Treasure Hunting from Home

When I reopened my Smurf mushroom house recently, I couldn’t shake the feeling I may have been missing some Smurfs. I was pretty sure I had a Papa Smurf figure and at least one other character from the show so I did some treasure hunting. 

Back in June, when I was mostly caught up with new content, I had a movie marathon. I started with The Usual Suspects and St. Elmo’s Fire. I moved on to Sleepless in Seattle and followed that up with While You Were Sleeping. 

I found the Bill Pullman connection between the two films interesting. In Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan’s character spends most of the movie uncertain about whether she should marry Pullman’s character. In While You Were Sleeping, Sandra Bullock spends most of the movie infatuated with Peter Gallagher, but over the course of the movie, she falls in love with Pullman. 

As the opening credits for While You Were Sleeping began to roll, I remembered something: I had a While You Were Sleeping button in my promotional materials collection! 

When I worked at both KMart and MediaPlay, I received promotional buttons to wear for home video releases. I have buttons to promote everything from animated Disney features to live action movies. Most of my live action movie buttons were also for Disney productions come to think of it. 

I also had friends who worked at the local movie theater.  Sometimes they gave me their buttons once those movies left the theater and new ones took their places. Usually, this happened with George Clooney movies (One Fine Day, The Peacemaker, and the much maligned Batman & Robin). 

While I was looking for the button, I had accidentally tipped the box over and all the buttons fell out. Because they are all pin back buttons and could cause serious pain if found them with a bare foot, I searched my closet for as many of the buttons as I could find. I checked all the bags and boxes in the immediate area, but never found one with Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman on it. 

However, I did find: 

1. Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony stickers 

2. An empty candy tin with Blueberry Muffin on it and unopened Care Bears mints 

3. Unopened Blueberry Muffin lip balm 

4. Keychains: Genie from Aladdin, Strawberry Shortcake, and a mini Etch a Sketch (and it actually WORKS!) 

5. An Alice from Alice in Wonderland “Weeble” type thing. 

6. My formerly headless Joe McIntyre doll. (Joey has since had a successful surgery.) 

7. My very first She-Ra: Princess of Power figure. Her original bustier jewelry broke, so I used a jeweled sticker from my nieces’ arts and crafts supplies. 

8. Will Scarlett- Robin Hood Prince of Thieves action figure from my Christian Slater phase from Fall 1992. 

9. Three more PVC Smurf figures: Baker/Greedy Smurf, Cowboy Smurf (was that ever a thing?) and red-capped patriarch Papa Smurf! 

There were also a lot of really interesting buttons that will make a great blog article of their own some other time.