What got you back into toy collecting as an adult?

[madmarva]

I sold all my Mego And Star Wars action figures and Kiss albums in a garage sale because my dad said I could have whatever money they brought in the spring of 1981. I think the last figure I got as a kid was Yoda in the summer of 1980 after seeing Empire.

When I was in high school, I bought my nephew all the Super Powers figures and some of the Secret Wars figures, but never really thought about action figures again until I was out of college and saw the Mask of the Phantasm movie. A couple of months later, I was in Wal-Mart and they had a display of Batman Animated figures down the main center aisle, not in the toy department, but in front of the row of checkout stands. The Phantasm figure was cool bc it had the removable mask.

I looked at them probably for 10 minutes before moving on to buy the weedeater cord I was there for. I stopped and looked them over again before checking out. I went home finished the yard off, but couldn't get those figures off my mind. So I went back to Wal-Mart that night and bought all the different ones I could find.

I spent about $40 bucks on them. I remember the checkout lady saying, "someone is going to have a great birthday."

I smiled and said yeah.

From there it was ToyBiz Spidey and X-Men. I started rebuying Megoes when I found Toy Shop tabloid. And then Star Wars when those figures and vehicles started coming back out around 96 or 97.

[SentientApe]

The stimulus for me was having children, who naturally wanted toys of their own. That was the period when TNMT, Ghostbusters, and secondary market Star Wars figures were being released, and when I mastered the technique of locating the limited and harder-to-get toys as they were being released. It was also when I began to speculate on keeping aside some MOC items, for which I am now seeking interested buyers.

[Gorn Captain]

I never stopped, not ever.
That is why my collection spans all the decades of toys, from late 60s to now, and I bought most of that when it came out.
I wish I had decided on a focus, though.

I am now considering letting go of most of it. I have a feeling of "been there, done that", when it comes to toys.

[4NDR01D]

I guess the short answer would simply be ebay.
The longer answer would be that I've always been collecting "something", t-shirts, records, comics, etc. I met my wife 10 years ago this summer, she had an ebay account and helped me figure out how to use it.
I was a decent photographer, having taken photojournalism in college, and my creative writing was ok so I could write decent write ups for the stuff I was selling. I was addicted to selling on ebay and started to sell anything that I found to "worth something". I'd hit up thrift shops and pick up anything I thought I could sell including toys with some early success.
Thats when I started considering selling off a bunch of my childhood toys (and my wifes).
I realized you really had to do some research on the things you were selling for best results, this led to scanning auctions everyday. I realized that were categories for selling and stumbled upon " robots, monsters and space toys". It blew my little mind. I quite literally laughed out loud and said "of course, that's the best stuff". It just had never occurred to me that I could focus on collecting cool monster toys (in my head I kinda called them "punk rock record store toys"). There was just a certain aesthetic to them that I fell in love with.
I guess like a lot of collectors that was only half of it, because the other half is the nostalgia factor. I had been pining for an original Stretch Armstrong since I stabbed my original with the pointy end of a comb back in 1980. Long story short(ened), my wife bought me one for Christmas, and then I was committed (both to toys and my wife). Also, found the Museum shortly after that, and the rest they say is history.
I admittedly flip flop my focus between aesthetic and nostalgia at least yearly, but try to focus on vintage monster and alien toys that I either had or wanted (or would have wanted had I known they existed).

[ScottA]

Super Powers. I remember the feeling I got when I first saw them on the back of a comic book. I could NOT believe they were making Green Lantern, Flash and Hawkman figures. I knew I had to have them and I can honestly say I found every figure in the stores, including Cyborg (which I found at a Kmart). All of which I still own. This got me interested in toys again and caused me to dig out my Megos from my closet.

Then one evening in class at college I was talking to a classmate about toys and Megos (which he also had as a kid as well). He tells me he just saw the Fantastic Four and Spider-man at a Lionel Playworld in Atlanta the previous weekend. Now this was in '88 so I had to question what he really saw. But he swore by it. So since I never had the FF as a kid I drove to Atlanta the following weekend to look for myself, And sure enough, there they were. I bought a complete set of FF for $2.97 each. They are still in my collection today. Of course, if I knew then what I know now I would have bought them all. But this was before ebay and the internet and all that. I was so thrilled I could add the FF to my collection. That led me to getting Toy Shop to look for more and the rest is history.

[mahseer]

I found a 12" POTA Cornelius on clearance at Walmart. Then I found Zaius at Spencer Gifts. Then some fool told me about Ebay. The first thing I bought was a Big Jim camper. Then Episode 1 sucked me in. Then I settled into 1:6 with Hasbro, 21st Century and Dragon. Stayed heavily into 1:6 WWII for several years and ended up printing camo and sewing Waffen SS uniforms. DiD, Soldier Story and others killed the magic by making 150 dollar figures that didn't need any modification. Hoarding became more important than creating in 1:6. Fast forward a few years and I somehow got interested in Mego scale. I never had them as a kid but I do remember them. Since then I got hooked on Henshin Cyborg and anything space, future or weird. My 10 year old son, my 11 year old daughter and I collect and customize together.

[MIB41]

There were several things that led me to get back into collecting. And my investment in the hobby was a very gradual process. I guess the first thing that really planted the seed were the Tomart price guides that I grabbed in the late 80's and early 90's. Having those publications got me interested in going through the collection I had kept from childhood. And the thing is it wasn't like I hadn't revisited that collection since I was a kid. I had all of my Mego's together, many still boxed or carded. The carded ones existed only because of Children's Palace that were still selling them in the early to mid 80's. That was my last commercial inroad before they went off shelves forever.

But I think what really kept me from diving into the hobby earlier than what I did, was because of my perception that I really was alone in this love for these figures. It's true. Until I found Tomarts and started looking at the value of these things, I really thought my profound love of these figures was something to hide instead of embrace. I thought it was some lingering connection I had with my childhood that I couldn't break. So I was really a closet lover of Megos and other figure lines right through the 80's. When I finally ran across a copy of Tomart's price guide in the late 80's, I was (as you can imagine) floored.

It NEVER occurred to me to think these figures, and play sets could be worth so much money. And when I attended a convention in 1991, I came across my first vendor booth that had a boxed RC Batman and...drum roll... my first ever view of an actual Kid Flash figure mint on card. Outside of the illustrated comic from Heroes World in the 70's, I had never seen him in stores, so I was blown away. The scale also caught me off guard since I didn't realize they were smaller than the standard 8 inch frame. Here I thought I was this lone "expert" and lover of Megos and the truth is I really knew nothing about the full extent of their production...or appeal. So from there, I started doing something I had never done in the past... I started going to flea markets.

Flea markets of today are NOTHING like they were in the 90's. The general public's knowledge of toys and their values were still pretty much viewed as a yard sale item that you were lucky to get anything for. And since I was still very much in my early stages of growing a descent income, and had purchased a condo, I did not have hardly any money to burn for the hobby. Given that ratio for disposable income, I still managed to walk out with a good assortment of things that today would be unreachable if you didn't have a good reserve for disposable cash. And Tomart's aggressive price guide also introduced a new word into my vocabulary - The Holy Grail collectable.

As much as there were many things I could scoop up, Tomart's price guide (mixed with my challenged finances) made allot of things seem unreachable under any circumstances. What was my first Grail item? Captain Action in his box. I thought I would never own one. You seldom saw them in flea markets, but if you did, they were in lock step with those prices. And you have to remember in those days before the internet, and before people started cleaning out their attics in droves, these kinds of figures were considered ultra rare. I was certainly under the impression few remained intact. So seeing a $250 to $350 price tag was common, because who knew if any were really left in those untouched attics? So I collected at mostly a snails pace until the advent of the internet and Ebay... Then the flood gates opened wide and the seas parted. The rest is overstock history!

[Toystasher]

As a child, I grew up playing with Megos with my next door neighbors and their uncle. He would turn on old 8mm films of the 1940's Batman episodes and the cool 66 Marvel cartoons. We would put bathroom towels around our necks and secure them with safety pins..LOL. Then, he would fly us around in his arms. What fun!!!! Of course, their uncle and his brothers had alot of the original Megos, including WGSH and POTA. This sparked my interest in comics at an early age and, being the little speculator that I was, I always had a feeling that those Megos were going to be worth a lot of money one day. I remember looking at the price guides for comics and seeing the astronomical values for original Golden and Silver Age books and thinking that since the WGSH toys were sort of the first toys of their kind, aside from Captain Action (which I had no idea existed at the time), that they were going to be valuable some day. For a while my mother bought me action figures when I was under age 10, but then I think she became concerned that it was too childish. I still to this day think that that she threw away my Megos !

The last figures I remember buying as a kid were GI Joe ARAH figures in 7th grade. I remember being embarrassed to have them and quite honestly I didn't care about them all that much because they weren't my WGSH Megos. Still another childhood friend of mine and I would play with them. I think we had more fun dressing up as army wannabes and patrolling the neighborhood though...LOL.

Fast forward about 8 years to 1991... I saw Batman TAS on TV and I began to wonder if there were toys being produced for that series. So, I took a drive to TRU and sure enough I found the toys hanging on the shelves. Then, I saw a couple of the Marvel Super-Heroes ToyBiz figures hanging next to them. Well, that was it and the rest is history. I've been pretty much toy crazy ever since! I started calling all the TRU's in the state and having them transfer figs from the Marvel Super-Heroes line to my local store. I got a couple mags from the bookstore, including Tomart's and Lee's and started buying figures I couldn't find elsewhere from them. That's when I started buying Megos again. I was actually lucky enough to get my childhood friend to sell me the Megos we played with as kids! I'm actually thinking about contacting him again to see if he's got any more things stored away at his mother's home because I get this feeling he may still have a Jokermobile and a Great White Shark hiding somewhere!

[sprytel]

Doc's Star Trek figures. I saw them in a catalog and it brought back so many good childhood memories...

[toys2cool]

I never really stopped, but my purchasing fluctuated...Now, it's more focused & nostalgia-based.

same here

[dee T.]

I had to pick up the Marvel famous covers series figures when I first seen these where I was working at a Meijer store in the 90's. These blew my mind, because they captured that look of a mego figure for me, and I still pick these up wherever I can too. Then it lead to a star trek kick and I found myself buying the 9inch collector series figures.

[Red Hulk]

12 inch Mego KISS figures in the early 90s.

[VintageMike]

I started seeing stuff from my childhood again in my early twenties at comic shops and conventions at that started the ball rolling. Also had a similar experience with the Toy Biz figures because it was like Mego in spirit all over again since they did Marvel & DC. Also since they were brand new I could get any character I wanted. The packaged Megos and SW stuff did not last long as cash was hard to come by in my twenties and I still had a life, lol. Carded action figures couldn't compete with nights out with friends. I remember selling Batman for $100 or something near there to a comic shop so my friends could have a hotel party! Fast forward to the early 2000's I had a steady job. Pay was spectacular but good enough I could buy things here and there. Started with Star Wars and then went to to some loose Megos. It ballooned from there and as my financial situation improved so did my collection over the years.

[nvmbrsdoom5]

I always had a collector's mindset, and had stored all of my childhood toys away in a couple of very large boxes in the basement. I planned to keep them until I was older and on my own when I could display them and perhaps add to them. I still bought the occasional toy throughout my teenage years, though a lot of my money went towards music, girlfriends, etc. When I was a junior in h.s. in the late '80s, I found out that my father had gone on a housecleaning rampage and decided to throw away all of my old toys. By the time I realized he'd done this, they'd already been taken away by the garbage truck. *sigh* I figured that was the end of that and I'd never see them again.

About two years later, my mom bought some of the first Toy Biz DC and Marvel figures for me just for fun, she thought maybe they'd be a nice replacement for my long lost Mego and Secret Wars figures. It was a nice sentiment, and while it wasn't quite the same thing, it got me wanting to get more of those figures. So I started scouring stores for those early '90's superhero toys, and I still occasionally frequented comic shops for comics too. One day I went into a comic shop and saw they had a French carded Spidey Mego behind the counter, MOC. I bought it instantly, and the sight of that figure on the card and having it in my hands really kicked my collecting into high gear. I didn't know at the time about toy shows (they were fairly few and far between then) or dealers, but luckily someone at that comic shop told me about Toy Shop magazine and said I could find more old toys in there. I bought an issue and lost my mind, lol. Right about that time I also discovered Collectible Toys and Tomart's first issues, and suddenly I realized there were other folks out there who took this hobby seriously and that it was possible for me to not only recapture those lost toys but also ones I never owned. I've remained solidly into the hobby ever since, even though I can't buy and participate nearly as much as I wish I could these days.

[Wee67]

Depression.

Well, that's overstating it, but it did help me during a down period.

While most people here seem to have kept some connection with this world, whether collecting new stuff or reading comic books, I had pretty much left all of it in my childhood. I had stopped having anything more than a slight interest in superheroes by about 5th grade. It had all transitioned into Atari, girls and soccer I suppose. Fast forward to 2000. I really hated my job and did not enjoy where I was living. I was really not enjoying life. Sometimes I would go hide out in the graphics dept where one of the artists would bring a different figure to work with him each week. and I brought up the beloved figures I had when I was a kid. He mentioned I should go to some site called "ebay" and search for these Mego things.

When I finally had the nerve to bid and actually won, I was flush with the warm driver of nostalgia. If I'm completely honest with myself, I think the difficulties I was having made the feeling even more of a nice refuge. I wanted more. It was fun to pick up a figure. Maybe I should get another. Maybe I'd get back just some of the ones I had as a kid. Of course, i'm just going to grab them loose...