Here’s an interesting article about the do’s and don’ts of toy collecting to share.  Actually I have covered most of the topics mentioned in the blog post, except for toy photography.  I’ve been keeping this in my browser bookmark for some time and here are the links:

“Toy collecting tips and tricks - part 1″

“Toy collecting tips and tricks - part 2″

Happy reading, and don’t go overboard with your toy collecting hobby!

Another year quickly draws to an end!  It took me quite a while to gather and reflect all my toy thoughts for 2011.  What can I say?  That 2011 is basically just another period of yet more mindless pursuit of more toys to add to my already overpopulated collection, spread over 12 months!  So am I happy with how the year went for me?

Well I have long wanted to quit this toy collecting hobby, but I obviously didn’t succeed.  This is mainly because I haven’t really found something else to take its place.

Ever since I started blogging about toys in Dec 2009, I had been gradually downsizing the toy collections that I had lost interest in and I did managed to sell off a sizeable part of my collection.  However along the way, I also bought new toys that caught my interest.  Fortunately the new toys were fewer in numbers and the new toy purchases were spaced much further apart than before.  Hence overall, my toy collecting pace has slowed down by a lot, which is good!

G4 My Little Pony

This has been a very exciting year for collecting G4 My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic (FiM) toys, ever since they started appearing in local departmental stores in Q1 of 2011.  My fellow local pony collectors and I had been following the news and were envious of the early retail release of G4 pony toys in the US in 2010.  We were then naturally very ecstatic to find them here as well and wasted no time buying the “mane 6″ pony characters, way before the local kids and other fans were introduced to these ponies when the FiM cartoon was screened on Okto Channel in Oct 2011.

LEGO

The local retail release of the 2nd series of LEGO Kingdoms sets in July this year revived my waned interest in LEGO and got me excited for a while, until I finished building them all and stored them aside in boxes.  I also became briefly interested in the new LEGO Aliens Conquest sets and added them to my collection too.  Now I’m still wondering if that was a good idea.  I still like them, but I feel guilty that I strayed from my LEGO collecting goals of focusing on medieval LEGO sets only…

Masters of the Universe Classics (MOTUC)

2011 marked the year that I finally completed my modest collection of MOTUC figures that I intend to collect.  I have the MOTUC He-Man, Battle Cat, Adora, She-Ra V1, She-Ra V2 and the massive Swift Wind (added in Nov) at last!  Maybe if Mattel makes Adora’s horse Spirit, I will get him too in 2012 or whenever he gets released.  These are very expensive toys which I bought as MOCs and MIBs, so they are all I can afford to have, for now.

Unanticipated Gundam Invasion!

Just as I have been painstakingly reducing my massive toy collection over the year, this is also the untimely period when my husband plunged into the “rapid growth” stage of collecting Gundam model kits!

I blame myself for letting him accompany me to the toy sections of departmental stores whenever I popped in to check out the latest ponies and other toy releases to blog about.  He somehow revived his childhood interest in Gundam and in the last 2 months, it had been a downward spiral for his $$ and my emotions!

He keeps reassuring me that he only buys them at massive discounts from both retail stores and online sellers, but he doesn’t seem to detect my built up stress at seeing the more than 30 boxes of unassembled MIB Gundams cluttering up our room!

I had strived so hard for the year to clutter clear my home and room, only to see other people’s clutter build up all over again!  And if you collect Gundam, you will know that each HG & MG model kit can take up to a week or more to build, assuming that you can only build on weekday nights after work and on weekends if you don’t go out.

My thoughts for 2012

All I can say for now is that I better find a new non-physical item collecting hobby in 2012 and further cut down on impulse toy purchases.  Recession is coming again and I can’t guarantee if my income will remain the same in the coming months, much less for the whole year.  I have to cut down on monthly expenses and set aside more funds and savings for rainy days, and perhaps a new addition to the family.

Oh gosh, just typing this paragraph alone is starting to stress me up!  But don’t let me dissuade you from your own toy collecting goals, for everyone has different targets for the new year.  So you go on and pursue yours while I carry out mine.  Adieu 2011 and Happy New Year 2012!

It’s the eve of Chinese New Year once again and it will be the year of the Rabbit from tomorrow!  I told myself during the beginning of 2011 (1st Jan) that I shall strive to collect less toys this year, but I caved in 2 days ago and bought another new toy - a 3.75-inch Marvel Universe Spiderwoman action figure from a local departmental store.  I sort of gave myself the excuse that I watched her cartoon series as a child and that I “had to have” her toy when I see it, yadda yadda.  And so she joined my toy collection…

Perhaps it’s really too extreme for me to completely stop collecting toys of a sudden.  I can start off by cutting down on collecting with having a smaller toy budget each month.  That would at least be a monetary guideline to streamline my purchases.  I can also eventually trim my collection by selling off the unwanted or unloved items away gradually in the coming weeks and months.  Yeah, that would be the plan for me, right now.  After all, the past few weeks of spring cleaning weren’t made easier by my massive toy collection, LOL!

Anyway, my spring cleaning’s done and I’m ready for the new year.  Here’s wishing all my Chinese readers a Happy and Prosperous New Rabbit Year!!  Gong Xi Fa Cai, Wan Shi Ru Yi!! 

As I look through my still rather large G1 My Little Pony toy collection, I realise that many of them were acquired back then because I wanted to collect all the ponies in the respective series.  Most of the time, I only liked 1 or 2 of the ponies in those sets, but the “completist” mind in me back then just had to have the whole set to make my collection “complete”.  Hence I ended with a larger herd than I can comfortably manage.

What about you?  Are you a “set completer” type of toy collector too?  Feel free to share your comments here! 

Q1 2010:

Up to the first half of 2010, I was still very much into collecting the latest toys of the toylines that I was interested in. 

In January 2010, I snapped up quite a number of the G.I.Joe movie toys that were on mass clearance sales at many departmental stores then.  It was a bountiful harvest time for G.I.Joe toy fans and I was estatic to have gotten the figures and vehicles at that opportune time!

Q2 2010:

Then I started getting obsessed in wanting to complete the LEGO castle sets that I missed out many years ago.  And so I went on a shopping spree, both online and at physical shops to hunt down all those missing sets that I wanted, for don’t know what crazy reason.  It was just a sudden intense period of unexplained obsession back then. 

Q3 2010:

This period was spent building up and reviewing a number of the LEGO Castle sets that I bought a few months before and being pleased that I acquired them despite lots of effort.  But fatigue gradually set in from all that LEGO building, photo taking and online toy reviewing, that my mad craze over LEGO finally waned.

Q4 2010:

Gradually my toy collecting pace slowed down a lot in the closing months of 2010.  This was mainly because I began to run out of proper physical storage for more toys.  Hence I had to collect less or forgo buying some of the toys I had originally wanted.  In a way, it became a good thing in the end because I realised that many of the toys that I skipped having, were really impulse toys to me after all.  So that’s a relief!

My thoughts for 2011:

I shall still continue blogging about the latest news on the toylines that I normally blog about, mostly about Transformers, Marvel Universe, G.I.Joe, My Little Pony and other Hasbro toys and such. 

2011 should be an exciting year for Transformers movie fans, as the third installment of the movie - Dark of the Moon (DOTM) is expected to be screened in cinemas in July 2011.  There will surely be lots of sneak preview photos of DOTM toys being released or leaked online to drive fans and collectors crazy again, like it happened in the months before the ROTF (Revenge of the Fallen) movie release in July 2009.

For the G.I.Joe movie sequel, the filming plans seem to have stalled for now, so I don’t expect the sequel to be ready this year, which is fine with me.  There will be plenty of other toy distractions to take its place.

If I have complete control over my thoughts, impulses, emotions and obsessions, I would rather embark on a new lifestyle in 2011 rather than continue collecting even more toys to restart the vicious toy collecting cycle all over again for another year.  But I know that my human mind is weak when it comes to temptations and discontentment with what I already have.  Hence 2011 is likely to be another challenging year for me if I want a change.  Nevertheless, I will still up keep this toy blog as long as I have not left this hobby.

Happy toys collecting everyone, and Happy 2011!

Iron Man 2 action figures - Movie series wave 6

If you do indeed collect the many variants of certain toys, this is a sure way to increase your toy collection massively, especially if your variant toys happen to be the main and best selling characters of that toyline!

For many collectors, the most recent variant toys that comes to mind are the 2010 Iron Man 2 movie 3.75-inch action figures, where countless variations of the main character - Iron Man, seemed to be churned out by the dozens in every wave released in the retail stores.  I bet that you can really count at least a dozen different Iron Man figures hanging on the store pegs, all in different armor and colors. 

Then there are the Movie and Comic versions of these little 3.75-inch Iron Man toys to take note of!  You really marvel at Hasbro for being able to conjure out so many kinds of variant Iron Man toys, from just 1 character!  I believe that from the movie, most people can only recall Iron Man himself (in his red and gold armor), War Machine and at most the villain Whiplash!

Some collectors including myself at times, have a weakness for collecting variant toys of a favourite character.  For me, the variant toys I collect are nearly all the different versions of the Deluxe Bumblebee figures from both the first and second Transformers movie toylines. 

———-

Just a few days ago, I was looking at my box containing the loose Transformers toys I own, and I counted about 15 Deluxe Bumblebees in there, not including the Human Alliance (HA) and Legends ones that I store elsewhere.  And to think that I only collect the movie versions of Bumblebee, and not the ones from the classic G1 or Transformers Animated (TFA) toylines, but I have a fleet of him already in my collection, OMG!

Do you collect variant toys too?  Feel free to share your thoughts and comments here!

Well firstly, I didn’t get myself any new toys for Christmas this year.  I just wished to have a long and extended break, and not collect toys or think about toys all the time.  That is why my blog posts have thinned out for a long time recently.  Since I wasn’t really in the mood to think much about toys, I naturally had very little toy collecting topics to blog or post about, other than the release of some new Hasbro toys into the market.  

I hope my readers didn’t get too disappointed when you visited my blog during this period and did not find new blog postings to read.  I really had nothing much to say during this lull period.  After a while, you do realise that the cycle of our toy collecting hobby gets very repetitive and predictable. 

A new toy comes out and we all get excited about seeing the online sneak preview photos and want to buy it so badly.  Then when it is out for sale, we get excited again because we finally have the physical toy in our possessions.  For the Transformers Revenge of the Fallen (ROTF) Legends Devastator toy above, I got him around this time last year and I was definitely very excited about having him then.  But in the whole of 2010, I barely looked at him as he stayed in storage in a cupboard… 

The interest in our latest purchased toy tends to only last from as little as a day to perhaps 1 week, before we all get bored with it.  Then we will go online to find the next ‘hot new’ toy to excite us, and repeat the vicious and never ending cycle all over again.  I have had many great and exciting toy finds this year, but without looking into my toy storage boxes, I think I can’t recall most of them by now.  So sometimes I wonder why am I still collecting all these toys in the first place?

What about you?  Do you have such displacement thoughts about your toy collecting hobby at times?  Please feel free to share your comments here!  And happy holidays to one and all!

While chatting with a fellow toy collector some weeks ago, he mentioned that he bought quite a lot of new toys from the recent Singapore Toy Games and Comic Convention (STGCC) 2010.  He had them all stashed inside his rather bulging backpack.  He aimed to return home to keep his toys aside first before his wife came home later that day.  It seemed that his wife would ‘nag’ at him if she discovered that he bought more new toys for his collection and fill up the home!

I was like, OMG, I do that too, although the person in my family who nags at my ever expanding toy collection is mainly my mom!  I have been smuggling toys home for lord knows how many years already!  Sometimes I even leave the big bulky purchases in the car boot and then retrieve them from it after my parents go to bed, LOL!  It was better than being seen carrying in those new bags of toys when I entered the house during their waking hours and be nagged at, again!

When you are a toy collector and you live with other non-collector people in the same home, this nagging situation from them can arise, especially if they are the ones who own or co-own the home you live in!  That means if those other people have a say in the household, your toy collecting hobby (or rather toy hoarding habits to them) can become a source of constant friction with them if not managed well from the beginning.

But since most toy collectors cannot stop themselves from buying more of the latest collectible toys, they do resort to ’smuggling’ them into the house, as long as they can hide them well.  Another toy collector friend of mine keeps getting nagged at by his mom about his ever growing and out of population control toy collection.  He shrugs her off by claiming that those new purchases were actually old purchases that he had taken out from storage.  He doubted that she believed him completely but he got away with it, LOL!

So, do you ’smuggle’ your newly purchased toys home as well?  Do you feel some sort of guilt when doing it?  I know it isn’t a pleasant thing, like we’re doing something on the sly behind the backs of our loved ones, though it’s not an issue that borders so extremely like on the betrayal of trust.  Most of us can’t help it, until the day we gradually get out of this toy collecting hobby. 

Do feel free to share your thoughts here!

Learn to let go of your toy collections when the time comes to move on in life - Despite your beloved toys being a major part of your life for the past ’x’ number of years, there might come a time in some people’s lives where they find new interests or have changes in lifestyle that do not accomodate a toy collecting hobby as much as before. 

If you reach such a stage in life, just go naturally with the flow of your new found lifestyle and let go your toy hobby.  Embrace your new life and move on.  You might just find better rewards there.  Your toys had served you well in the past ‘x’ number of years and it’s time for them to serve a purpose in other people’s lives.  So let go most of them while keeping a handful as souvenirs of those particular memorable years of your life.  Happy living!

Army building toys is not for the faint hearted and cash particular collectors - Yes in summary, these are really the main points to note if you are still at the stage of thinking about going into this line of toy collecting.  

Some collectors ‘army build’ soldier action figures and military vehicle toys because these “have to be” displayed in great numbers to be ’impressive’.  Other collectors collect multiples of the same action figures because certain characters (e.g. Marvel Universe Multiple Man above) have the power to replicate themselves in the comics, cartoons and movies etc. 

Storage space constraints, being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of your toy armies and high replicated costs of buying multiples of the same toys are your main concerns before you decide that this type of toy collecting is for you.  Happy army building!