At what age does it turn to collecting?

[ludevig]

At what age did you stop playing with figures and turn to collecting them?
From time to time i find myself on the couch with my son watching a movie with a couple of his toys in my hands and i am subconciously playing with them. Can't help it, have done it all my life so i guess i have never stopped playing with them.
I guess for me it would have been around 98 i realised i was a collector when i started collecting WCW Toybiz figures.

[bowheadwhale]

Aug 9, 2008 10:56:10 GMT -6 @ludevig said:

At what age did you stop playing with figures and turn to collecting them?
From time to time i find myself on the couch with my son watching a movie with a couple of his toys in my hands and i am subconciously playing with them. Can't help it, have done it all my life so i guess i have never stopped playing with them.
I guess for me it would have been around 98 i realised i was a collector when i started collecting WCW Toybiz figures.

Well, in my case, the transfer from "playing" to "collecting" has happenned a lot more progressively. When I was 12, in 1989, my childhood playmate made a yard sale out of his figures and I bought his Battle Cat as a souvenir.In 1990, I bought, for one buck and just for the fun of it, a cool lizard figure that was displayed at the bottom of a box full of toys; it was only in 2007 that I discovered it was a Star Wars Dewback. In 1993, I bought four plastic horses in the flee market, for the only reason that I found them decorative (it was 13 years later that I discovered in joy that they were related to MOTU).

So, if I take the facts by themselves, let's say I started to become a "non-playing collector" at the age of 12. In the contrary to most teenagers, I wasn't much ashamed of my childhood crushes. This is why, I guess, not only I kept all my toys, but also why I continued, with more or less passion according to the years, to buy vintage toys. So, the transition was made in 1989, nine years earlier than you, Ludevig.

[spockoda]

I never really thought of toys as collectibles until I started collecting in my adult age years at age 26, in 1997. I have stated from time to time on this board that around 1985(age 14) I thought I was too old for toys and got rid of 99% of all I had. Years before, my parents had bought a set of 8 inch Mego Star Trek figures to keep in their packages and although I already had a set I was playing with, I found the packaged figures spread out on their bed one day and got so excited I made them let me open them to play with. I now wish otherwise .

[10incher]

At the end of grade 6 I was pretty much done with playing with figures, so that would have been around 1984, though I did pick up some Star Wars POTF, Secret Wars and Super Powers final series of figures through 1985 and 1986, just to go with the others I had and boxed them all away. I also bought the odd G1 Transformer that I liked up until 1987 or so. Officially started collecting around 1992 with the X-Men Toybiz line and went steady on from their.

[joshtx]

I probably stopped sometime in the early 90's or maybe 1991 or 92 or so, I was about 12 or 13. I didn't collect for a couple years, then realized I was missing it and started purchasing figures and leaving them on the cards. I remember the very first wave of Spawn figures as being some of the first figures I bought and left MOC.

[spockoda]

Actually,upon giving it more thought I always give 1997 as the year I started collecting in my adult age years,but actually I started collecting Playmates Star Trek figures about three years before that. Although,it wasn't until 1997 that I started looking at guides and finding out what my old childhood toys were going for on the collector market.

[kylefromdirtnapp]

I must've stopped playing with toys in '88, because I don't really remember any GI Joes after that year. I only started re-collecting a year or two ago. Maybe 3.....