WHAT I BOUGHT AT WIZARD WORLD 3

Once upon a time, major motion pictures had souvenir program books produced for sale at select first run movie theaters across the country. You'd buy your ticket to the show, your popcorn and Dr. Pepper (that's what I always get) and if you were lucky enough, a souvenir program book.

These booklets were sometimes hardbound, sometimes soft cover and they were full of color stills from the film you were about to see along with information about the cast and crew and the production of the film. My collection of these souvenir movie program books includes EXODUS, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, BEN-HUR, SPARTACUS, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. I used to have more, including 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, THE GODFATHER, STAR WARS, ALIEN and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.

When I found the program booklet for SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE at Wizard World Austin Comic Con on Friday, I knew it was an item that I had to have. It's a neat little collectible from one of my all-time favorite films. The one I bought was in pretty rough shape and the dealer wanted five bucks for it. He was also selling the James Bond mag I wrote about in my previous post so, taking a page from the AMERICAN PICKERS handbook, I bundled the items and asked him what was the best he could do for the two books considering the lower grade condition of both. He let me have them for twenty-five bucks, which means I got this movie program for free. Sweet!