toys

Since 1956, diecast vehicles have been sold to children and collectors under the name Corgi.  Here in the United States, the scope of Corgi toys might not have shown up on the radar for a lot of kids — I was a Matchbox kid, myself — so I was impressed when I got a review copy of Corgi Toys, by David Cooke.   Corgi produced larger-scale vehicles than Matchbox, although they did include the smaller-scale size later, and the quality and style changed as the needs and desires of their customers grew over the years.

Cooke starts before the creation of the Corgi trade-name, tracing its origins to the Mettoy company in the 1930s.  After war-rationing of metal hampered the creation of metal car toys, the market grew and saw numerous competing companies fighting to make their toys more desirable to kids and collectors alike.   Cooke’s book covers a lot of ground in few words, giving a good timeline and overview of Corgi’s growth and change in the past eighty years, but is far from comprehensive.  The book is neither a reference nor a price guide, and feels more like a nice gift book for your friendly neighborhood toy car collector.  The limited text is made up for with a couple hundred photographs of various toys, most with their original packaging and accessories.   The photos are all well done, and nothing would be considered a poor quality collectible.  It also benefits from a handy index and two pages of “Further Reading” suggestions.

The photos are the book’s strongest points, and it’s too bad the book isn’t longer.  The Shire Library has produced a number of books appealing to collectors and kitsch fanatics alike.  All are thin and image-packed, and the Corgi Toys book is no exception.  The content’s quality and feel is similar to books from Taschen, but on a smaller scale.  The only place the book’s size has a slightly negative connotation is in the price – while I understand that 64  full-color glossy pages isn’t a cheap book to produce, the $12.95 pricetag seems a bit high for a thin paperback book.  That might encourage a gift-buyer to pick up a thicker, but lower quality, coffee-table photo book of toy cars simply because it carries a greater heft.   The tight focus on Corgi’s history, however, is the right fit for a book of this size, nicely balanced by a multitude of good images, so don’t be put off by the price; a Corgi collector will definitely enjoy Cooke’s summary of the Corgi toy car company’s history.

Corgi Toys, by David Cooke
ISBN 978-0-7478-0667-7
$12.95, 64 pages
Shire Library (Random House)

I have a few collecting regrets that follow me around occasionally – those precious items that would enrich my existence in multiple ways that transcend the stale ideas of ‘possession’. One of the bigger regrets is that I did not more actively pursue the 85 or so Medicom Kubrick figures dedicated to the Pantone system of colors when they were a bit more common.

It sounds incredibly boring to have little block men who are featureless except for a stamp indicating their precise color as determined by an internationally recognized, proprietary color matching system that graphic designers need to understand before they’re worth their salt. However, as a graphic artist, I find that having little toys based on a technical color system is an incredibly geeky, very neat thing. You can try to find these Kubricks on eBay, but they’re very expensive. I plan on buying the hell out of them when I’m a rich and famous designer someday. You’ll see.

So, I was excited when I stumbled across this amalgamation of some of my very favorite things : colors, ghosts, creepy eyes, and a passing hint of cephalopod. Kidrobot released these stackable miniTotem Doppelgangers recently, and I instantly appreciated their nearly featureless faces and attention to color. While I love stock mini-forms adorned with the art of many designers, simplicity seems to be the theme of my life in general, lately.

I knew that I had to own them all. There are fourteen different colors to collect, and many of them are slightly discomforting off-hues, which I also love. There are eleven common colors, with slightly rarer figures appearing in black and white, and one much rarer clear figure. As is usually the case, I purchased a full case of 25, knowing that I could complete my own set (minus the clear guy), and use the rest to make Christmas presents for people. I have a strategic way of collecting in such a manner that I can get exactly what I want and benefit others at the same time by sharing in the wealth.

The way that cases are packed from Kidrobot is always something that collectors should be aware of. While some cases are randomly distributed, others are strangely regimented, and a clever consumer can pick from certain places in the box to have slightly higher odds at obtaining the pieces that they want. I’ve included a photo of how these were distributed, which is an unusual pattern, but a pattern nonetheless. Matching colors are always next to each other on the sides of the case, with the rare pieces down the center column. There you go – I’ve cracked the code. Enjoy.

For $5 each, and standing at 1.5 inches tall, that’s a lot of price for a tiny, rubber thing – but that comes with the territory when collecting designer toys. I, for one, am a little bit in love.

After I interviewed Hillary DePiano about her My Little Pony collection, I interviewed her about another one of her collections: She-Ra, Princess of Power. Since Hillary is the author of The She-Ra Collector’s Inventory: An Unofficial Illustrated Guide to All Princess of Power Toys and Accessories, she sent me a copy of the second edition of the collector guide for review.

The She-Ra Collector's Inventory, by Hillary DePiano

As I stated in my interview with DePiano, I’m admittedly not at all familiar with She-Ra, He-Man, or the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) (although, I must admit my interest is growing rapidly!). However, I don’t think my inexperience makes much of a difference reviewing this collectors’ guide because most people use such guides for two reasons: One, to identify specific items properly and two, to get a ballpark idea of monetary value. And in both those cases, a guide book ought to help a collector (or seller) who is unfamiliar find their way about; and The She-Ra Collector’s Inventory does just that.

After a brief overview of the MOTU world and the Mattel line of toys, DePiano gives an account of her pricing process and grading evaluation, including a very wise word on pricing which all collectors, regardless of category, should heed:

Though some sites, or your local collectibles store, may try to insist on a higher value, I have found in my many years as an eBay seller that the only true value of an item is what someone is willing to pay for it, which is why I have based the prices in this guide on the average completed sales over several years rather than higher priced unsold listings. (The same is true in reverse, however, for if two bidders get in a war over your item, it may go for far more.)

After gaining understanding of her pricing and grading, the author gets into the individual Princess of Power toys and accessories.

Arrow: Princess Of Power Horse (page 17 in The She-Ra Collector's Inventory)

Dolls Action figures, including winged horses and other figures, are listed by year, each with color photo, description, checklist of clothing &/or accessories included, variations (if any), along with a price guide, listing values for those “Mint in Package” (MIP), “Complete,” and “Loose” toys.

The Fantastic Fashions section gives a general overview, with a centerfold-style color section showing you the fashions in their packaging. The Accessories and Playsets chapter is much like the chapter on the action figures.

In the Appendix, you’ll find Princess of Power prototypes never released in stores, international variations and packaging, detailed descriptions of wing types & combs, items commonly mistaken for She-Ra (including Golden Girl: Leader of the Gemstone Guardian), other She-Ra items (books, magazines, mini-comics, lunchbox & thermos sets, Shrinky Dinks, etc.), comments on custom dolls made by She-Ra collectors, and a checklist of MOTU Evil Horde figures who featured on the Princess of Power series (with photographs). While the Appendix has less pricing information, there are plenty of color photographs and information to assist the collector in identification and, therefore, in performing their own pricing research.

The She-Ra Collector’s Inventory: An Unofficial Illustrated Guide to All Princess of Power Toys and Accessories is a slim 55 pages in a trade-sized (6.6 x 10.3 inches) paperback, but it’s easy to understand and packed with color photos plenty large enough to be useful in identification. All of this makes it easy for a collector (or someone who discovers a box of the retro 80’s toys in their basement) to identify what they have, discover what they are missing, and learn how much it may be worth — which is exactly what a primary collector guide book ought to do.

An interview with Hillary DePiano, a fiction and non-fiction author best known for her play, The Love of Three Oranges, and her e-commerce blog, The Whine Seller. Hillary is a collector of both My Little Pony and She-Ra: Princess of Power toys and has authored collectible guides to both (the MLP book is The My Little Pony Collector’s Inventory: A Complete Checklist of All US Ponies, Playsets and Accessories from 1981 to 1992). She is also a frequent contributor to the blog at My Little Pony Collecting.com.

Hillary DePiano With Project Pony 'Silver' At My Little Pony Fair, 2008

Hillary, when did you first fall in love with My Little Pony?

I was pretty young when My Little Pony first hit stores but I think it was a given that I was going to like them from the start. There was a stable that offered pony rides near my house growing up and I was a frequent visitor there until they turned it into condos. There were also unicorns on my childhood wallpaper long before MLP existed so I may have been conditioned from birth. While I am not sure quite what distinguished them from any other toy I had as a child, I know they remained my favorite toy long after I had tossed others aside because I didn’t have to dress them. I am a very low patience threshold when it comes to putting on tiny doll clothes and I used to feel really weird about leaving my Barbies naked so I just never played with them because they took too long to dress. Ponies had clothing but if I got bored before I finished dressing them, I could just leave them naked because horses’ aren’t supposed to wear clothes!

Another thing I think cannot be discounted was the affect of the cartoon show. My Little Pony Tales was often very weird and very dark. I think that strange mix of sugary sweet from the toys but weird and dark from the cartoon series really captured my imagination as a child and made me keep returning to them again and again. I think that unlike a lot of cartoons from the 80s and early 90s, instead of advertising the new toys as most shows did, the MLP show really just made me like the pony toys I already had all the more.

When did you consider yourself a collector?

The first time I ever even though of MLP being something collectible was when I saw some MLP figures at a doll show I went to with my mother. I was still pretty young and all the ponies they had for sale I already had so I didn’t buy any but that planted the seeds. I looked at those MLP figures that were only a year or so old alongside all these dolls, some of which were hundreds of years old, and an association was born. Even then I started to realize that these were my generation’s collectibles.

The real moment I became a collector came many years later, however, when a toy store called Lionel Kiddie City was going out of business. My mom and I found hundreds of mint in box MLP items, some from the very first years of the toy line, and bought a ton of stuff I didn’t have. I was older at this point and I came to the sad realization that I probably shouldn’t open a lot of what we bought that day because it would probably be worth more someday if I left it in the box.

DePiano's MLP Collector's Inventory Guide Book

I could kick myself, because if we had bought everything in the store back then, now, it would be worth over 10 times what we would have paid. Items that are worth hundreds of dollars today were on clearance for pennies! We could have make thousands of dollars. But there was no eBay back then so I couldn’t conceive of the online community of collectors that exists today so there was no reason to buy anything with the anticipation of selling it. So as much as we did buy, we left a lot of really good stuff behind.

But at the time, at that awkward age between kid and teenager, I sat there surrounded by toys I couldn’t wait to open rationally knowing I really shouldn’t open them. That was the moment when I became a collector before a kid with toys. I was thinking more of the future value of the items over the desire to open the packages.

Describe your collecting habits… Are you methodical, with a list of “needs” or do you serendipitously discover & buy? Do you own multiples of the same pony or piece or do you replace pieces so that you only keep the pieces in best conditions? Do you find your collection spreading & sprawling, branching out to include other related items (knock-offs, other plastic ponies, horses in general, toys from the same maker, time frame, etc.)

I decided long ago to only collect parts of the My Little Pony line instead of everything. Many of the subsections of the main toy line (such as Petite Ponies, Dream Beauties, Plush, etc) I sold off long ago when I decided to focus only on the basic ponies and playsets. There are a ton of MLP items and I felt like it was insane to try to get everything so I focused on certain elements. As large as my collection is, you definitely couldn’t say I had a complete collection.

I used to keep two full sets of MLP but I sold one entire collection off so that I now only keep one of each pony. This decision was both financial and a real space saver. Ponies are small but when you have them in the quantities I do, boy, they can start to take over.

I run across a lot of ponies when selling items on eBay through PricedNostalgia.com and I always make sure to check my collection before I sell anything. If I come across something in better shape than what I have, I do a trade and keep the better one. I also make sure to keep anything I didn’t already have in my collection. The one exception is if the lesser condition pony is one from when I was a kid, I usually keep my old pony as well as the nicer one.

Hillary in Priced Nostalgia's Booth At MLP Fair, 2008

As I get older, I find that I spend more time streamlining my collection rather than expanding it to include more. My Little Pony is a massive toyline spanning several decades so if you really wanted to collect every single thing, it could easily be a lifetime quest. I find myself making decisions based on space a lot of the time. For instance, I recently decided to sell off all of my mint in box pony items. Perhaps this preference stems from the Lionel Kiddie City incident, but I have always preferred the loose ponies to those MIB. I like to be able to touch them and the mint in box ponies are worth a ton so it just made more sense to me to sell off the MIB for the money and keep the loose ponies that take up less space. I also don’t aggressively seek out international or variants like some collectors. If one crosses my path and I like it, I’ll keep it but I won’t get involved in crazy bidding wars over a rare piece.

But some collectors only collect mint in box items. There are some sellers who focus on just a single pony, getting every possible variation of that one character. I think one of the big appeals of My Little Pony collecting is that there are a lot of different ways to collect so no two collections are exactly the same.

Tell us the story of one of your collecting ‘holy crap’ moments — best deal you ever got & thought you’d pee your pants, the most you’ve ever paid for a piece, the longest lengths you’ve ever gone to get a piece for your My Little Pony collection.

The Lionel toy store find was a really great Holy Crap moment but another great one was pretty recent. My husband and I were at a flea market and we are both pretty good a playing it cool when we spot something rare but I saw a rare pony mint in box. I asked the seller how much casually and actually handed her a wad money before she had even answered with the price. This should have been a sign to her that I was a little over eager but I only paid $10 for this pony that I later sold on eBay for just shy of $400. You see ponies so rarely at flea markets or garage sales that when you do, it’s hard not to grab them really quickly like another collector is breathing down your neck. When I was younger and we didn’t see any ponies on a flea market trip, I would assume another collector had been through first. Now I think people are just smarter about their value.

My dad is my favorite person to go pony hunting with. He is totally useless at spotting them and refuses to rummage in bins to look for them. But he loves it when I find one I didn’t have before. Every time we would get back into the car he would say, “So did we get any we didn’t have before?” and would eagerly examine whichever one was “new.” It always made me feel like we were a team because he got so excited for one we didn’t have. My husband is also getting rather good at it. My brother-in-law called to say that he picked up an MLP item for me at a garage sale and, upon hearing the description, my husband was able to identify the pony by name. I think he may have lost street cred for life with his brother for that but whenever he busts out a random pony fact he earns major brownie points with me.

I have never really paid ridiculous amounts for a pony. To me, part of the fun of collecting is getting the pony I want for the price I want to pay. I try to leverage trades, coupons, gift certificates, credit card points, whatever I can. It means that my collection grows more slowly than the collection of someone who just outright buys what they want instead of waiting for the deal but, for me, the thrill of the hunt is half the fun of collecting. The only time I ever just outright buy a pony is if it is at a convention where I can physically touch and examine the pony before I purchase. I am usually willing to pay a little more in person if I get to really get a good look at it in person.

Is your collection complete? Are you still searching for a ‘Holy Grail’ piece?

Since new My Little Pony items are still in stores to this day, it’s impossible for anyone’s My Little Pony collection to be complete. New ponies come out every day. Mine will never be complete. I tend to pick a random pony to obsess over and that becomes my current grail. Then, once I get that pony, I pick a new one. I get an $100 eBay voucher once a year from my credit card so I always spend that on an MLP item since that is just a bonus so completing sets I am after usually moves at a rate of about a pony a year.

DiPiano At The 2005 My Little Pony Convention

For the longest time, my grail was Twice-As-Fancy Munchy. Most ponies have flowers or other cutsie things on them but Munchy has hot dogs and hamburgers on her. I was amused by the randomness of her and was after her for a long time until I snagged her at the 2007 convention. My current obsession is getting all of the Twice-As-Fancy baby ponies. These were a mail order only offer so they are hard to find and, as such, more expensive. I just ordered what should be the final one of those on eBay about a week ago.

Then once that set is complete, I will obsess over the United Kingdom exclusive male ponies, the Mountain Boys. I just used this year’s eBay voucher to get my very first one so now I am going to work on bit by bit, getting the rest of the set.

And so it goes, bit by bit, as every collector knows…

While Egypt is an awesome place to explore, Playmobil also brings it back to basics with their ‘Life in the City’ collection, released in August of 2009. By the way, no tiny Cleopatra, Playmobil? Possible expansion set?

Playmobil has been releasing bits and pieces of urban and suburban life for as long as they’ve been around, and there have even been a small variety of houses for the Playmopeople to live in, but the recent ‘Life in the City’ set, with its focal point firmly on the gargantuan ‘Suburban House’ playset, is probably the most impressively comprehensive of any of their sets to date.

While the basic $160 playset has two floors that can be augmented significantly with various smaller sets, you also have the option of adding extra floors to the set, extensions onto the house, and even electrical lights to place around the house, all with the intuitive ease that Playmobil capitalizes on so smartly. Even as an adult male, the prospect of the perfect miniature house appeals to my desire for tranquil domesticity and love of scale models of things.

A basic floor extension costs $45, but the construction of the set indicates that these can be added indefinitely, giving you a potential for a ten story suburban home that you can populate with all manner of stuff. Create a kitchen floor well stocked with Re-Ment miniature foods, or a whole superhero hideout for 3 3/4 scaled Justice Leaguers. Maybe have a floor for your Undersea Explorers to chill in, while the time travel booth on the 5th floor keeps on cranking out warriors from who knows when. I’ll let you know when my mind catches up to my actual age.

Subsequent sets are intended to fill these rooms with people and accessories, but should have a universal appeal to any properly scaled dollhouse. While I don’t have the full Suburban House at my disposal to model these things, I was able to play with some of the excellent, smaller room-themed sets. It’s always great to get these quiet, everyday items that can be used a wide variety of interesting situations. Most of these situations, I admit, involve a tiny Batman.

First, we have the ‘Kitchen with Dinette Set‘. I’ve loved kitchen playsets since the Muppets line, and this set comes with so much stuff that it can barely contain it all (as well as a piece or two meant to augment the larger playset). A fridge / freezer combination with working doors and storage space is definitely a highlight, and a good place to keep all of the extra food pieces. The kitchen also includes a range and an array of oven and stove tools which hang from it, a sink with an opening dishwasher, and a stark, modern kitchen table and chairs. Shelves and a coffeemaker are also included. Here is where some of the cultural divergence comes in, as the exceedingly modern dining accommodations are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Gone are the usual warm woods and cushions of the US dining room, and in their place is stark, modern design. What I find even more interesting, however, is the miniature food that is provided with the set. This family is on a fast track to heart disease with a delicious meal of meat with a side of meat. Also, sounds delicious. The set retails for around $30.

On the next tier down is the Living Room, at around $20. It’s another set with a crazy number of pieces, filling up its own set of four shelves with videos, books, a stereo with speakers, a large TV, plants, a lamp, a couch with a fold-a-bed, a table, and an aquarium encased in clear plastic to create the illusion of depth behind the glass. This set also includes a woman and a little girl. The cubbies are also modular, allowing for countless configurations and usability in all kinds of house situations.

The Master Bedroom set is another interesting bit of home life. For one, it includes a dude with bare feet – an interesting rarity in the Playmobil world. In this set are two beds, two night stands, a little clock, a plant, and an armoire deal with some highly mirrored doors. It’s a very simple set at $18, and it’s curious that the bed isn’t one large, master bed. I’m now also curious about the sleeping habits of the average German, as these include a kind of sleeping bag atop the regular mattress, instead of a blanket. Putting the little Playmoguy in there feels like I’m preparing him for a burrito.

The Family Bathroom also presents an interesting cultural divide. Sure, it includes the typical sink, shower and toilet, as well as various other toiletries – but the one aspect that I find strange is that the toilet is partitioned from the rest of the bathroom using a translucent screen. This can only imply that one would have company in the bathroom, as being bashful about the judgmental eyes of the toothpaste isn’t normal or sane. Who are we protecting our functions from, Germany? If I don’t have three feet of concrete around me in all directions, nothing’s gonna happen. Needless to say, a scaled toilet is perfect for every situation.

Among the many other available sets, there’s the Laundry Room, which is decked out with a washing machine, some great shelves, a vacuum, a collapsible ironing board and iron, a whole bunch of fabric pieces in various colors, and best of all : a spinning clothes rack with a bunch of working, mini clothespins. As usual, everything is solid and beautifully simple. While these sets would all suit a dollhouse far better than some kind of adventure through the billowing grass of the backyard, they have their place and function, and they do it well.

Even as general dollhouse accouterments for a playset that you already have, no matter the maker, would benefit from these things pieces. They’re so practical that they’re easily overlooked in everyday life, but given a new and interesting context in this strange little world.