Rare figures growing up....

[BoogDoc7]

Here's a fun one...

Did you have any rare figures you grew up playing with and more or less took for granted until later on when you realized the thing was rare?

Mine is probably my later-years Super Powers stuff, maybe a few of the older lego space stuff I have.

[ramdog79]

Snakeman and Satana were the bastards of my MOTU figures while I was growing up. Always being shunned, crapped on(figuratively) and pulling second string. They just didn't fit in.

Now I'm forced to pay $35 for a Snakeman, and I'll be darned if a Satana is anywhere to be found.........

Hindsight is 20/20

[dom]

Soundwave was the rare thing for me. I couldn`t find him anywhere, I even wrote to Hasbro, when I was 7

[fishandchips]

Hey dom did you get one of those generic thank you letters? I got one that had nothing to do with what I wrote in about lol

What I took for granted...let's see....probably my Popy and Takatoku robots. Oh and my Action Force Stalker (Euro Snake-Eyes v1). Traded him off for an Eels heh....

[gort]

Things I had that I'd consider to be genuinely quite rare today include a couple of Tomland Space People, a Skeleton Soldier, Megadons, a GF Demon Fighter and maybe my X-Changers.

I had a bunch of other less mainstream figures like Micronauts, Black Hole, Tron, Tomland Space Raiders, CHiPs, Power Lords, Metal Man, etc.

[ludevig]

Several of the final 17 Star Wars figures, i had all the Ewoks, Anakin Skywalker, Barada and some others and never thought anything of it until about 10 years ago when i found out those ones are harder to get hold of.

My Starcom stuff as well as my Air Raiders stuff. I had loads of the vehicles and figures and over the years they all but disappeared. Now they are hard to get complete with their visors, guns and backpacks with the pipe. (Starcom)

Biggest one of all for me is WCW Galoob Big Josh's axe handle, i used to have it but it got lost and i didn't really bother about it until now when it is one of the hardest pieces for the WCW Galoob line to find loose. Darn axe handle.

[victoryleo19]

<--This is my first post, hey everyone!

I used to have Logray from the Ewoks line and traded him for god knows what, now i havent seen him show up in an action figure lot once on ebay in the past few years . I also used to have 3 sets of the Gi Joe Dino Hunters set which eventually got thrown away by my parents....

[madmartigan37]

I had the A-wing from the droids line, It flew down the stairs a few times, cracked and broke, now I wish I still had it. I would probably have traded it or sold it along time ago though.

[3 3/4"collector]

i had the blue snaggletooth. i didnt even know where it came from, my best friend had it and i really liked my regular snaggletooth and thought the big one would be cool to have them as a team. and i had never seen another one. so i traded him something for it. this was probably about 80. and it vanished during one our moves. and i had always wondered what it was because i never seen another one and it wasnt until about the mid 90s that i learned about the big deal with it and where it came from.

[drbo]

Good tread idea BoogDoc7!

As a kid I also had the "Last 17" Star Wars figure Lumat and Paploo. They had showed for scraps at Zellers at the tail end of the Return of the Jedi craze. Still have them, only missing Lumat bow.

As a kid growing in Canada I also had a bunch of of the Alien from Star Trek, the Motion picture (which made perfect Star Wars alien): The Klingon, Megarite, Rigellian and the Zaranite, who was my favorite. Still have the Rigellian and Klingon to this day!

Finally, I had ordered a mail-away King Randor that I received on December 23th, I remember pretty well it's was like a early chritmas gift! I also had Scare Glow as a kid.
I didn't had those two anymore for whatever reason when I started collecting back, and thus I made a point of getting them last to complete my MOTU collection!

[afsupplies]

My brother had all the Star Wars figures including all the last 17 and my mum sold the lot including the falcon, at-at, snowspeeders, landspeeders, mini-rigs, jabbas throne, etc, etc for the measly sum of £50. And then she did the same with my Action Man stuff, there was some good 60s stuff in there my uncle gave us.

[shaxper]

About sixteen years ago, I threw my vintage Star Wars POTF Luke Skywalker Storm Trooper figure out of a window while my school bus was on the highway. About a year later, I found out it was worth $80. I don't really miss the figure since a better looking version was released soon after, but the money aspect still kills me.

[goofateer]

Blue Snaggletooth. I'd be willing to bet that's number 1 on a lot of lists for this subject. Who knew it was rare at the time? I sure didn't. But hey, I got $200 plus in trade for him in 1992.

The figure I had that I KNEW was rare, and was probably most directly responsible for turning me into a collector, was the G.I. Joe Listen 'n Fun Tripwire. I found him on clearance at a KB Toy Store a good year or 2 after it was released. It was the ONLY one I had ever seen or even heard of for several years.

Roger

[slm2024]

the rare stuff to me is the stuff that i vaguely remember and have a mental image of it, but don't know the name of it or anything about it enough to search for it on the net or anything....

[Captainamerica]

I had several of the Sears exclusive GI Joe sets when I was a kid. The stupid missle base barely stayed together a day, what a piece of crap. At least most of the SW sets had a plastic foundation that held the cardboard bits, the poor Cobras could only afford the cardboard.

And the GI Joe gliders were equally craptacular. Poor tan Grant lost his helmet when it cracked after a bad landing, the Viper's glider lost a fight with a tree & a gust of wind.

[mightyquinn]

12" magnetic mego batman and 1st issue mazinga, godzilla, and gaiking.

[signguy]

Oh man, where to begin...

When I was a kid I preferred the knock-off figure lines. I had damn near every Galaxy Warrior/Fighter, Muscle Warrior, Bugman, Remco figure,etc,etc.

The worst part was that my toys were always mint. I never broke them or lost anything.

Then I sold them all for $20 at a yard sale when I was ten.

Anyway, the rarest toy I ever had was either a Diaclone Soundwave, Fortress Maximus, or my James Bond Attache case from 1964.

[proteus]

mine is also my biggest regret- i had a fist fighting mego spidey- took him everywhere and when i got to be an adolescent he got mashed up

jeeze.i regret that so much.

[mightyquinn]

I still wish I had my old stretch monster

[else3573]

Probably the Seacons Transformers set.

[batmanscowl]

Mine would be Yak Face.

[cyberwolf76]

Yak face always reminds me of Joe camel....Now the toy I played with alot not knowing it was rare was the original Golion Japanese Voltron. It had everything missiles , launchers , sharp teeth the lot . If i want it again It would cost 500-1000 so I won't be buying it again soon.

[runamuckduck]

I still have my original Blue Snaggletooth from when I was a kid. It had to have come from either a yard sale or a flea market, since I was born in 1983. It couldn't have been much more than a quarter or fifty cents for my parents to get it for me.

The other figure that's become a rarity over time is my Steel Brigade soldier, which I just rescued from my parents' basement recently:

www.yojoe.com/action/87/steelbrigade_2.shtml

I had fortunate circumstances there. I always wanted to order the figure but ended up using my flag points/money for other things. By waiting until 1992 or so to order it, I ended up getting a much, much rarer later version of the figure. I am dying to find the file card I had written up when I was 8 years old!

I'm sure there are more, but those are two examples off the top of my head.

[den82]

Buzz Saw Hordak for me.

Back in the day, Buzz Saw Hordak, Sorceress, King Randor and Ninjor were rare even upon their release. What's funny was that in NY, Buzz Saw Hordak seemed impossible to find. But during a family trip to PA, he was every where. All the others I got, well my parents did, from a small mom and pop shop in Brooklyn. They had bad distribution in the big chainstores.

[potatojoe]

Hello! New guy here! This place is awesome!

I remember when the Dick Tracy movie came out and I looked and looked trying to find "The Blank"

A toy that I loved as a kid and I had no idea was rare was Scareglow. Such an awesome figure!

[funkyterrance]

I had Scareglow as well but I remember it was after I was really into He-Man and was just buying the toys as a sort of compulsion now that I had money and could afford to buy my own. I remember really wanting to like him because he had all the makings of a cool toy (glow in the dark, skeleton, etc.) but I just never really got to like him that much. His comic was a letdown as well. Tbh I don't regret losing him at some unknown point because I don't desire to get him back at all. I think that aside from being glow in the dark he was basically rubbish.

[chiefchief]

My brother had just about every Mego imaginable, can't count how many he had. He loved those things. He had a Star Trek one, half white, half black figure, can't remember the name, sold it to pay bills. I can't remember the guy but he still laments over not having that particular one anymore.

[funkyterrance]

At the risk of being repetitive, my Lords of Light collection.

[figuremod73]

I had one of those ultra rare Mego stretch Hulks around '81 or so. One day i thought it would be neat to see what was actually on the inside so i took a pin and poked it. Out comes Corn syrup. Pretty neat and I put tape to cover his "wound". Later i was told he must be thrown away because stuff was coming out of him. Havent seen another one in person ever since.
It turns out that a nice copy can sell for thousands now.

[funkyterrance]

Mar 12, 2012 16:24:34 GMT -6 figuremod73 said:

I had one of those ultra rare Mego stretch Hulks around '81 or so. One day i thought it would be neat to see what was actually on the inside so i took a pin and poked it. Out comes Corn syrup. Pretty neat and I put tape to cover his "wound". Later i was told he must be thrown away because stuff was coming out of him. Havent seen another one in person ever since.
It turns out that a nice copy can sell for thousands now.

Hehe my brother and I had a similar experiment with stretch armstrong but we wanted to see how far he could actually stretch so one of us took his arms and one of us took his legs and we walked backwards across my parents bedroom (our rooms were too small). We probably got around 6 feet apart when one of his appendages snapped off. I'll tell you it was worth it to know! Anyways I remember tasting the stuff inside (probably not the smartest move lol) and it was sweet. I didn't know what corn syrup was back then though and it was very thick more like taffy.