A re-post of my toy collecting origins.
In the beginning there was a Japanese animated show called Marineboy that I watched faithfully in the early 70′s. I love my Hanna Barbera Saturday mornings, but it was the Japanese cartoons that caught my eye; Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, Robotech and these takes on fairy tale classics that were often dark and deeply true to their original telling. The best of these was the Japanese version of The Little Mermaid where she kills herself at the end. Disney ruined a lot of really good tales with their glitter sugar dipping but that’s another story.
I have also always been a hoarder and a, I shudder to say the word, collector. I associate the “C” word with those creepy guys that lurk for hours in the Hot Wheels aisle pawing through hundreds of tiny cars looking for that elusive 1957 Chevy-something-or-other so that they can pin it to their wall like a little trophy. I am pretty sure my collector buzz began with Hot Wheels cars in around 1969 but I am also sure it was the little tin badges that I was after. One of my earliest memories was being in the hospital and my parents bringing me a HW car and pinning the metal wheel shaped button to the pocket of my pjs. Full Metal Jammies.
Toys were valuable to me as a kid because we weren’t a family with the usual flow of goods, Christmas, B Days, Easter etc. Our toys were earned and often they were passed over from another family or bought at the flea market we attended many weekends. Many of the games we played were missing pieces, some of the cars had only 3 wheels, the dolls only had one eye that closed so they were in a permanent wink and the Barbies that still had feet were scarred with little bite marks around their ankles. That didn’t stop the playing.
My first real toy love was for the, and here’s where things will start to connect like dots, Micronauts. Yes, little Japanese robotic men with an array of space machinery and futuristic grid cities. I saved up a lot of allowances and paper-route money to buy my own Micronauts as it was decided that I was too old for mom and dad to buy them for me. I am pretty sure it was because they were so expensive but I was not to be deterred. I had a huge collection in short order and even though I never owned the holy grail of the Micronaut universe, the vacu-powered Monorail City, it is forever preserved in the Sears Wish Book in my mind.
The hoarding began when I got to the age where I was ready to move out on my own as a little adult. I didn’t want the awesome memories to end up in the waste bin so I dug out what toys were left in the crawlspace and took them with me. The Micronauts, Barbies, Hot Wheels I saved stayed in my storage for some time until they emerged triumphantly in the very famous “Toy Bathroom” I created with my room-mate Cruella. Treasured toys had a new purpose in my life; home decor.
The Micronaut Battle Cruiser became a soap dish, Barbie and Ken dangled from the mirror, Pee Wee and Chairy watched it all from the back of the toilet. Cruella made a little sign for the door. My childhood toys had made their triumphant return.
My first trip to Toys R Us was to see if I could get the infamous Talking Pee Wee doll. All I could find was empty shelves. I had never heard of such a thing, a toy store with no toys. It would be 1990 before I started to buy action figures and keep them “Mint on Card”, a phrase that would become a mantra in my search for the ultimate collection. The first toys that appeared pinned to my walls were the Star Trek Next Gen figures. I was so excited to collect little plastic replicas of my space roaming heroes. It only got better when I also bought the Enterprise, the Bridge Playset, A Romulan Warbird, the Teleporter, phaser and a communicator. The fever had begun.
Soon my room was covered in Aliens, Batman, Gargoyles and more. In 1994 my partner and fellow toy enthusiast asked me why I wasn’t a fan of The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Huh? The What? It was Japanese and robotic, why didn’t I have the toys? I watched my first episode and my head nearly exploded. Yah! Why didn’t I have the toys? Once again I took a trip to Toys R US to admire their empty shelves and blank pegboard. Apparently the Rangers were hot or something. That made them much more desirable for some reason. The hunt was the addiction. I had to have everything. At this time I had moved to Toronto to start a Japanese toy store with my partner and we were discovering that there was a lot of Nihon goods to be found if you really dug around.
Now the trick with the Rangers was that there wasn’t just one or two figures to collect but a team of 5 or 7 and each team member got their own zord, weapon, vehicle and powered up version. I had to have each and every one and all their incarnations, variants and packaging changes. Getting the Japanese version was a bonus.
In addition to my own personal collection the inventory for the toy store had begun to pile up. The bulk of the toys we had amassed was Sailor Moon which was at the very beginning of its huge and almighty reign on Canadian television and toy store shelves.
3 times a year we filled my little Nissan Micra with totes and tried to sell our pricey imports to anime starved college students. Many were impressed with our tables but few purchased our $150 Sailor Mercury or $200 Transformers. We eventually had to call it quits having maxed out all our credit cards and emptied our savings to launch this enterprise. We had one final blow out of goods and took the best of the rest home. After dividing the remains we each had an impressive Japanese doll collection. I had shelves lining each wall in my apartment, each one filled top to bottom with toys, mostly boxed and untouched.
You would think that I would have stopped there. But the Rangers didn’t stop coming out each year with their multicoloured suits and battalion of plastic machinery. Christmas was dubbed Power Ranger Christmas and for good reason. At one point I actually got a job at Toys R Us and figured out why sometimes the shelves were empty. It happens a lot.
15 years of Power Rangers later I had hit the ceiling. I realized that my happy collecting had become the burden of obsession. I was feeling unhealthy and overwhelmed. The purge began when someone told me that I had let the toys become my life and they had become more important to me than my own self. I was letting them overshadow my creativity. I was paying good money for 4 storage lockers full of boxes of unopened plastic. I had become one of “them”. A collector.
As I emptied the totes and let the toys loose into the world I began to feel better. I freed many from their boxes and enjoyed them as the pop articles that they were. I let go of the “need” to fill my life with objects and freed up a lot of space in my home and my heart.
I still have a lot of toys. But I no longer have the compulsion to buy everything. Just some things. I appreciate the collection I have. I have it all on display.
I admitted I was powerless over my need to collect.
The road to recovery is paved in brightly covered plastic but I have 5 different coloured cars to drive on it. And it is fun.
