inch vinyl figure on the counter.

"Ahhh," the man behind the register said almost wistfully, smiling and tapping the figure on the head, "a classic."

"Yup," I said.

"Good ol' Godzilla."

"Sure is," I replied.

"King of the Monsters."

"Uh-huh," I said, beginning to lose patience here.

"Yup, nothin' like good ol' God-zilla for?"

"Look," I finally erupted, "will you please just sell me the fucking toy?"

With that, he did, and five minutes after walking into the store, I was on my way out again. Behind me, the aging fanboy was talking about a spaceship model that some company or another had released two years ago.

Jackass, I thought. Then I noticed the really, really nice Godzilla I hadn't noticed before?a big one?on a shelf to the left of the front door. It was much nicer than the one I had in my pocket.