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I Spent $6 at a Honolulu Vintage Show: Here’s What I Found!

by Steven B. Combs, Ph.D. Topic: retro

I’ve walked the aisles of a lot of retro computer shows: Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, World of Commodore, and more. This time, the lovely accountant (TLA) and I were in Honolulu, and a nice surprise popped up in town: the Wiki Wiki One Day Vintage Collectibles & Hawaiiana Show at the Neal S. Blaisdell Center. Tickets were $6. Everything on the tables had to be 20 years old or older. My mission was simple. Could I find a retro computer in Hawaiʻi?

This post is the text companion to my video. It follows the tour table by table, adds a few facts I checked after I got home, and collects every link from the video in one place. Let’s dig in!

Wiki Wiki One Day Vintage Collectibles & Hawaiiana Show banner at the Blaisdell Center in Honolulu

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Here are the links from the video, plus a few I used to check my facts.

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COMPANION YOUTUBE VIDEO

Title: 🌺 I Spent $6 at a Honolulu Vintage Show: Here’s What I Found!

I Spent $6 at a Honolulu Vintage Show: Here’s What I Found! I Spent $6 at a Honolulu Vintage Show: Here’s What I Found!

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I’m posting videos from this Hawaiʻi trip on this channel and on my modern tech channel, @retroCombs-tech, where I’m covering the tech I took to Hawaiʻi with me. Subscribe to both so you don’t miss the next one.

VIDEO ERRATA

As of 2026-10-22:

  • Mix tapes: I said the DJs always talked over “the first 10 minutes” of the song. I meant the first 10 seconds. It only felt like 10 minutes when you were waiting with your finger on the record button.

THE WIKI WIKI ONE DAY SHOW

Wiki wiki means quick in Hawaiian, and the name fits. The show runs for one day and then it’s gone. We went to the fall show on Sunday, October 4, 2026. A $6 ticket got us in at 11 AM. If you want first crack at the good deals, $25 gets you in an hour early.

The poster promised two big rooms and more than 100 tables with dealers from Oahu, the neighboring islands, and the mainland. They delivered, filling both the Galleria and the Hawaii Suites at the Blaisdell Center, 777 Ward Avenue. According to the show’s website, vendors also come from Japan, and they promise not to pre-shop.

There was a map right on the door. Did I use it? No. Browsing is always the way to go. Attendees were hunting for vintage aloha shirts, jewelry, comics, and records. Then there was me, a guy from Indiana looking for anything with a power cord.

RETRO GAMES

Yellow handheld LCD Pac-Man game at the Honolulu vintage show

At the very first table I found a little yellow handheld LCD Pac-Man game, and yes, I pushed a few buttons. It worked. That was a promising start to the day. The same table had Pac-Man salt and pepper shakers. Pac-Man chasing ghosts around your dinner plate seems oddly appropriate.

Other game finds:

  • Altered Beast for the Sega Genesis, $40.
  • The Revenge of Shinobi, also from 1989. They don’t make box art like that anymore.
  • A $5 box of handheld goodies: a Nintendo DS, some Game & Watch units, a Multi Screen Blackjack, and a Wizards & Warriors. There was a lot more hiding in that box, so pause the video and tell me in the comments what you spot.
  • Casino Kid for the NES, sitting next to a box of Miller Lite playing cards. Now that’s the ’80s.

70S AND 80S ELECTRONICS

This is where I slowed way down, hoping to find a retro computer. TLA kept walking, looking for her own treasure. More on that later.

Boxed Motorola toy Handie-Talkie radios at the Honolulu vintage show

  • Motorola toy Handie-Talkie radios: a pair still in the box, promising a “secret click switch” and fun for everyone. If I’d had room in my bag, they might have ended up in Indiana.
  • Blaupunkt car stereo: its red LED clock read 12:26 when I shot it at 12:24. Two minutes fast isn’t bad for a 40-year-old radio. A Blaupunkt was the car radio I wished I could afford for my 1979 Honda Civic. Instead, it got a Realistic.
  • Realistic radio: right next to the Blaupunkt, of course. Realistic was the Radio Shack house brand. If you grew up in the ’70s or ’80s, you bought your batteries at Radio Shack, and every single time they asked for your address.
  • Cassettes: Sony, Nikon, and a stack of Fuji blank tapes, perfect for mix tapes recorded off the radio.
  • Cassette recorders: a National next to a Sony. These things were built like tanks.
  • National BH-710 fishing hook tyer: the oddest gadget of the day, bagged up next to its box with a $20 tag. National was Panasonic’s brand name in Japan. You set the hook and line, hit the switch, and a yellow gear spins the line around the hook and ties the knot for you. It runs on one AA battery, good for about 500 knots, and the box says “Keep the fishing spot clean.” I did my share of fishing in the ’70s and ’80s, so a motor that ties knots combines two of my loves: fishing and gadgets.

Can Radios

Campbell's tomato soup can AM radio with telescoping antenna

  • Budweiser can AM/FM radio, $50. That might be a little overpriced. I had one of these as a kid. My dad was a Budweiser distributor for a short time and brought one home with a pile of Bud Man swag that probably wasn’t appropriate for a 10-year-old. I think I got in trouble at school for having a Bud Man sticker on my notebook.
  • McDonald’s and Cracker Jack radios: the more kid-friendly options.
  • Campbell’s tomato soup can radio, with a telescoping antenna that pulls right out of the can. I love the goofy engineering of shoving a perfectly good radio into a can. Andy Warhol made that can famous in 1962. I don’t think he pictured it with an antenna, but I think he’d like it.

If you love oddball radios as much as I do, check out my Radio Fun! playlist.

TOYS AND LUNCHBOXES

This is where the show really took me back.

  • TOMY Astro Shooter pinball, still in the box, from around 1983. It has real flippers and real bumpers, and it plugs into the wall, so no batteries are required. It was pinball for the nights you couldn’t get to the arcade.
  • Lunchboxes: Gremlins (1984), Knight Rider with KITT on the front, and The Six Million Dollar Man. I really wanted the Six Million Dollar Man box growing up. It would have been the coolest box in the lunchroom, but sadly, I never had one.
  • Hot Wheels, $5 each: Rodger Dodger, Purple Passion, Rigor Motor, and even a Goodyear blimp. Hot Wheels started in 1968, and they’re still hot.

Vintage Volkswagen bus, Jeep, and Snoopy toys at the Honolulu vintage show

One table was a time machine: a Volkswagen bus, a Jeep, Snoopy, a little R2-D2, and Johnny Lightning cars, which showed up in 1969 to take on Hot Wheels. Bozo was in the back.

That Bozo brings up a little bit of shame. I was on the Nashville Bozo show in the early 1970s and was picked to tell a joke. I had one planned that nobody had ever told. When my turn came, I told the same joke everybody told every week. I was so disappointed in myself. Want to know which joke? Ask me in the video comments.

Another vendor had all of 1980s Saturday morning in Ziploc bags: action figures from lots of brands, plus M.A.S.K. (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, that’s “command” with a K). And wait, is that ALF? It is, and there were two of them. ALF was on TV from 1986 to 1990, the alien from Melmac who always had his eye on the family cat. I also found a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkey. I have no idea what it does, and I was afraid to ask. That is one scary-looking monkey.

MOVIES, MUSIC, AND POP CULTURE

’70s and ’80s pop culture was on full display.

  • Framed film cells: each frame holds real 35mm film from a movie. My Trekkie eyes went straight to a 1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan cell, then to a 1979 Alien cell. The selection ran from Elvis to Marilyn to Star Wars. I wish I’d had room in my luggage for that Star Trek cell.
  • Mickey Mouse phone: Mickey holds the handset for you. The first came out in 1976, and this one has push buttons on the handset. Very high-tech for the time.
  • Records: AC/DC High Voltage on vinyl for $25, from 1976 with Angus in his schoolboy outfit. Flip, flip, flip, and there were two of my favorite albums of all time from Boston and Styx.
  • A sunburst hollow-body guitar sitting on a Vox amp. As a wannabe guitar star and part-time player, I loved looking at that one.
  • Comics from about $1 up: X-Factor, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and one called Hawaiian Dick. Let’s hope that one’s about a detective, like Magnum P.I.
  • 45s and 33s: for you young whippersnappers, those numbers are the speeds the records turn on the turntable, not their sizes.
  • A Bruce Lee Enter the Dragon poster: the movie came out in ‘73, and we lost Bruce just weeks before it hit theaters. Way too soon, Bruce.
  • World War II-era Time magazines: a whole table from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. The Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, still looms over this island.
  • A sheet of Elvis stamps, $35. The Postal Service didn’t put Elvis on a stamp until 1993. That seems way too late.

HAWAIʻI HISTORY

This is a Hawaiiana show, and some of my favorite finds had nothing to do with electronics. There were old Waikiki visitor guides and a war map of the Pacific showing Japan, Hawaiʻi, and the rest of the world. That’s a real piece of history, right here in Honolulu.

Vintage Dole, Hawaiian Seal, Summer Isles, and Kapa pineapple labels

Then there were the pineapple labels: Dole, Del Monte, Hawaiian Seal, and Kapa. Look at that art. They just don’t brand like they used to.

This is the table where TLA found her treasure: a souvenir pamphlet from a 1956 tour of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company cannery. James Dole started that company in 1901. Inside, there’s a chapter called “A King Is Born,” followed by one called “A Lot of Fertilizer.” She loved her new find.

A PERSONAL FIND: CHANUTE FIELD

This next find stopped me dead in the aisle: “Greetings from Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois.”

In the early 1980s, the United States Air Force sent me to Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul to study automatic flight control systems and avionics. These postcards are older than my time there. They say “Army Air Forces Technical School,” the World War II name. I didn’t even haggle. You bet I bought them. Next to them were more wartime postcards, including “We Will Win” and “V for Victory.”

Then, an Indiana license plate in Honolulu, sitting right next to a bottle of Primo, a Hawaiʻi beer. Indiana and Hawaiʻi side by side, kind of like me on this trip. It was early October, so the show also had skeletons and other fun vintage Halloween decorations. I’d always wondered what Halloween looks like in Hawaiʻi.

ELVIS HAS NOT LEFT THE BUILDING

Elvis Aloha from Hawaii statue pedestal outside the Blaisdell Center

We spent about an hour and a half at the show, and a good chunk of that was outside, checking out the architecture. That’s where we ran into someone famous.

Here’s the retro tech hook. On January 14, 1973, Elvis Presley took the stage in the arena next door to the show. Back then the complex was called the Honolulu International Center. It opened in 1964 and was renamed for Mayor Neal S. Blaisdell, who oversaw its construction, in 1976. (Library of Congress HABS)

The concert started at about 12:30 AM Hawaiʻi time so it could go out live by satellite to Asia and Oceania. Europe saw it on a delay, and Americans had to wait until April 4, 1973, to watch it on NBC. Elvis’s official site calls Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite the first full-length concert by any musician to be beamed around the world over communications satellites. (Elvis Presley Official Site) Satellite TV in 1973? That’s my kind of retro tech.

TV Land unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Elvis outside the Blaisdell on July 26, 2007, to commemorate the concert. (NPR) Elvis has not left the building.

If you want to hear what all the fuss was about, here’s the official “Burning Love” performance from Aloha from Hawaii.

WAS IT WORTH $6?

Absolutely.

Did I find any retro computers? Unfortunately, no. Not a single one. What I did find was a pile of retro electronics, games, and pop culture: the things those of us who love retro computers also love. I also came home with a few postcards I’ll treasure.

If you’re on Oahu, check the official Wiki Wiki show site for upcoming dates. As I write this, the next one is the Holiday show on November 22, 2026, which the organizers say will be their 66th Wiki Wiki show.

This isn’t my only video about the retro scene in Honolulu. In an upcoming video, I head out around town to see whether I can find any vintage computers in Honolulu. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

CONCLUSION

I expected to come home empty-handed on the computer front, and I did. But I found a working Pac-Man handheld, a soup can radio, a knot-tying fishing gadget, and a postcard from my Air Force days, and I got to stand where Elvis made satellite TV history. That’s a great day for $6.

What would you have bought? Let me know in the video comments. If you came for retro computers and left disappointed, check out my vintage and retro show playlist, where I find plenty of them.

If you like hanging out with folks who love talking about this stuff, join our Discord. It’s a perk of becoming a channel member, with levels that run from the Commodore PET all the way up to the MEGA65. If this post helped, you can also leave a tip.

That’s it for me, folks. 🕹️ retroCombs, OUT!

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