![]() ![]() So if you’re looking to collect these I’d suggest watching eBay like a hawk and being patient. Sometimes you can get a good deal and sometimes folks sell these for $100 a pop. But since these are highly prized and sought after collectibles by folks in the horror fandom community they tend to get snatched up and resold individually. The best resource for finding them over the last decade has been when small stockpiles of them have been unearthed in old storage lockers and they show up in bulk sets for upwards of $1k on ebay. These things are used, abused and thrown away, so it really rare to see them pop up on the secondary “antique” market. I mean they cheapo stickers that are used to adorn trapper keepers and school notebooks. Not only are they most likely unauthorized bootleg merchandise, but they’re designed to be disposable. I mentioned this in the previous piece that I wrote, but these are the type of collectibles that become really hard to find years after their release. In fact it wasn’t until 2009 when I finally found a small set of 5 stickers on eBay, 20 years later. And very similar to my Barfo candy experience, after I found my first prism horror sticker I was never able to locate anymore for a very long time. ![]() Much like art adoring trading card wax wrappers, there’s something that I find really appealing about the bloby, offset, screen tone colors and thick, bold shadowy style of the reproduced line art. I always loved that sticker, partly because it had different imagery than anything else I’d seen relating Nightbreed, and partly because of the super simplified art style of these prism stickers. I was beyond stoked and as soon as we were settled into our new home my dad gave me an old black particle board bookcase from his office and the Nightbreed sticker was peeled off the backing and stuck prominently above my collection of horror paperbacks. ![]() I’m not sure if it was a Pizza Hut or something more in line with a truck stop diner, as we were inclined to have stopped at either, but sometime on that trip I found a machine, slid my two quarters into the push handle and pulled out a little while cardboard sleeve that had a foil prism Night Breed sticker inside. So I was excited for the flick and sometime during the drive up to New Hampshire my folks stopped off at a restaurant that had one of those sticker vending machines in the lobby. I was also an avid reader of Fangoria and remember reading an interview with Clive Barker about his new project Nightbreed in the October 1989 issue. By this point I’d seen and was mildly obsessed with both Hellraiser films and had just recently picked up a secondhand copy of Barker’s first Books of Blood short story collection. Joe and Transformers and was turning into an angsty teen who wanted to spend all of his time reading Uncanny X-Men comics and Stephen King novels, listening almost exclusively to Metallica and Megadeth, and watching horror movies. At the time I was 12 and had been sort of weaning myself off of stuff like G.I. But before I get ahead of myself let me bring it back to the beginning and talk a bit about what these are and why I love them so damn much.Īs I mentioned I found my first sticker back in 1989 while my family made a big move from Florida up to New Hampshire. Now I’ve managed to dig up some more information that leads me to believe that these stickers actually debuted in 1989 and were potentially released in waves throughout the end of 1990 or so. As a kid, the only vending horror sticker that I manged to get my hands on was one featuring Clive Barker’s 1990 movie Nightbreed, so I assumed that the stickers were released in at least 1990, but I was also working under the assumption that the entire set of stickers (at the time I guessed that there were maybe 40-50 available based on some collections I saw online) were released at the same time. They don’t feature copyright notices so you kind of have to use context clues to date them. Vending stickers are a hard thing to date because of their bootleg and disposable nature. Some of it is having a new perspective on the material, and some if it is finally having access to a much larger collection to showcase and the collector in me, the completest, is compelled to set about making something a little more definitive.īack in 2009 I addressed one of my 80s era collecting holy grails when I wrote about a small collection of obscure horror movie-themed prism vending machine stickers. I’m a different person than I was at the outset and enough time has passed that I feel like I might have something more to add to those early articles. ![]() As I approach my 10th anniversary of running Branded in the 80s I can’t help but feel a pull towards revisiting some of the topics and products that helped to launch the site back in 2006. ![]()
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