I was reading my old film guide on the loo like every morning and I came across a movie that has some significance for me.
Not as a film - it sounds like dross - but as an object. The Comic, from 1985, was the last big box VHS horror video I saw at a car boot sale. I didn't know it at the time but the writing was on the wall as the sub-genre's presence at boot sales was clearly on the wane. This will have been about 10 years ago. After that, apart from the odd fishing tape, they were gone.
I did try to buy the video but the seller, a rather obstinate weekly trader, wanted a fiver and I wasn't willing to pay that. Haggling didn't get me anywhere either so the Comic stayed out of Moonbase.
Irritatingly the seller's reluctance to deal put me off something else he had, a loose Kenner Boba Fett figure, which was in a flat glass case face-up, along with old school Prefect badges, Esso keyrings and assorted dusty tat. I wanted to look at Boba and maybe get it with the Comic video. Whether it was the fabled mail-away rocket launching Fett I will never know but its very very unlikely, so I don't know why I keep thinking about it after 10 years. I suppose it's the Fett that got away and all that.
I've been back to the same car boot countless countless times over the last decade - its our local sale and I love going in summer and autumn - but like a released wasp I occasionally retraced my steps looking for that obstinate trader again just to stare at those lost items, but to no avail.
I've never seen either the Comic VHS or an original Kenner Boba Fett at any sale since then. No doubt they are available on Ebay but it's just not the same as finding them on a stall in the summer sunshine.
The cover of the Comic, a typical Eighties video nasty, is too gruesome really for me to show on the blog but should you wish to look Flashbak have an online example https://flashbak.com/terror-tape-horror-vhs-boxes-yesteryear-388223/the-comic/
Do you have any items that got away from you reader that you still think about?
