Generally speaking I try not to post anything that's mostly self-congratulatory nonsense. I don't like to post notices about holidays or too many anniversaries, because it's not what I started writing about toys on the internet - but today seemed like a good day to try it anyway. You may not know this - or care - but I started writing about Star Wars on the internet as a free newsletter on August 1, 1995. Word on the street was the Power of the Force relaunch by Kenner was hitting Service Merchandise stores, that the AT-ST may have shipped despite not being one of the four vehicles announced at Toy Fair, and the most juicy (and weird) rumor of all was that Froot Loops cereal would have a mail-in Han Solo in Stormtrooper Disguise action figure. In July of that year, it seemed difficult to find any proof of what sounded preposterous. A new mail-in cereal figure? From Kellogg's, and not General Mills? And for free? Preposterous.

On August 1, 1995, I was on summer break in High School. And not reading Great Expectations. My dad came home from work early that day, having been laid off - a layoff that would last a full year. My mom would go on about how we were going to have to move (we didn't), I'd never see my friends again (I did), and that I probably would not be able to follow new Star Wars toys. I wasn't so sure about those things, but having seen pictures of myself I realized that time spent attempting to date would be wasted. (This turned out to be true.) My dad and I went to the grocery store. As I was fond of doing back then, I looked at the magazines and also the cereal aisle - and saw the Froot Loops box. I could confirm it! And I could also make the argument that, as food, I should buy this and I'd be able to get the first figure in the new line. Win win.

On that day I put together what would become Adam's Star Wars Newsletter because I wanted everybody to know that you could get a real toy eating cereal. And I wanted to know everything else - and make sure anyone else who cared, too. I had to find a way to do this hobby despite having no job, no money, and every reason to be fairly sure whatever I was doing could end at any time. Writing about toys seemed like a good idea.

 

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Around this time I did what made sense - collect any and all information about the surge in Star Wars toys and collectibles, and email it out to anybody who asked for it. I put out calls on America On-Line and Usenet, and people wrote in asking to be placed on a mailing list. Some people also put their friends on the list to prank them, and parents complained their kids signed them up for the dumb toy newsletter, but a few thousand people eventually signed on board and as many as twelve genuinely enjoyed semi-regular email updates on whatever information I was able to uncover in the early days of the Internet. Bad web sites followed, as I didn't learn HTML at first, but eventually I got the hang of it. I was on my way to z-level early internet fame because I could tell people about toys. People in bands knew who I was and put me on the guest list. Well, a few of them did, and it was awesome. Around this time, it seemed everybody knew somebody who was interested in this stuff.

Weeks later I took a (very) part-time weekend job at The Empire of Toys (now Toy Anxiety) which was run by a guy who I bought toys from at an antique show when I was 10. I manned a register, answered the phones, and quickly showed the world just how bad I was at communicating with other human beings. But hey, people loved the newsletter and with access to magazines and product catalogs on breaks, there was a lot of information to be seen before the days of non-disclosure agreements or information blackouts prior to a product launch were even a consideration.

You may not know this, but high school students are the best people to research news for fan stuff. I wasn't in to sports, most of my friends did plays and had real jobs or took their studies seriously, so I had a lot of free time on my hands after school and not much else to do. Finding out that Luke Skywalker in Dagobah Fatigues was coming shortly was a huge deal, and given the smaller nature of the Kenner action figure line it was easy to follow. 12-16 figures per year is almost laughably tiny today, but it was enough to keep people hungry, interested, and as I'd find out while working at the store very much invested in the hobby. People were buying 12-16 of each figure - a case of each - to keep set aside, just in case. Nowadays the figures of 1995 to 1997 are usually worth about two dollars. Kenner never released official numbers but word on the street was many figures were produced in numbers of 250,000 or greater back then. This was in line with many action figures of Star Trek's line from Playmates, and also means that this line's longevity was, in part, thanks to speculators and scalpers. Finding figures on the shelf was utterly miserable for those first few months, and it wasn't uncommon for someone to ask $20 for C-3PO or $35 for Lando. It kept people interested, but it also meant Kenner had a tremendous hit on its hands - people were investing in a future that would never come, and Kenner (as well as I) got a fat head about how many people were really interested in what was going on. There was still a robust audience of fans and collectors, but so much of the product was preserved in mint condition in basements and storage spaces that it's possible we still haven't hit bottom as people eventually sell off their unwanted and increasingly worthless stash.

From about 1995 to 1999, "ASWN" would come out fairly regularly. My intent was to get the world news and information, to answer the questions they didn't have or maybe didn't even care about. I hated price guides, because I was vehemently against the culture of people who waited outside stores in the morning to snap up figures to flip on Usenet, at flea markets, and elsewhere. As a response I set up an ad newsletter for trading and selling off old stuff, I met some nice people, claiming that the person they met was not me, and generally acted poorly before the newsletter imploded in 1999. I received hundreds of emails a day with questions and inquiries, plus helpful tips from all over the world which got passed along to anyone who cared to read the often rambling collection of news and checklists. Sometimes they'd clock in over 20 pages. I'd stay up late at night and compile information from a source who was at Toy Fair in New York before I was old enough to get in, and made sure anyone who wanted it had the information as quickly as possible. Digital cameras were less of a thing back then, and I had to make do on my resources. It was my hope to make some dough off this project, but the reality was very few people wanted to actually cut any checks - and there are stories there I probably shouldn't get in to. Some people turned out to be pretty valuable partners in the long term, one of which would sponsor the newsletter in 1996 and come to hire me as a full-time employee in 2005. Not coincidentally, that's when my ability to contribute a lot of scoops tapered off.

For the curious, I got my first death threats in 1996. If memory serves the first one had to do with pointing out an error in a printed magazine - and not by anyone who wrote the magazine. I do not remember the reasons for the subsequent ones, but I got a regular drip of them. I'd say I ended up pretty well-adjusted.

Before then I was lucky enough to write for some magazines and new web sites - most of which would go under shortly after I wrote for them. go figure! Magazine, proto eBay Auction Universe, Star Wars Galaxy Collector, and many others were on the short list of freelance gigs I took in the 1990s. My name would occasionally pop up in quote boxes in magazines. In college, I was quoted in Us Magazine (now Us Weekly) about the then-upcoming Episode I product line where I issued a fairly dour forecast about how an entire planet of people expecting to get rich on these probably wouldn't. That wasn't terribly interesting. What was interesting that the cover featured Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. I could now say to (uninterested) girls that I was in the Us Magazine hunks of summer issue, and it was true. Who says toy collecting couldn't give you a decent pick-up line?

My dad's ability to plan for the worst insulated us from ever having to worry about food and shelter during that layoff where I was up all night on a Mac IIsi and a 14.4 modem to tell the world about toys. The Phantom Menace brought in "new money" collectors and derailed what I assumed would have been a great career path in the world of toys. I'd freelanced for Rebelscum and the Fandom Menace, numerous toy magazines, and more as best I could while people were actively screaming at me because they considered the mention of a new character name to be a severe spoiler, which makes the concept of a newsletter hard to continue. The paying gigs largely came because of the interest in a future of these new toys as collectible investments. The newsletter stopped - I bounced around from Rebelscum to Yakface and eventually Galactic Hunter, for various reasons, none of which are interesting enough to get in to here. The freelance gigs also all dried up, and as being low-level internet famous I would get people asking what happened to their subscriptions. The means I had to support myself in college evaporated around the time people got a good look at Jar Jar Binks on the big screen. The fan backlash was incredible, the influx of email from new fans asking how this would hurt their "investment" from the May 3, 1999 Midnight Madness launch of Darth Mauls and LEGO Pod Racers was demoralizing, and around that time it seemed the best thing to do would be a Q&A column. Granted, I got everybody's hate mail for Lucasfilm and Hasbro... and quite often still do.

"Questions and Adam" started off at Rebelscum with 10 questions per installment, 3 to 5 times a week. It was insane. People loved it, and somehow readership has remained relatively steady over the past 16 years despite the ups and downs of the general collector readership, splintering off to various other fan sites, eventually to morph into "With Every Question for Justice" during my mad stint at Yakface.com's helm and simply "Q&A" at Galactic Hunter. The number of questions - and frequency - has gone down simply because there's not that many questions needing answering in the era of Google as well as diminishing popularity among the old guard. (I was born just after the original movie - so I was one of the last theatrical era fans, and one of the first VHS era fans, and generally unwelcome at either group's parties.)

The popularity of that column gave me a surprising amount of direction and focus, and for that you have no idea how much I thank you guys. I know some of you are back after a hiatus, some of you never left, and a surprising amount of you write in to let me know you still read my stuff despite not collecting any more. I really appreciate that - I owe my entire career in the toy industry to your reading my goofy scrawlings from 20 years ago.

 

The newsletter is something I really miss - a few others would write them (some of which lifting content directly from mine), as new web sites would pop up, merge, disappear, return, and so forth. Some of those - like Gus Lopez' site - predated my stuff, and the precursor to Rebelscum was Wiseacres. It was amazing and spectacular when it debuted, mostly because decent photo galleries were unheard-of back around 1996. I did my best to shine light on things, break news as I could find it, stick my foot in my mouth, and catalog what's new. I think that's one thing that the web era of toy news, and the end of the magazines, really missed. As a fan, do you know what's new this month? Next month? Do you have any sort of reference as to what came out this year? I don't. I miss that sort of reference, even though I was the one writing it for a long while. We also never really got a good action figure database, like a Yo Joe! or a TFU.info, where you could hit up a page and see all the Darth Vaders. In this era of information supremacy, we lost sight of the news you can use. I can go to any of a number of web pages and see reviews, ads, convention notices, galleries, convention coverage, and more. In a week, it's off the front page and you may never see it again. It's not easy to know what's new or what's coming, and while I love the idea of doing it again I do spend a lot of time on projects I don't get paid to do. Some things don't change.

Having been around for a while, this is the most locked-down we've been on a toy launch ever. Normally we knew the first few assortments a month or several months before they hit stores, and what we're seeing is the new regime keep everything locked up. Even I don't know who's in the first wave of action figures, and I work in a position where I order these things now. I don't think there's going to be much of a record of this era of collecting, because the zines are dead and news is as disposable as a tweet or a Facebook status update. You see it. You process it. You forget it, until the figure shows up or gets canceled. You might not even realize you missed something - there's no list to look at showing what really happened this month, or this year.

For an enterprising fan, especially a young one with time on their hands, there are many opportunities to be in the right place at the right time and capture the attention of interested fans. Obviously it's no longer the dawn of the internet and the original Star Wars kids are all in their 40s and quite possibly over the collector lifestyle. The line has gone from just over 100 figures to something close to 3,000 in 20 years, an impenetrable glut of sameness shipping alongside new and weird aliens, robots, and heroes. No new fan will probably want to "collect them all," the intent of such a statement no longer has meaning unless you've got a giant house. But you can follow it - maybe. There are some great photo galleries, but there's still plenty of information out there that could be organized in a way that a new fan could look at and understand. I wish I thought of this 20 years ago, because now after a long day's work I'm answering questions, writing 5-10 action figure reviews every week, and generally not sleeping at night. A lot of things passed me by, and to avoid this rambling mess of an anniversary indulgence from continuing I should probably have thought of some profound point before I started typing things. That would be counter to our hobby, wherein we ascribe tremendous significance to things which have little to know meaning or thought put into them by the manufacturers. The numbering of figures in a series since 2002, the consistency of Clone Trooper figure height, the utterly rotten big box distribution of action figures, some of these things don't matter as much as we'd like to think.

We're well beyond the era of your being able to have it all - even if you specialize just in action figures - without a head start or a massive warchest. I can't be on top of every article writing project people request either. I've had a few more days than I'd like where I sit down to write at a blank screen and it just stays blank - you can't force it. Things aren't going to work out like you plan, and if your life has been anything like mine you've a) spent more than 50% of it writing about toys for strangers on the internet, and b) realized that there's actually very little you can do to change most of what happens. Maybe you've picked up a little patience, or insight on when to wait out on those "rare" convention figures you "missed" and buy them when people get bored, or perhaps you just threw up your arms and said that collecting all those droid repaints just isn't for you. I don't know. But I do know that I get to write about this stuff because if you, and this whole project has shuffled me around to strange places, awkward taxi rides, brushes with some of my heroes, and the inescapable conclusion that we as a group will never, ever be satisfied.

--Adam Pawlus

...has written about toys for a very long time.

 

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