Things We Collected During The Dark Times

If you viewed the "Collect All " pitch on the back of your vintage Kenner cards as more commandment than suggestion, you were a collector. You might not have realized it, but this is what you were. You have a sickness. An unnatural compulsion drives you to accumulate. And were you going to stop collecting just because Kenner said "NO MORE STAR WARS FOR YOU"? Of course not. A collector collects. Always. Fortunately during that awful ten year period of Starwarslessness, we had other, lesser things to keep us occupied until the POTF2 He-Man Luke dotted the pegs at retail. You will note a lack of G.I. Joe because that line was too contemporaneous with Star Wars.




I hated the Mego superhero figures. My most vivid memory of them is that Batman's gloves were like two blue sandwich bags pulled over his hands. Those 8" figures probably created some subconscious primordial hatred in me for the current Black Series 6" line. Fortunately, Kenner wrested the DC licence from Mego in 1984. As the Star Wars line was winding down, Kenner was ramping up the Super Powers line. They were pretty awesome. It was a case where action features made the figures better. The triggering mechanism was well hidden; usually activating it involved squeezing the legs together to perform some sort of judo chop. Since these figures were roughly the same scale as the vintage Kenner figures, it was a natural transition. It was methadone for our Star Wars withdrawals.

It's true that there was overlap between the Star Wars line and the Super Powers collection (and with the next item on the list), so it wasn't a direct collecting descendancy. But once those foolish fools at Kenner decided against the 85/86 Continuation Line, we could officially devote ourselves to the DC Superheroes. I know I bring up the continuation line a lot, but it seems like every time I do, someone comments "I never saw that before". Of course that someone is always nomadscout, but we need to keep reminding him of things.




Vehicles transforming into robots didn't start with Transformers, or at least not in the US. Tonka's Gobots slightly beat them to market in 1983. I still remember the first time I saw a commercial for the GoBots. The expression on my face for the next week was this. The shock also knocked most of my clothes off like that in pic. By the time I finally got a stupid adult to take me to the toy store, all they had left was the train. The frackin' train! It's like settling for Chuchunezumi when you really wanted Pengin (Bret, it's from South Park).

This sting of second-rate GoBottery was short lived, because Hasbro all but wiped them from the Jedi archives. GoBots were a fad. It's no hyperbole to say Transformers are a cultural phenomenon. When Generation 1 launched, it was a sign of things to come. It launched with a cartoon, comic book, and toy line all at once. The pain you felt every second you didn't own a Transformer was worse than the pain of losing your moustache in a fast food fire. For most of us, Transformers became every bit the passion Star Wars had been a few years earlier. I still remember the first time I saw a commercial for the Constructicons. The expression on my face for the next week was this. I also remember literally reading the cover off my first Transformers comic. Say, that reminds me...




Even though we're not all nerds, we're all nerds. I would say that pretty much everyone I knew growing up read a comic book or two at times. I read comic books too, but I didn't collect them (see above about reading the covers off). Then it seemed at some point that awful collector gene kicked in. This was the perfect elixir to finding yourself "too old to play with toys." You still got to collect, but there wasn't as much of a stigma around comic books because they were an investment. They were better than shares in Apple. Until they weren't. Sure you still read the books themselves, but that was your reader copy. You also had that pristine copy that only came in contact with human hands for a few moments before it was hermetically sealed, bagged, and boarded.

It was the late eighties/early nineties, and the comic book companies knew they had you. They saw you buy that stupid red repaint of Bumblebee when you still collected toys. They knew you had this horrible collectors sickness, and they started producing multiple gaudy holographic chrome wraparound covers for each issue, so instead of buying two of each issue, we were buying three, four, or more. And don't forget the newsstand edition! Then it all crashed. The good news is that for all your diligent preservation of these illustrated magazines during this time, you don't have to worry about capital gains tax. Most are worth less than their cover price today. Unless of course you didn't burn out on the early nineties flood and were snagging issues of Amazing Spider-Man when Marvel almost went bankrupt in the late nineties. I still need a copy of 431 (EBAY).




Even though we are all nerds, we're not nerds. It always amazes my how the nerdy poindexter Stars Wars fan stereotype has persisted when Star Wars is such a huge part of our pop culture fabric. As such, Star Wars fans are merely a representation of society as whole. I also laugh at how many of those who do perpetuate this myth can't throw a baseball themselves. But because we're such nerds, we can turn our love of sports into a nerdish obsession. For many of us, that manifested in collecting sports cards. I titled this section "baseball cards" because that was the biggest player in the game at the time. Like comic books, these were an investment! Also like comic books, this was until they weren't.

This frenzy peaked with the 1989 Upper Deck Baseball set featuring probably the only remaining iconic card from that era: the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. As with comic books, the industry fed our collector impulses without ever pausing to think if it should. Upper Deck was a premium set, which caused Donruss, Fleer and Topps to each produce their own premium sets in addition to their basic sets. Then they created new brands (think Ford and Lincoln) which produced multiple sets. Then they added super premium randomly inserted subsets within the sets until it got to the point in the early nineties where a player would be featured on upwards of twenty plus cards a year. Collecting started to become impossible It all came crashing down. Now you'd have to pay to get someone to take all your 1987 Topps "Woody" cards off your hands.

As a side note, seeing what happened with both the comic and sports card collectibles, allowed me to forecast the "investment" collapse of POTF2. When every single collector has ten of the hot figure, it's not rare, or scarce, or valuable. It only appears scarce because every single collector is buying ten of them.




The circle is now complete. You've gone from a teen terrified of someone hurling the "plays with toys" invective at you, to an adult, who rationalizes the hobby as "collecting" and not "playing with" toys. Your collector status was verified by the fact that you would never even think about removing them from their packages. By the way, at this point it should be painfully clear that I'm describing my personal collecting arc, but under the advice of the Fresh Prince, sometimes when you make something very specific it has the paradoxical effect of being highly identifiable.

Of all the lines that could be collected during the ten year period of awfulness, the Toy Biz X-Men line felt like it came the closest to scratching the Star Wars itch. The X-Men were exploding at the time. The comics were everywhere across a kabillion titles. The X-Men Animated Series was an unmitigated hit, and there was a toy line on the pegs. The cardbacks showed past and present figures. It felt familiar. The Toy Biz figures are the quintessence of the nineties. The cards are so gaudy that they're almost hard to look at. The quality of the figures is only marginally better than the vintage Kenner Star Wars figures, and the hunt for them kept you circling toy stores until the day that first gloriously ugly orange and silver POTF2 card showed up. Everything in your collecting career lead up to that point. Someone please invent a time machine so I can go back and slap myself in the head.



You didn't think the honorable mentions were going to be serious, did you? It's not like we're going to say "M.A.S.K., LJN Wrestling Superstars, TMNT, and Garbage Pail Kids." That's not what this section is for! Here are five other collectibles we also would have collected if they were real.

• Presidential Trapper Keepers: James K. Polk was a bear to track down because the idiots at Mead shipped three Millard Fillmore's in the same case.


• G.I. Joe: Quartermaster Corps: Finally all the fun of logistics was captured in a toy line. Refuel and Waterboy were my two favorites.


• Burger King Masters of the Universe Movie Glasses: I could never find the Gwildor.


• Celebrity scabs: I don't think we need to dig too deep into this one.


• Breath Blasters: Little rubber toys that when you squeeze them give you a whiff of various kinds of bad breath. There was vomit breath, morning...what? They did? For real? AW, C'MON!
  EVERY TIME!

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