2 Warps to Neptune

One of the best living room decor shots I’ve seen. There’s more Star Wars on the far left, just in front of the coffee table. I think one of the boxes is the 12″ C-3PO figure. (It’s actually the MPC C-3PO model kit. Thanks, Retro Art Blog!)

The kid in the photo is Scott Tipton, comics writer and co-creator of Blastoff Comics. He says:

I can’t remember a Christmas growing up when there wasn’t exactly what I wanted either under the Christmas tree or arriving as a surprise on Christmas morning. And half the time, I hadn’t even asked for it — my parents just knew. This was the thing I would want. The Mego Batman Wayne Foundation? The Star Wars Millennium Falcon? ROM the Spaceknight? There they were.

And looking back now as a grown man with bills and responsibilities of my own, I can even more than ever appreciate what that meant. We were a working-class family, no question about it. My father drove a truck for a living, and my mother worked at the school cafeteria. Some of these gifts must have meant skipped lunches for my father and careful tightening of the purse-strings by my mother. And yet every year, Christmas was an absolute joy, and not just for the presents under the tree. My parents always treated Christmas as something special — to go back to the Dickens, we “were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time.”

That hits me in the feelers. Scott goes on to ask everyone who can to donate to Toys for Tots, “Because every kid should have a Batmobile under the tree if they want one.” Hard to argue with that.

I didn’t forget about the giant Bat Away box. Here’s the commercial. (Stick around for the hilarious Zips shoes commercial that comes next.)