Blast from the Past

A few doors on, look to your left for Blast from the Past. If the Mystic Museum trades in nightmares, this store trades in the happier corners of pop-culture memory — the action figures, movie posters, busts, and vintage toys that a couple of generations grew up loving. It's nostalgia as retail, and in a studio town, nostalgia is a serious business.

The store began around 2003, when Larry Ross, a lifelong science-fiction and horror fan, was invited to partner in a small movie-memorabilia and toy shop. Within a year he and his wife Kathy had bought the original owner out and made it their own. They grew it patiently, moving a couple of times before finally landing their own building here on Magnolia. Inside you'll find a staggering inventory — by some counts more than five thousand action figures and two thousand movie posters — with horror memorabilia now one of the strongest draws, pulling collectors in from across Southern California.

Look in the window and you're really looking at a museum of the last fifty years of movies and television, priced to sell. This is the collector's-shelf version of the same story you saw at It's a Wrap: an entire local economy built on the entertainment industry, right down to the toys made from its characters. The people who work on films are often the biggest fans of films, and stores like this are where that devotion gets to live out in the open.

Kathy Ross once described their earliest days plainly — a good day might bring in a couple hundred dollars, and they didn't know the first thing about payroll or sales tax. Two decades later, they're an anchor of the strip. Take a slow look; you'll spot something from your own childhood. Then we'll continue toward a deli that's fed this neighborhood since the 1960s.