A Sensible Endeavor 37 comments
My obsession with Star Wars action figures probably began on Christmas 1981, or at least that holiday yielded the first photographic evidence. Looking at 4 ½ year old me, sitting by the tree with my AT-ST walker and Hoth playset, cherubic cheeks aglow, it seemed like such an innocent hobby, and for the next 5 years or so, it would be. It wasn’t until some years later, when I found myself flush with cash from part time bookselling, that the playthings of my youth transformed from toys to commodities.
Stage 1: Take Stock of Current Holdings
Like any sensible kid, when I received an action figure in my youth, I’d rip open the packaging and toss it, take the figure down to the creek on a makeshift zipline, sink it in some “quicksand” mud, and lose any weapons or accessories in the process. In spite of this, I still had some 40 or so action figures (with about 10 blasters between them), but with all the dings and wobbly limbs, these weren’t exactly museum quality. My vehicles looked worse than Luke’s X-Wing when he lifted it out of the swamp. Still, these toys were pushing 15 years old! Surely they were still valuable? After ordering Steve Sansweet’s collector’s guide (2nd edition!) I ran the numbers. Sentimental value: priceless. Collector Value: around $200.
Stage 2: Make a Fresh Start
$6 an hour, 15 hours a week–no rent, no car, no interest in clothes (and no sense to save for college)–I was rich! If I was going to be serious about Star Wars collecting, then nickel and diming it with those sad little played-with pieces was going to have to go. It was time to start tracking down the “MOCs” and “MIBs,” unopened toys kept away from kids by savvy collectors or retailer screw-ups. That’s where the REAL money is. Empowered by my 14.4 modem and an AOL account, I soon found sellers willing to part with vintage “12 Backs” and Sears exclusives. I learned about the bargains to be had with tri-language packaging, and the importance of checking the material of your Jawa’s cape. For my first purchase, I ordered a MOC Yoda with the original Empire Strikes Back packaging – and for the modest cost of a month’s work. It wouldn’t be long until I had amassed a collection any future child of mine would be proud to inherit.
Stage 3: Reality Sinks In
After about a year of collecting, I had managed to track down a 12-Back Princess Leia (pristine card, but a slight crack in the blister, alas), a Power of the Force Obi Wan, a MIB Max Rebo Band set (something I coveted but never got in my youth) and a mail-away Anakin figure still in baggie. A fine start, but it was growing too slowly to sustain my compulsive collecting bug. Around this time, I started second guessing the soundness of Star Wars toys as an investment. There were just too many variables…
Stage 4: A New Hope
Then it hit me. Rather than try to collect one of each of the hundreds of Star Wars toys out there, what if I instead focused on collecting a single one. I’d have to pick something with low demand so I could get a lot of them for cheap, then keep buying them and taking them off the market. Eventually, people would catch on to the sudden scarcity of this figure, and I’d be sitting on a goldmine! It was a brilliant plan, totally without flaws. First I had to pick a figure to take the starring role in my market fixing adventure. It was an easy choice—I went with the Wampa. You remember, that yeti thing that tries to munch on Luke in the beginning of Empire? Now it was time to corner the market on the things. Mint-in-Box, loose, C7-C10 – I wanted them all. Hitting the usual channels, I managed to get two with packaging (one opened, one not) and a couple more loose. Nothing could stop me now!
Stage 5: Denial
I don’t know if it was common sense of the limitations of a pre-ebay internet that cut my endeavor short. For whatever reason, I never went beyond those first four Wampas. Scanning ebay now, I see that my efforts did little to skew the market value of the snow beasts, as a dozen auctions list the figure loose for 99 cents (ouch! I was paying $20, 13 years ago). The fateful four are currently living under my grandma’s house, where the carefully preserved packages have probably turned soggy with mildew, which when you think about it, does more to increase their rarity than my hoarding them in a safe, dry closet ever would have done.
I went through several more collecting obsessions, including signed first editions of Hugo/Nebula winning sci-fi and Batman animation cels before I managed to cast off the bug, but that is another story and will be told at another time.