A year before the Captain America merchandising blitz hits

A while back, I went and placed a big old ugly Amazon.com ad block at the bottom of my blog. Now I just did this out of a sense of curiosity. (really, does anyone really click these kinds of ads much anymore?) I was curios to see what kinds of ads, considered relavent to my site would be shown on there. Of course I already had my suspicions but I just wanted to see it for myself just to satisfy my suspicions.  What ended up being displayed on there was your typical mix of Captain America related merchandise: Captain America T shirts, Captain America Mugs, Captain America comic book collections (otherwise known as graphic novels), Captain America action figures, and even the old 1990's Captain America movie. Yep, pretty much what you would expect.

  So what was the point of me mentioning this here? Well I guess I am trying to illustrate a point about the influence of the future Captain America movie on the whole Cap franchise; beyond just the expected hype for the movie itself, we will be inundated with merchandising for the character, the likes of which we have never seen for him before. Right now, any search for Cap-related merchandise will give you a real mixed bag of stuff.  A year from now we will be almost smack dab in the middle of the media marketing blitz that we know will be coming; there will be  Captain America merchandise pushed at us from all sides, from restaurants to convenience stores to big box stores, all of them competing for our precious dollars.  It happened with Iron Man, remember?  A year before the movie therewas no deluge of movie related action figures or t-shirts or plush toys or coloring books, Now, it can be hard to remember what it was like before the movie since back then the character was not as high profile as, say, Spider-Man or the X-Men.

  I guess that the same thing could be said for both Thor and the Avengers: both may have some level of popularity with the regular comic-buying crowd, however I would argue that they are by no means as much a part of the public consciousness as Spider-Man, Iron Man or the X-Men, all of which have had a successful movie franchise to bolster their reputations with the moviegoing public.

I guess the point that I am trying to make, in a roundabout way, is that you should make a mental note of the Captain America landscape now, circa Summer 2010, because soon enough everything is going to change and in the midst of the Cap hype it might be neat to be able to stop and think to yourself, 'wow, things sure changed a lot in a year'.

  A follow up to this point is the idea that if there is a specific t-shirt or poster or other Captain America item that you have wanted to buy but have been putting off, you might want to go and get it now because it is pretty likely that a lot of the stuff out there will be discontinued and be dissapearing off of store shelves and online soon after.

  Along these lines, if you think that you might be shopping online at the official Marvel shop (Marvel.com) or anywhere else for such items then you should consider first going over to Mr. Rebates and signing up for free and then doing your shopping because you will get some cash back on your purchase.

Who knows, you might just save enough on your purchase to help pay the ever-growing price of a movie ticket next Summer...