Snoova's Toy Tales: ADVENTURES IN TOY COLLECTING (The Dark Years)

    Didn't they define the span between Return of the Jedi and the announcement of the new movies - "the dark years"...?  Something like that...  Basically, it was that weird zone of time where there was little to nothing happening on the Star Wars front.  It was done, inactive, dormant...

    Well, I think we have all had those times in our toy collecting.  At one point you stop, then there is a large blank space and then after awhile you are back in!!  There was that span of "dark years" in between when I collected and when I didn't.  Not that anything about life in general was actually dark - just that on the toy front, it was over.  There were a few interesting things that happened during this time period though.  So I guess this blog entry serves as a "Prequel" to the Adventures in Toy Collecting, Part 1!

        One of the weirdest was after high school in 1991...  my collection had long been boxed up, and a friend of mine stopped by my house with some of his old Joe stuff.  He told me he had heard I had kept my stuff and I could just add these remnants of his collection to mine.  He had a big bag of accessories and another big bag of figure parts.  Apparently he used to take them apart and reconfigure them.  This is why I STILL have the Secto-Viper's gun and the accessories of Deep Six (v2) in my possession, yet I have never owned either figure.  We were friends and I didn't even know the guy collected G.I. Joe???

    Another moment was when we were all starting Junior College and my good buddy, Bobby ("Deathwish"), and I went out for lunch and just happened to stop by the old Comic Shop to look around.  We saw the Impel G.I. Joe cards and both of us thought they were really well done.  We had both been out of Joes some years now, but he happened to have some extra money, so he ordered the G.I. Joe Footlocker with the complete collection of cards.  

    This started a conversation about the "old days" and how much fun it was going to the store and buying our figures.  Then we started wondering WHAT figures are actually available now and where the line had been going.  Then it all snowballed into "let's go buy some figures for old times sake.  We can just set them on a desk or something at home for display."

    Well, surely Deathwish and I couldn't go to a local store and buy figures, right??  I mean, what if someone saw us?  That would just be embarrassing!  So what is Plan B???

    So we decided on a roadtrip to a little town about an hour away that had little to nothing there.  They did, however, have a small store or two that might have figures.  We don't know anyone from there, right?  Great, so the mission is a go!

    So one day we headed out into the wild blue yonder, once again in search of cool action figures.  I don't think either of us really even had an idea what potential characters were included in the assortments that year.  So we were really going in blind.  I mean, there was a weird energy of just finally being able to peek at the Joe World just for a second and see what is going on!

    After a lengthy drive, we arrived at a the town's Big R store (I think we went to a second store too).  We went in and sure enough there was a nice-sized endcap of 1991 G.I. Joe figures on display.  It was exciting and strange - here was the same toy line we had collected for years, but now there were spring-loaded weapons and other new features.  Some of the outfits were cool and others, not-so-much.  It was the same, but not the same, ya know?

  If memory serves... on that trip I got the Crimson Guard Immortal and Grunt (v3).  Deathwish got Snake Eyes (v4) and Tracker.  For myself, I used to really like the Crimson Guards, so he was an obvious pick.  As for Grunt, I really thought the gun mounted to the rocket launcher looked cool!  I would find out it didn't translate to the figure as well, but the artwork was great!  Deathwish always liked the ninjas - so Snake Eyes (v4) was a no-brainer!  He picked Tracker because the whole inflatable raft seemed like a unique gimmick to the figure.

Man... tell me it wouldn't be great to see those prices again!!!

    That was a fun roadtrip!!!  After returning home, I placed the figures on a shelf in my closet that had some of my cool knick-knacks on it.  They shared the space with Laser-Viper who was the last Joe figure I got for Christmas.

    Maybe a week or so later, Deathwish's Impel Footlocker came in at the comic shop.  He picked it up and stopped by my house to show it to me.  For whatever reason, he left it there.  Later, he told me to just hang on to it for awhile... he would get it some other time.  This eventually turned into "just keep it".  They were too cool to leave alone, so I put them in card sleeves in a binder, which then shared space with those lone displayed Joe figures on the shelf.  There they all would remain, gathering dust, for a few years until I returned to collecting in fall-1993.

Still got 'em!!!  Have no plans to ever part with them!!!

    It was little moments like this that made such cool memories with the Toy Line... even after we had quit collecting!  I always think it's fun to hear other people's journeys with G.I. Joe.  Does anyone else have any interesting happenings or stories from their "dark years" of non-collecting?  Does anyone else have that one character, that for a certain period of time, was - "the last figure"?