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1. I am a long term collector and have invested (ok splurged like a drunken sailor on shore leave) in a high volume of Star Wars and compatible 1/18 action figures. This is includes customs, 3 d printed, etc.
On Al- Express I saw a warning label for Hiya Gi Joes. The sales link included a warning to P65 something or other about exposure may cause cancer.
I am not trying to throw any company under the bus. I am just asking Is action figure collecting bad for my wallet, storage space, and my physical health?
--David
I first started to notice the Prop 65 warning on stuff from the now-defunct Encore, formerly Rawcliffe. They did a lot of pewter guys, mugs, and other collectible things.
As one of my favorite comedy shows made a crack once, "if you're going to write a comedy scene, you're going to have some rat feces in there." But that's a joke about the fact that you have regulations regarding how much rat feces you can have in cereal and food products. And it's not zero. There are allowances for some. Anyone wanting to get rid of rat feces in food regulations is making an argument for an allowance for more rat feces. Similarly there are warnings about how there might be some materials in consumer goods that might not be safe, or how much lead they can have, which is also not always zero. The Prop 65 warning is s a warning. For better or worse, it's informing people. For worse, it's definitely desensitizing people to seeing that kind of warning when it's on a water bottle or almost literally anything you buy. When every product has a warning label, at some point, we'll just pretend it isn't there.
Hiya sells to the American market, and has a lot of great stuff coming here - even exclusives. I wouldn't worry about authentic Hiya products, beyond them being pointy, because I know I've stabbed myself with one when setting up a trade show booth. If someone is selling knock-offs of Hiya products, I would be worried about those since they are unlikely to be made with the same standards as the genuine article.
America has a set of safety standards. California has a different standard and they label dang near everything. The EU? Yet another standard. Any mass-produced items are expected to pass certain requirements, but it's not like every sample of every shipment is necessarily tested. Your 3D printed items? Not tested. Customs? Not necessarily tested. Some paints are not meant to be handled like a toy, nor are some plastics, rubbers, etc. The reason you buy a Hasbro toy (or Hiya or Mattel or Jakks or LEGO) is that big companies don't want to be liable for a lawsuit and they're likely to undergo the legally required testing and auditing.
Should you be worried? Well, if there's an item I'm concerned about it doesn't live on my desk. Most toy companies want to make sure something is safe enough that if a kid sticks it in his mouth, said kid won't drop dead. But sometimes you don't know if a material is dangerous until later, and the state of California is no doubt covering all of its bases. And your bases. And other bases yet to come.
There are things like home lead tests over the years, and a number of "third-party" (bootleg/unlicensed) Transforemrs-alikes have been given tests by fans. Some of those did not appear to be up to the standards of a Hasbro or Mattel, but with many makers, many products, and many factories? You'll need to see what the testing situation is or was. Testing costs money, and not every market on Earth has the same requirements for safety and chemicals and fragility.
I would generally not worry about most items sold for the American, European, or Asian market with an ages 4+ or 8+ age grading. Many items that look like toys, sold in America, even with ages 15+ on it are usually held to the same standard because nobody wants to hear from a law firm. If you're seeing something not packaged with an age grade on it and not intended for the US market, well, don't put it in your mouth.
2. How many The Retro Collection action figures have blasters?
--Phil R.
I maintain a small The Retro Collection Dump Page to provide unnecessary lists of character data. Over the weekend I added The Retro Collection - The Blaster List which tells you 62 of 108 figures have accessories that are explicitly some form of firearm. As a kid I assumed most people had guns because many of my toys had guns. It turned out this was not necessarily the case, but forms of media including toy lines shape our realities. See also, Han's jacket.
And this is what happens when I run out of questions. As such, please send in your questions, if you have any.
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FIN
Depending on your luck, you have potentially picked up or missed some wacky Target clearances. The Imperial Warlord guy in The Black Series is under $10, and this year's Retro Collection 6-pack has been as little as $19.50. (The Target nearest me sold 16 in under 7 days at that price.) I know a lot of fans are speculating that the sky is falling because four of the last five Kenner 6-packs have been on clearance. You can probably say the same of most if not all of The Black Series exclusives for big box stores. The very few The Vintage Collection items for online shops often go on sale, and that's probably just where we are now as we see this week's new 3-pack at $70 and go "...hunh." Sometimes things click, and sometimes not. Have you ever really looked around to see how cheap it is to pick all of that stuff up that you skipped over the past 30 years? Sure, some are expensive, but a lot of it is under $10. It's a buyer's market.
Thanks to the fact that Hasbro (and Kenner) have made thousands of figures and hundreds of action figure-sized vehicles, combined with collectors' lack of attention spans, there are some really cheap older things to be had. I was looking up 1995-2001 The Power of the Force stuff on eBay and honestly it doesn't seem like a bad place to go hang out. I was surprised to see some very highly priced short saber/long tray farmboy Luke Skywalker figures - he and Obi-Wan were scarce ones - but everything else is pretty affordable. For a 30-year-old action figure line, $150-$175 for an AT-AT or $200 for a sealed-box Millennium Falcon is a lot less than you'd pay for a new Hasbro toy. Some original movie trilogy figures like Pote Snitkin, EV-9D9, Ishi Tib, Lak Sivrak, Muftak, Owen, Beru, and the Max Rebo Band haven't exactly had any significant updates since the turn of the century. Admittedly the line isn't state-of-the-art, but if you want ships for Retro figures? Consider these. And aside from articulation, some figures are pretty amazing - Pote Snitkin, in particular, has an incredible sculpt for his time.
As the anniversary approaches, expectations are high and information is low. But if you look at the 40th, and the 30th, you can see that sometimes you get amazing stuff and sometimes you don't. The kids coming up aren't starved for Kenner figures like Generation X and Millennials were, so it might be worth taking a look back and picking up stuff that actually exists instead of holding your breath for things that may never come. This isn't to say there won't be good things next year, but the entire history of action figures is a hard act to follow. Especially when you have to compete with whatever legacy anniversary items and new movie toys that Hasbro is sure to release. So if I were you, I'd say sock away some money for next year but don't neglect going back and filling your shelves with the stuff that already exists. Heck, maybe you've already got it at home, and your 1995 Landspeeder is probably still in amazing shape.
Old toys are still a lot of fun. I mean, I've certainly hit up specific antique malls to pick up old, cheap, worthless stuff to amuse myself. $1.50 for a 30-year-old Hot Wheels car seems like a good source of entertainment. And zinc. But antique malls are filled with unwanted, hoarded, mint-in-the-box, and often at or below SRP toys. They're not all going to tickle your fancy, but some will.
Oh, and go vote. Maybe whatever side you pick may help keep yet another price increase away and discourage tariffs on toys.
--Adam Pawlus
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