Working on a new article soon; not the "big one" I keep talking about -- that's for next week. Anyway, I was delving deep into the recesses of all my old backup CDs and shit, and was floored by some of the stuff I'd saved over the years. The best part was finding tons of old materials intended for X-E articles that just never came to fruition. Here's an image collection of particular interest -- a few years ago, we went to Toys 'R' Us, camera in hand, archiving the sights and sounds (well, just the sights) of their massive E.T. section.
This was in conjunction with the 20th anniversary release, but since the merchandising blitz preceded the movie's re-release, the photos are from 2001. (could be wrong, but fairly certain) More amazing than anything else is the fact that most of the toys were incredibly high-priced -- some E.T. statues going for well over a hundred -- but as the anniversary edition more or less flopped and the expected legion of new toy-buying kid fans never quite surfaced, everything was and is still being liquidated at discounts of up to 90% off the original price. I bought almost none of this crap when it first came out, but have since collected virtually all of it. The 150 buck E.T. statues were 20 dollars or less, and the smaller items had even more significant markdowns.
Profit margins notwithstanding, the reason E.T.'s new merchandise has to be considered a failure is because of the immense attention it received -- with the amount of floor space and intricate setups it was given in stores, it either had to be a sales leader or be thought of as a total flop. The most interesting item by far? E.T.'s "Chips Ahoy!" cookies...
God...why didn't I save a bag of these? Why why why why why? I wish I wasn't so poor a few years ago. Hard to justify buying bags of E.T. cookies when you shouldn't have even been at Toys 'R' Us 'cause your gas tank was empty and you had no money to fill it. But that's your story, not mine. "Chips Ahoy! E.T. Glow Blasts" were amazing -- they were the same cookies everyone's familiar with, just with yellowish, candy-coated chocolate "Glow Blasts" added on top. The package was foil-embossed, and the look on E.T.'s mug explains that the poor guy had no idea his reemergence was going to be such a piss in the wind.
Click "more" for "more." Toy store aficionados have probably grown accustomed to only seeing E.T. merchandise shoved in the bag with half-ripped packages and huge "TAKE ME HOME" red clearance stickers all over 'em, so let's voyage back to the space alien's brighter days...
I ended up buying the Drew Barrymore figure (and most of the other stuff) when it hit the clearance racks. She showed up on the site later, in this article. The E.T. figure itself also turned up, in my tribute to Blaster, of all places.
Posted by Matt on 11/07/2003. E-mail me!
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1st Post … score! That’s all I got.