Toy Bender

Apparently the toy collecting world has had some sort of kerfuffle that I was not aware of. Julius Marx of the rather huge toy website Action Figure Insider managed to win the gigantic (and super rare) Anti-Monitor figure that was available at the ‘09 San Diego Comic Con. He posted his victory picture with the title “Lucky Bastard” on Action Figure Insider:

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The other day Yo Go Re of OAFE.net (and frequent ToyBender commenter) and I got into a friendly discussion about “price gouging” and “scalping” when it comes to online toy retailers. I have some strong opinions on the matter and so do a lot of other toy collecting types, but mine usually differ from the “let’s grab the pitchforks and torches” mentality that a lot of other collectors have.

Instead of pointlessly discussing why online retailers charge more for toys than say Wal-Mart or Target without any input from an online retailer, I turned to Brian of the online toy shop Brian’s Toys* to get to the bottom of things.

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A lot of people know Mark Bellomo from his work on the Ultimate Guide to G.I. Joe and his Transformers identification guide. They may simply think of him as an author, but he’s actually an uber collector. You see Mark doesn’t just write about toys, he owns almost every toy he writes about. If you’re a toy collector (and thank you for reading this blog if you’re not) you should really check out a series of videos called “Collectable Spectacle” that features Bellomo and his enormous collection of toys. If you’re not an uber fan of G.I. Joe, I’d recommend at least watching the parts where Mark is digging around his storage shed. Some of the stuff he pulls out of there is simply amazing, if you know how much some of this stuff goes for.

Just looking at another persons collection may be boring particularly if you’re not interested in the figures that the person has. What’s neat about this is Bellomo’s commentary on both the items and his thoughts on collecting in general.

What I came away from this is that while I want a lot of the stuff he has, if I ever need that much storage space for it I’m doing a massive sell off. If Mark didn’t have an outlet for these things like his books, I think it would be fair to say he would have a little too much.

I also learned that I like Mark a lot more through these videos than I do of the other, more famous toy collectors like Steve Sansweet who just comes off as pompous and/or smarmy. Mark appears to be a genuinely nice and down to Earth guy. It’s kind of nice to see, and I dare say, perhaps a bit rare in someone that has a huge mega collection of toys.

To see the entire series you can go to either YouTube or here.

It’s time to go over the issue of toy repackaging again. No, not the kind that toy companies like Hasbro and Mattel do where they keep making the same figures and putting them in different packages. I’m talking the kind done by scum bags. I know this isn’t a new issue to toy collectors, but since I’m seeing it more and more it’s time to address it once again.

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So with the American economy in the dumper (and soon the rest of the world) I’ve been left wondering about my toy buying habits. I had already scaled back and haven’t gotten much in the last few months (aside from a gigantic Millenium Falcon) and I’m expected to buy even less the scarier the news gets.

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I’ve got a bit of toy blogging block. I have no idea what to write about at the moment, but I wanted to put something up today. Is it better than no post at all? Yes, because my blogging overlords will lash me with electric whips if I have nothing for the hungry masses dying for articles to fill up their workday. Therefore I decided to delve quickly into something that faces a lot of us toy collecting nerds/geeks (Hell, all nerds and geeks) out there… the issue of being overweight. The amount of XXXL comic book character t-shirts at comic shops in relation to the near lack of smaller sizes is just one of the indicators of the size of many of our people. The post title might be a bit deceiving as I’m not really a big guy, but I’ve gained some weight in the gut area and I’ve finally decided to deal with it. Dealing with it means many trips to the gym doing both cardio and lifting, and eating nothing delightfully tasty like cookies and beers. Damn, how I miss cookie and beers.

I’m assuming that there’s at least a couple of you fellow toy collectors out there that may be at least slightly overweight, so I’m throwing it out to you. How do you guys deal with your weight? Is it an issue for you? If you’re a skinny nerd, how do you stay so lean eating all those Hot Pockets? No really, I’d like to know. I’m dying for a Hot Pocket.

As a writer on a smallish blog, it’s hard to believe that anything I write here has any impact. Hell, if it wasn’t for the comments I get I would just assume that nobody was reading it. That’s why it’s surprising that I managed to get someone to quit the internet.

Let’s go back a bit though and explain the situation. There’s a fellow that has a rather large toy collection and by large, I mean insanely huge. This fellow would join toy related forums and share images of his collection. He’d also post YouTube videos of the collection as well. There’s nothing wrong with any of this at all, but after awhile it seemed like a bit much. It appeared to me that his only drive was to spread his collection across the face of the internet for approval and/or praise. Perhaps I was getting the wrong vibe, but as a responsible blogger (if there is really such a thing) I felt like I needed to write about it. I also felt that I needed to not lie and think he was the coolest guy ever or anything like that, because that wouldn’t be fair to anyone reading ToyBender.

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So you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m giving this Poe Ghostal guy a chance in the high stakes world of internet blogging. Sure, I could crush him like a bug like many others before him, but for some reason there’s something that keeps me from smiting him. I guess you could say I’m like Q and he’s like Picard… if you’re a huge geek.

After Poe interviewed me, I thought I’d return the favor. About a month and a half later I finally got around to sending him questions. Here is the result of that epic exchange:

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I rarely ever point at a fellow collector and laugh, criticize, or otherwise look upon them negatively. That’s why I’m going to host a few videos here without judgment… Okay, I can’t do it. I tried for a minute there but I couldn’t get past the first draft of this post. There is no way I can be impartial in this matter and respect myself as an opinionated blogger blogician, so if I hurt any feelings I apologize ahead of time.

The following videos were made by a fellow I’ve alluded to before in my post “Collecting: When is it Too Much?“. I’m sure he’s a nice person, but the sheer size of the collection and the fact that it’s all over the internet makes it impossible to ignore without comment. If he didn’t want the world seeing his stuff and talking about it, he’d never have joined every forum in existence with the intent on posting images of his collection for everyone to see, much less putting videos of his collection on YouTube.

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At the end of the 90s I ran into a huge problem. I was buried in Star Wars toys. My father had generously built a pegboard wall to hang my Star Wars figures on and it was quickly filling up. The toy collection had also expanded and exploded, engulfing the rest of the room. Not only was my childhood room packed to the gills with toys, but I’d started living on my own and I was quickly getting a secondary collection apart from the main one. Originally I had planned on buying ever single figure that I could along with all the vehicles, but as the years wore on since the rebirth of Star Wars toys I realized that the sneaky devils in Hasbro Castle were going to make Star Wars figures until Armageddon and beyond. Something had to be done to stop the madness, because Hasbro wasn’t going to help me at all.

(Here’s the not everything, semi-outdated, but what most of it looks like that’s not in storage post)

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While trolling Google to find if anything has said anything about me recently (hey, I’m a writer, it’s something we do), I found an interesting blog post that directly referenced Toy Bender. The post was titled “Why I Hate Toy Collectors and Toy Traffickers” so I had to bear down before I read it, because a name like that makes me think I might be going through the wringer like in high school gym class. Yep, believe it or not I wasn’t a big jock back in the old high school days! I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it wasn’t an all out attack on me or toy collectors in general. Instead, it was a well put together reason for why this person doesn’t like us. By the way, I have no idea who wrote this as there aren’t any bylines associated with any of the posts on the site.

From the site:

He recently posted an article called “Toy Collecting is for Losers: Defending Toy Collecting.� The article is about how toy collectors are not all like the 40 Year Old Virgin. Ok, that’s fine. I believe him even though ALL the toy collectors I have ever met are in fact freaks who do still live with their parents. However, given the size of the toy collecting industry I can believe that there are some socially, well-adjusted toy collectors.

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I’ve been thinking about writing an article about how toy collecting as a hobby is looked down upon by a large portion of society. Particularly, I was interested in getting the point of view of someone who thinks that there’s something wrong with toy collectors. The main problem with such an article was that I didn’t think I’d be able to find anyone who could give me this kind of unbiased opinion. It’s not like my friends and family are going to go on record to tell me that I’m an idiot. Maybe for other reasons, but not for toy collecting.

Then my article “Why I am a Toy Collector� became a minor hit. It even made it to the front page of the social networking site Digg. For those of you who don’t know what that means, I got a lot of page views that I normally don’t get. Along with these page views I also got a few nasty comments directed at me on Digg itself. It seemed that I had discovered the the article I was looking for.

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I hate to bring down the rocking all night party here at Toy Bender, but it’s time to get serious for a moment. Recently, I decided to be a little introspective and I asked myself why I am a toy collector? Why is there a drive in me to collect items meant primarily for children? More importantly, why don’t I feel bad about it? Even if you are a mild collector of all things toy related, have you ever stopped and asked yourself why you do it? After asking myself these questions, I decided to write this to further explore my own feelings and to see if anyone else out there has similar reasons. In short, I decided to write an essay:

Why I Collect Toys

By: Paul The Toy Collecting Blog Guy

It all began with a bizarre recurring dream I had starting in the early nineties where I was in a huge discount warehouse store. As I walked down the aisles full of plumbing supplies and gigantic boxes of cereal, I would stumble upon aisles full of toys. Not just any toys either. These toys were vintage 70s and 80s Star Wars and G.I. Joe figures and vehicles all at super low prices. I’d go nuts and find the biggest cart I could and load it up with toys and figures. I would pick out all the ones I always wanted and never got or the toys that had been broken or lost during childhood. The Death Star play set would make it in the cart along with a Storm Shadow and maybe something Captain Power related. Somehow though, I could never quite make it to the checkout line. I would always wake up before that point pissed that I it wasn’t real. I then realized I had an annoying itch that needed to be scratched.

This man has many DC Hero toys in his “crib”, as the rappers say.

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