RICK: What do we got here?
I have brought you in something that you may want
to take home and use tonight.
A bar of soap from 1896.
RICK: Yellow Kid Soap.
That is funny.
And, uh, yeah, it definitely looks aged.
It's seen its better days.
[laughs]
MAN: I came in the pound shop today
to sell my Yellow Kid soap.
It was an early comic strip character.
He wore a yellow nightgown with different saying on it.
And it was real politically geared at the time.
If I sold the bar of soap today, I'd
probably make sure my daughter has a very nice birthday.
It's really, really neat and different.
It was, like, the first comic strip to really use,
like, the bubbles that come up.
But everything he said was written on his shirt.
It was really weird.
The reason they called him Yellow Kid,
he was always wearing a yellow nightshirt.
His actual name was Mickey Dugan.
He was a little boy that lived in the slums of New York.
And it was pretty common for kids
to be bald back then in the slums,
because that's how you took care of lice.
The neatest thing about the comic strip
is, that's where the term "yellow journalism" came from.
MAN: I did not know that.
I forget the name of the newspapers,
but it was Pulitzer's paper and William
Randolph Hearst's newspaper.
And they were massively competing against each other
for viewership.
Originally, the Yellow Kid appears in Pulitzer's paper.
But since it was so popular, Hearst poached the comic's
creator for his own paper.
So Pulitzer got a new illustrator
and he started publishing Yellow Kid.
Next thing you know, you had two competing Yellow Kids.
So the public started calling the papers
Yellow Kid newspapers.
Those two main competing newspapers--
I mean, they would straight up lie about stuff just
to get the viewership.
So eventually, sensationalized news stories became
known as yellow journalism.
MAN: Interesting.
RICK: So you wanted to sell it.
I'm here to sell it today.
How much did you want for it?
I'm asking $750 for it.
RICK: [sighs] How did you come up with the price 750?
I saw it, like, in a price guide, I think,
that was about 10 years old.
RICK: [sighs] I mean, my big problem is,
no one knows about this, OK?
I'll tell you what.
I'll give you $150 for it.
You might see a book that gives you a price in it.
That means nothing if you can't find anybody to pay that price.
We need to come up a little bit.
$200, it's yours. RICK: No.
I'll give you 175.
No one else is going to buy it.
No one else knows what it is.
I'm being a nice guy.
You could wait another five or six years,
find someone else that knows what it is.
175. MAN: All right.
Sweet. We got a deal.
Um, come up front and we'll do some paperwork.
OK.
It's not as much as what I was hoping to get today.
But I'm going to take this $175 and be bathing in $1 bills.