let's vacation anime

[davemerrill]

Some travel pix at the new Let's Anime including the Harlock/Candy murals, some Shogun Warrior toy action, and a car dealership using Astro Boy to advertise its service department!

http://letsanime.blogspot.com/2016/08/w ... on-16.html

Summer's wrapping up and that means I'm spending the next month getting ready for AWA. I'm doing Anime Hell on Friday night, "The Craziest Anime You Never Saw" Saturday morning at 10:30, and "Anime Club Hot Tub Time Machine" Sunday at 12:30. I'll also be hosting the AWA Mixer on Saturday night and will likely be dragooned into the opening & closing ceremonies as well. Oh, and I have to manage the Super Happy Fun Sell on Thursday night. That's a lot of stuff I gotta do.

If you're anywhere near Atlanta next month please come by AWA! I've been told the hotel has been asked to lower drink prices at the Mixer, which is good news.

[SteveH]

Well, if the drinks aren't free and I can't do my light stick dance then NO THANK YOU!!

[AVHodgson]

I've been going to the Outer Limits for years and I've somehow never noticed their vintage anime material. Still, every time I go there I'm never disappointed; there's always something good.

[SteveH]

I've been going to the Outer Limits for years and I've somehow never noticed their vintage anime material. Still, every time I go there I'm never disappointed; there's always something good.

Mind, I have no idea what they still have. Like I said, I was under the impression they went out of business sometime around 2006 or so.

Outer Limits used to be one of the 'holy stores' of the Toybox DX crowd, right up there with Kimono My House. Lots of old stuff from the days when Pony Toy had cheap prices.

Now, it's completely possible there's more than one comic/toy store using the name 'The Outer Limits'. For some reason I thought they were in New Jersey and I can't find any old posts at TBDX to confirm or deny.

Could be they moved. I dunno.

[AVHodgson]

They've been in Waltham for as long as I've been going there.

[SteveH]

They've been in Waltham for as long as I've been going there.

Well, OK, but you don't specify just how long you've been going there. Like "20 years" or "5 years" or whatever. So I can't see that as a metric.

But assuming you've been going there for 15 years, do you recall them closing down for a time, having a big 'fire sale' of stuff, or moving location, say to another strip mall or even to a different location within the same shopping center?

Reason why I'm questioning myself on if there was a different store also called Outer Limits is the Japanese toy stock was pretty hard to miss, being a significant part of the store inventory. You can't hide Jumbo Machinders on the wall, ya know? I think it was the store that had a decent in-box Jumbo Machinder Grandizer Spazer which is quite the rare animal. This would have been sometime in the early 2000's.

[davemerrill]

Outer Limits has a bit of 70s vintage diecast toy action in their case - I bought one of the cars from "Gattaiger" - and some manga and anime comics, magazines and a few copies of "Intron Depot" stashed away in the center aisle of books. Some groovy older kits up towards the ceiling. That store is stuffed to the gills with stuff of all kinds.

I don't know how long they've been in that location. I know they were there in 2000 when I first visited the Boston area. So that's 16 years, at least. They're in downtown Waltham, in a block of shops that's 1940s vintage at the very latest. Old school retail space.

When we visited a few years back, there was an anime store that was down the street a block or so that had DVDs, toys, and newer anime merchandise, but they didn't survive.

on my 2000 visit to Boston, Carol and Kathy and Mike took me past a store in Cambridge or some dang place that did have a jaw-dropping selection of amazing robot toy action; Jumbo Machinders, a swell X-Bomber, etc - but it's been out of business for a good long time, and was not in Waltham.

I think there was also a place called "Cosmic Connection" that did some mail order model kit business back in the 80s, and I want to say it was Waltham as well. I'd have to dig their pamphlet out of my files.

[SteveH]

I recall when Jerry and I were in Washington DC to visit a suddenly very ill friend (it was quite the epic trip, never drive to DC in a Feb. Blizzard.) we made a stop at a nearby comic store (with absurd amounts of anime stuff) called Barbarian.

My god the things they had there. They had a beautiful MIB brand new (it was around 1987) Tomy DX Ideon at some then-absurd price, like $75 or something and Jerry LUSTED after that toy and was in such anguish he couldn't buy it (yeah, you know nobody really had money then, ours was tied up in gas and food and hotel, ya know?) and now that toy commands insane money.

And other stuff I can't even remember. I think that was where I was able to get a complete run of the 1000 Year Queen anime comics (which turned out to be not actually complete as they never did the entire series, but it WAS all the volumes the publisher produced). That thing, that I had money for. They wanted like $5 a volume and I think they cut a little deal to get it out of the store. LONG LONG AGO TIME.

[AVHodgson]

The manga in the store is hard to miss, but I always passed it over because it seemed like there was barely anything interesting there. Nothing like the terrific variety you get when you look everywhere else in the store.

[davemerrill]

re: "Cosmic Connection" -

Sean at Colony Drop found this on Facebook and he shared it on Twitter and I'm sharing it here - the true story behind Cosmic Connection and Yamato model kits and everything!!!1!!11