I Play With My Toys

Hi again. I figure a little background is in order, if just for a little context. I'll probably do other posts that go into more detail about stuff like this, in and around the posts about more recent subjects, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail right now. But, I thought people might like to know a bit about my background with toys.

So, I am a 40-something-year-old toy collector. (Anybody who has a problem with that is REALLY on the wrong blog. 8^) I am married and have kids of my own. (And, no, I did not just have kids to have an excuse to get more toys. 8^)

I started out with much the same random hodgepodge of toys as any small child. I would say my serous collecting started with the original Kenner Star Wars line in the late 1970s. My brother and I both got into Star Wars, and we both had fairly extensive collections of the toys.

By the mid 80s, though, Star Wars was winding down when the Transformers came out. My brother and I both ended up switching our primary focus to them, and this is when our "world" really got started. I'm not sure it was a conscious decision at the time, but he and I and a friend of ours basically ended up splitting the Transformers toyline between us, and played with the toys in a kind-of shared world, not unlike an RPG campaign setting. We each had a "base" or two for our toys, and they would often interact with each others' toys.

We got into other toy lines too, before, during, and after TFs. G.I.Joe, Adventure People, M.A.S.K., StarCom, Battle Beasts, Super Heroes (of various lines), etc.

Eventually, that friend of ours dropped out of the shared "toy world". I guess he lost interest in the toys, but my brother and I kept on it for some time. When I left for college (which was not long after the end of the G1 Transformers toyline), we stopped doing much actively with the world, and in the decades since then, he has lost most interest in toys as well.

I still have the vast majority of my collections from back then (aside from some that I have sold off to be able to buy others, more on that in another post), and have continued collecting -- mostly Transformers, but the occasional other, such as the revived Star Wars in the '90s -- most of the time since. I have had times when my collecting has slowed, such as between toylines or when finances were tight, but never really dropped it entirely. But I have usually at least picked up a few here an there when they particularly piqued my interest.

Recently, I've started picking up recent Transformers a bit more heavily, and that is largely what led me to start this blog. See, I really don't have anybody I interact with regularly who is interested in this sort of thing. Meaning, I don't have anybody to talk toys with very much, and I've been feeling a desire to talk about this stuff. So, time to set up a blog, and talk to the entire Internet. (Or just myself, depending on how many/if any readers I get here. 8^)