One Saturday morning in the very early eighties, I was watching cartoons and eating Honey Nut Cheerios. It was still dark outside and my parents and sister weren’t up yet and this commercial came on and changed my life:
At some point I believe I had just about every MOTU figure and vehicle there was to get and I had duplicates of some of them. Later on it was Gi-Joe, Thundercats, Super Powers, Transformers, and then Rambo. (I already had a bunch of Star Wars stuff.)
As happens, I got older and left most of those things in boxes that got moved to the corner, then the closet, then finally, the attic. Years went by and I barely even thought of it. I don’t guess I ever actively got rid of any of it, but after years and several moves, stuff just disappeared. What didn’t vanish was, for the most part, destroyed by heat, exposure, and improper storage. Of course, these are all things that had I known differently I would have taken active steps to prevent. But alas, my epic 80’s toy collection decayed.
The thing is that historically, that’s what happened to most kids and that’s precisely why vintage toys in good condition were sought after: because they were rare.
In the 90’s I jumped on the comic collecting bandwagon that came with the release of Batman. For a few years I took subscriptions to several titles and dutifully bagged and boarded them to keep them in “mint” condition.
The toys came next. At the time, most of the 80’s stuff I spoke about were not yet old enough to be worth anything. Hell, some of them were still hanging on pegs in stores at the mall. It wasn’t unless it was some unique variant of some limited run of some obscure character that anything was worth more than its weight in plastic.
These toys, however, were not to be played with. Nope. They stayed safely packaged and carefully packed in boxes to ensure that they didn’t get damaged. Which ones were going to be worth anything? Hell if I knew so I just got everything I could.
But damn if every other kid in America didn’t do the same thing! Everything that’s been bought and sold in the super hero market in the past 25 years is still in pristine condition! Collectors everywhere are holding on to potentially priceless artifacts that, unfortunately, only become priceless if and when everyone else opens/damages theirs. Everything is “limited” and “special” edition, but none of that really means anything unless “limited” means “scarce” and “special” means “substantially different from everything else…and scarce.”
Noone will be!!!
So, while my actual potentially valuable stuff was rotting away in the attic, I spent all my hard-earned cash on books and toys that I hoped would be worth something but now that I’m here in the future I know will not. I mean, some of it is worth some money; I wasn’t completely hosed.
But it’s nowhere near as lucrative as had I kept all my other truly vintage stuff in better condition. Plus, the market is so funky it’s really hard to tell. For example, go to Ebay and search for “Spiderman 361”
I’ll help you out. It’s worth anywhere from $1.75 to $300.00.
Now I’m older and am actually subject to the fits of nostalgia that cause a grown man to part with a significant amount of legal tender to acquire an artifact from his childhood.
The irony is that I DON’T want a figure in perfectly mint condition and in the package. Hell no! I want to play with him for a few minutes before placing him on a shelf. I don’t want to worry about wrecking a collectible. That’s too much stress for me.
For what it’s worth, I have been trying to help the market out a little bit. Since Spawn of Scarydad has come along, she has inherited several Spiderman action figures (she loves Spidey) that had lain sealed in their original bubble packs. Realizing that some of them were actually worth less than they were when I bought them 20 years ago, that was not a hard decision to make. So collector market, your Toy Biz Web-Slinging Spiderman MOC figure has increased in rarity by a millionth of a percent.
You’re welcome!
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