Poe’s Point > Eras End All the Time

Ryan “The Superfly” Prast has a blog post at AFI in which he predicts “within the next few years, the 6″ action figure will be an endangered species, and possibly completely extinct.” He continues:

My rants on ‘corporate greed’ are commonplace on the forum, but I am also aware that overseas manufacturing costs have been kept artificially low for over a decade due to the influence of certain retailers. We have seen fifteen years of adjustments in just the past few years, and many collectors can no longer afford the action figures at today’s prices. Add in improving factory conditions, fair workforce compensation, additional regulations and safety standards, and, well, you begin to realize the days of cheap 6″ action figures are nearly over.

Hold on – there’s a big difference between saying “the 6″ action figure market will become extinct” and “the days of cheap 6″ action figures are over” (my italics). The latter is obvious. The former is unlikely.

He then laments the end of the toy hunt:

Remember what it used to be like?

Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, the mighty Toy Hunt, heart pounding for the thrill of the chase, the eternal struggle of Collector VS Scalper!

Many times I came away empty-handed, but man…those rare finds made this collecting hobby fun.

Fun.

That word seems very foreign to my action figure collecting these days.

I’m willing to consider the argument that era of the toy hunt may soon be over, if it isn’t already. And to that I say: good riddance.

I had a love-hate relationship with toy hunting at best. I’ve got pretty low frustration tolerance. Why subject myself repeatedly to a situation which will often end in disappointment? I found the “eternal struggle of collector vs. scalper” a source of simmering rage, not “fun.” Yes, the occasional success was exhilarating, but I would have happily traded it to avoid miseries like chasing the first DCUC Walmart wave.

I couldn’t start ordering toys off the Internet fast enough once the opportunity came along. And while I do have treasured memories of the Great Turtle Hunt of 1989, that came very close to ending in bitter disappointment.

Of course, all of the above is just my opinion. I know a lot of collectors loved the thrill of the hunt. I just wanted to make clear that the end of the toy hunting era isn’t something everyone would miss.

Prast then digresses a bit into a discussion about how DC and Marvel have been running their comics, concluding with:

I look at the lackluster efforts on some of the DCUC Subscription figures, wonder if I even care anymore. Are these action figures really worth $25 each, or are we fooling ourselves with rose-colored nostalgia?

Look, I don’t even like most of the Club Infinite Earths figures myself (I’ve been mailing off my CIE sub figures to pay for a custom figure commission). But this just reads like a bummed-out person trying to validate his own sense of being bummed-out. There are plenty of people who wanted these figures and love them.

Prast then discusses “[o]ne last contributing factor could be the biggest of all – Brand Exhaustion.” At this point I’m still not clear on what brand exhaustion is a contributing factor to – the end of 6″ figures? The end of cheap 6″ figures? The end of these specific brands? The end of toy collecting as a whole?

[…] is the ‘WOW’ factor gone? Is there anything left to achieve? Perhaps all the goodwill and excitement created from that 80s sentimentality has finally worn off, and collectors are finally satisfied. We literally have dozens of Spider-Men, Optimus Primes, Darth Vaders, Snake Eyes. We’ve all been unbelievably spoiled. Maybe we have taken it all for granted, and there’s nothing new left to make, nothing left to be enthused about, and nothing new that deserves our money.

So there it is.

The End of Days.

Where is the evidence for this? Transformers is getting another movie, and I just wrote a post yesterday about how I’m excited for the new Grimlock. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – another ’80s property – is a huge holiday hit and selling out everywhere. Joe fans are excited for Retaliation, despite the delay. Star Wars has three new movies coming in the next decade. Masters of the Universe Classics is getting a gigantic Castle Grayskull next year.

Furthermore, every single one of the brands listed above have come and gone several times. They’re all evergreen properties and while they sometimes get put away in the vault for a bit, they make a comeback eventually.

And that’s to say nothing of the surge in independent toymakers and toy lines. Want a glimpse of what could very well be the future of toy collecting? Visit Onell Design.

On a related note, in a response to a comment in the post’s comment threat, Prast writes:

How many more Snake Eyes and Duke figures will be purchased when the line resumes in 2013? And how many other fans will be willing to continue to plunk down literally hundreds of dollars for just a handful of exclusive collector club figures?

You expect 2013 to be even better, and I would like to agree with you, but I think we’re going to see drastic changes within the industry.

He says that we will see “drastic changes” in the industry right after mentioning what I think are the sort of drastic changes the industry is in the midst of making. Exclusive collector club figures is where this hobby is going. Action figure collecting is becoming a high-end adult hobby (but will continue to draw in small but significant amounts of young fans). The same thing happened to baseball card and comic collecting. I suspect 5-10 years from now, the kind of 5″-7″ action figures collectors want will probably have more in common with Hot Toys and Sideshow 12″ figures than Playmates’ current Ninja Turtles lines – but those figures will exist.

While I don’t to make any assumptions about Prast’s own experiences, I do think the sense of pessimism he’s expressing is common among longtime collectors at any time. As I noted above, do it for too long or get too close to it and you can become bummed-out, and sometimes you start trying to bum out other people to validate your own sense of being bummed-out.

And in the course of writing this piece, I realized that I’ve been guilty of this myself – especially in regard to MOTUC. Collecting fatigue is real and common, but it’s a mistake to assume that one’s own experience of the hobby at any given moment is the same as everyone else’s. I’m going to try to remember this in my own writing here on the blog.

Finally, it should be noted that Prast is writing this on Action Figure Insider, one of the flagship toy news websites that helped change the nature of action figure collecting by introducing things like extensive Toy Fair news coverage, area reports of where toys have been found in stores, tracking case pack ratios, and engaging in interviews and other dialogues with the people behind the toys. AFI and other websites changed the nature of collecting over a decade ago. They helped bring about the end of one era, an era where collectors had to visit stores just to find out what was even out there, where it wasn’t just the thrill of finding a toy, but the thrill of discovering that toy even existed. They ushered in a new era where a collector could be well-informed and engaged with his peers and sometimes even the toymakers themselves, directly leading to those toys with “all the sculpting, articulation, and details we all wished our original toys had when we were kids.”

I want to thank Mr. Prast for writing such a thought-provoking (and provocative) post. It allowed me to gain some badly-needed perspective on the hobby myself. I may not agree with his conclusions, but it gave me a chance to sort out my own feelings on the hobby right now. Are we entering a new era of collecting? Maybe. But there’s no reason to think this will be a bad thing. It may be even better than we imagine.