Pod Stallions Episode Two: Toy Shop Days

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Hello Tally Ho! Brian and Jason wax nostalgic about the pre internet days of toy collecting including mail order catalogs, comic buyers guide and of course, Toyshop, outrageous phone bills, trading, rigged phone auctions, ungodly waits and the thrill of the hunt.

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• The first thing Brian ever traded for was this action figure.
• The Kenner Indiana Jones line got Jason into collecting again
• Someselect scans of the "It's a small world" catalogue that caused ripples among the collector community.
• The Dick Tracy watch that Jason was trading and selling.
• What'sa blue faced data worth these days?
• One of Brian's mid 80s catalogues
• Brian is all excited over these retro style Hammer horror action figures.

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For more Fashion Mockery and 70's toy love visit us at Plaid Stallions.com


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[cjefferys]

Awesome, a whole show about the good old days of collecting! Can't wait to listen to this when I get home from work tonight!

[starsky]

rigged phone auctions????

[ScottA]

I still have a ton of Toy Shops and the catalogs I ordered from them.

[SeattleEd]

This a stellar podcast. Thank you so much for the insight on various subjects. Now this invested time well spent!
Interesting enough, I could understand the feeling of growing up with collecting and magazines/catalogs. I collected records so I was doing the shows and buying from Goldmine and Record Collector. Calling and mailing globally as well.

Well done! Now I feel like buying a POTF Han Carbonite and Hammer Dracula!

[cjefferys]

Great podcast, gentlemen! It was very entertaining reliving those Starlog, CBG, Toy Shop days. I agree that the whole modern toy "collecting" craze began with 3rd series Super Powers (Cyborg and Mr. Miracle!), continuing into the Galoob ST:TNG line (Blue faced Data! Speckled Data! The aliens figures!) and finally Playmates Dick Tracy (The Blank!). I just wish that I wasn't quite so much a poor university student and also had a bit more "vision" back in the late 80's when I had the opportunity to buy tons of Kenner Star Wars and Raiders figures at clearance prices. I bought a fair amount, but wish I could have bought a bunch more and sat on them for a decade or two! I also wish I would have kept copies of the Toy Shop ads that I listed back in the early 90's (I was mostly selling some Captain Action stuff I stumbled upon, plus some Star Wars and Super Powers stuff), and also wish I kept all the Toy Shop mags I had bought over the years. And if you guys could scan and post pages from that It's a Small World catalog that you mentioned, I'd LOVE to see some of it, it sounds amazing!

[palitoy]

Gr And if you guys could scan and post pages from that It's a Small World catalog that you mentioned, I'd LOVE to see some of it, it sounds amazing!

This is my sales list from 1987

Here are some scans from the BW Small World Catalog (still looking around the compound for the colour one)

[Confessional]

^^ You toy hustler you… look at the sweet Apes list! Too bad you don't have a 26 year price guarantee!

[cjefferys]

This is my sales list from 1987

Here are some scans from the BW Small World Catalog (still looking around the compound for the colour one)

Thanks, those were really fun to look at. So there was a b&w and colour version of the catalog? What year did they come out (you probably mentioned it to me once, but my memory is getting sucky)? I would love to track down actual copies someday, I could flip through them all day.

[palitoy]

i remember getting a copy in 1990ish. I'm going to go through my comic bins sometime today to find mine.

[jwyblejr]

I miss Toy Shop. I remember buying Star Wars figures for $6 in there.

[Bionicfanboy66]

Would be fun to find some of the old Heroes World catalogs from the late 70's & early 80's. Had a few, but never ordered from them. Great podcast, BTW.

[vulcan2074]

Awesome podcast. I'm really enjoying these. Great job fellas.
Sammy

[Earth 2 Chris]

Saved this for a listen at work. I remember those days, and subscribed to CBG, and remember getting the "pilot" issue of Toy Shop. My memory is foggy, but I think they put out a one-shot to test the waters and see how it would go over. Being a CBG subscriber, I got the issue, and promptly subscribed when the magazine was green-lit.

I only wish I had sense enough to order more of the vintage stuff through the ads. Being a dumb middle-to-high-school kid, I was more concerned with getting all of Toy Biz's DC Super Heroes line than buying Megos for $20-$40 a piece. And Super Powers...most of the first two series were barely over original retail then. Sigh.

Great show guys, it really took me back, even though I am a bit younger, and kind of came in to the hobby right as the speculation boom was on.

Bionicfanboy66 brought up Heroes World, and I think that would be a great subject for a future show. I think that was kind of "Toy Shop" before it ever came about. I know I learned of toys and products I never saw from all those old great comic ads, produced by the Kubert school.



Chris

[MIB41]

Great episode! I really like the discussion about how different commerce is today versus what we faced as kids or young adults. It was a standard expectation in the 70's and 80's to have to wait a MINIMUM of 6 to 8 weeks to get any kind of mail order item. That's why it was so hard for me personally to get my parents to mail order anything unless it was from the Sears catalog. And only then it was usually Christmas items which I wasn't suppose to know about. So it was a real hassle to obtain things like that back then. If I could pick one word to best describe the obstacle we as kids faced in our generation it would "accessibility". Today's youth have NO IDEA how hard it was to get things back in our day. This also explains probably why so many of us are such fans of the things we collect and enjoy (not only in toys but also in television and movies). When we were kids, those things were only seen sparingly. So with the advent of the internet and Ebay... Holy cow. I was like a kid in a candy store. My wife can even tell you. When we were first dating and computers were still very new and expensive on the market, we would go to a local print store where you could rent out time to get on one. So we would spend like an hour or two on Ebay. Let me tell you. I was out of my mind. Anything I could conjure up, I would look for. And believe you me, I thought of the most obscure stuff. I literally chronicled anything I ever adored from a tiny kid up to that present time and collected accordingly. It became nothing short of a dream to be able to go back and collect up things I had either lost, wore out, or just never had the opportunity to get. And the best part, alot of it didn't cost as much as what I had seen in collector books and magazines. And social media took it to the next level. Finding the Mego Musuem was a great blessing, because I had NO IDEA there were so many people out there that shared the same love for this hobby.