Sleuth This, Sherlock

Clues without a mystery: what I found in a long-abandoned box for the board game Clue: Master Detective, which I found under my bed. At one point, this version of Clue was my favorite non-electronic game, but that day passed on around the time it became unfashionable for me to wear t-shirts with Hawaiian gecko designs.

box... of... mysteries!

Play pieces for five of the available characters. (Clockwise, beginning at 10 o' clock: Miss Peacock, Monsieur Brunette, Miss Peach, Colonel Mustard and Madam Rose. Apparently I lost most of the game's original cast. I guess you're screwed if your favorite is Professor Plum. Not that your color of game piece has any effect on the fun factor of Clue or anything.)

Fancy, expanded Clue: Master Detective board, complete with bonus potential murder locations, like the courtyard and the fountain. (Noticeably still lacking: a shitter.)

Face cards for the ten potential murders. Note that Miss Peach is a dead ringer for Emma Thompson and that Miss Peacock looks suspiciously like Liz Sheridan.

A partially completed Clue murder checklist. Of course, we don't know where it happened or who did it, but they clearly did the deed with poison. We know that much, people.

Official murder evidence folder, still with poison inside, denoting it as the murder weapon. (To be honest, I pulled it out of the envelope for dramatic effect.)

The most retarded murder evidence card ever, in that it lacks either the look or the size dimensions of the actual cards, meaning it could never have fooled anyone. For example, if you ever saw somebody holding the big, white, bent, ugly card, you'd know that the murder weapon isn't the above. It's the only big, white, bent, ugly card in the stack. Also, it's too big to fit in the evidence folder. Really, it's just an index card with a crude depiction of dynamite on one side. Also problematic in that the Clue murder weapon could never be dynamite. If detectives in whatever case can't immediately rule out dynamite as the murder weapon — say, as opposed to rope of a knife — then something is way fucked up in department intelligence.

A photo of a clocktower I don't recognize.

A tattered but basically un-used package of paper hole reinforcements.

Another mystery. I haven't got a clue who "Rosalie Otterbame" is, but that's not my handwriting. I think this card — and, likely, the TNT card too — may have resulted from a project I did in elementary school in which I had to turn a book I read into a board game. I read Death on the Nile, and transformed it into a shameless rip-off of Clue. Now that I think about it, "Rosalie Otterbame" is probably either a misspelling of or a poor rendering of "Rosalie Otterbourne," whom the internet says actually was a character in Death on the Nile.

A zip-able Mickey Mouse change purse.

A copy of Wilson Rawls's Where the Red Fern Grows, for some reason.

A travel guide for Las Vegas. (Apparently, the younger me had some pretty grand travel plans.)

A relatively crisp issue of GamePro magazine from August 1993, touting the console release of Street Fighter II Turbo on its cover.

A trading card for X-Man The Beast. (Though the card has the word "metal" on it, rest assured that it's actually flimsy paper with the smallest amount of metallic ink it needs to appear to be metal.)

A fairly large poster depicting The Incredible Hulk fighting The Thing, for some reason. I don't remember ever seeing this before, nor does it look like it had ever been thumbtacked to the wall.

The storybook version of The Great Muppet Caper, for some reason.

Conclusions: I don't think I could ever sort out how all these random items made their way into the Clue box, making a convertible junk drawer out of what should have been the container for the game pieces — many of which are now lost, rendering the remaining pieces basically useless. However, I can tell you this much: Back in 1993, the eleven-year-old Drew has organizational skills that can be described as lacking at best, non-existent at worst. Also, I enjoyed a rather focused set of interests: board games, video games, Muppets, and bulky male superheroes whose names began with "the" and end with a synonym for "bulky entity." I may or may not have been plotting to run away to a clocktower in Las Vegas.