Question #4: from September 8, 2003:

I have always wonder this.When I was a kid back in 1978 I was only about 3 and me and my older brother played with our stuff HARD.These where toys,I thought that's what they were for.Flash forward to today and I look on Ebay and lots of people what outrageous prices for the old stuff.For example,a ROTJ MOC Fett,people what 300-400 bucks for him.That's insane.The question I have is,how did these guys know the stuff was going to be worth "gold".How did they know to keep their stuff nice and neat in their boxes and on cards?I really like to know.
--Chad

My answer from 2003 With commentary from 2025:

Well, some people knew from the very beginning. They saw something the rest of us couldn't see clearly, and that was a pop culture rampage the likes of which America hasn't seen since that tulip thing.

You never know what will be huge, or what will or balloon up in value down the road, but some people made some pretty shrewd guesses and others just got stuck with the right toys. Some stores ordered product that just never sold, or sat in the back room for years. I've heard tales of hardware shops getting stuck with unsold Land of the Jawas playsets, and I myself have seen drugstores that were stuck with Tripod Laser Cannons and Radar Laser Cannons in Empire packaging until almost 1990. Some aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents bought the toys for gifts, and they remained untouched in attics and closets because the recipients were too old for the toys, or something.

Millions of Star Wars action figures were sold during the first year. I believe it's about 12 million. The laws of probability would have me think that some would survive, and it seems quite a few did. Odds are kids received duplicates and stashed them away, or a few smart kids realized that when the Jawa's cape went from vinyl to cloth, that this was going to be something special.

I guess you just never know, really.

I'd stick with that - people are still digging up trading cards, carded figures, Burger King glasses, and all sorts of goodies they've held on to for nearly fifty years. I just heard some stories earlier this year of some pretty good finds at reasonable prices. And there are a lot more figures out there as we age out of the hobby and sell our collections off, so who knows how it might shake out?

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FIN

I'm going through a lot of my old stuff and my opinions on things like reissues and the secondary market haven't changed too much. I used to write a lot more about how much I hated reissues of old stuff - defined as pre-1990 stuff - unless there was some obvious change. Which, it turned out, Hasbro was happy to do any time an old figure came back to a modern-era line. I'm also pretty happy to see rereleases of anything from the last couple of decades as long as the market still exists.... but man there is so much stuff now.

From the look of things people absolutely are saving everything, to the point where you can get figures from the last few years at 50%-75% off at the right second-hand collector shops. The good old stuff - back when it was just kid's junk and no adult money was in the hobby yet - tends to stay pretty expensive. Especially if it's in good shape. But stuff made specifically for collectors doesn't always have the staying power, in part because it can never have the history of being "the original" once it's 40 years later and George Lucas isn't involved anymore.

Now a lot of people just save everything in the boxes, so there could be tens (or hundreds) of thousands of perfectly preserved figures just waiting to be sold as we quit the hobby. Or, you know, die.

--Adam Pawlus

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