What do you get when you combine two crazy robot guys with 144 old Toyfair catalog auctions all ending within a 73 minute period on a late Monday night? You get the 43rd episode of the Roboplastic Podcastalypse! Join the Nostrodomatron and Colin of fairplaythings.com (aka the Dave Mustaine of Toyfair catalog collecting) as they battle it out against other bidders to get a piece of what was one of the greatest vintage toy catalog auctions in the history of eBay. From Bandai to Hasbro to Ideal to Kenner to Matchbox, Mattel, Takara, Tomy, Tonka and every great toy company who ever cast a plastic robot in between, this one's got it all (and we even talk a little about Coleco). What rare unreleased action figure prototypes lay within the pages of these books? Which auctions did we win, lose, and/or forget to click "place bid" on? Will the late night and the great pictures of toy robots bring out the evil scummy slimy auction sniper in all of us? Find out in this "TOY CATALOG AUCTION SNIPING IS MY BUSINESS AND BUSINESS AIN'T THAT GREAT" edition of the podcastalypse!
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IT IS BETTER TO BID HIGH AND LOSE THAN TO KNOW IT SOLD CHEAP
For posterity's sake I wanted to highlight a couple of the catalogs that I consider some of the gems of the collection up for sale that night. During the show Colin and I bid or remark upon all of these and what they contain. Since Toyfair catalog prices on the secondary market are extremely volatile, these ending totals are not necessarily indicative of what these books would sell for or have sold for on other nights. But it was cool to watch some of them go so low while others went outrageously high, especially considering that many of them have several scans of their pages available online.
 BANDAI 1984NOTABLE LINES: Godaikin. This was the line that had GoLion in 1984, which was a year before official Voltron toys launched. ENDED AT: $140.00 |  BUDDY-L 1985-86NOTABLE LINES: ChargerTron, RoboTron, BugTron If it ended in -tron, Buddy-L had you covered. ENDED AT: $16.50 |
 COLECO SECTAURS 1985NOTABLE LINES: Sectaurs It really bugged me to see this go! This is a really special promo we'll never see again. ENDED AT: $66.00 |  GALOOB 1984NOTABLE LINES: Blackstar, A-Team, The Last Starfighter Some super rare stuff here like the Ice Castle. ENDED AT: $69.76 |
 GALOOB 1985NOTABLE LINES: Bron Bron Robot was a B-list contender in the toy robots wars of the 1980s. ENDED AT: $50.00 |  HASBRO SPRING 1990NOTABLE LINES: Transformers This pre-Toyfair catalog has early working names for many Action Masters. ENDED AT: $77.00 |
 IDEAL 1984NOTABLE LINES: Robo Force The first year of Robo Force! ENDED AT: $77.00 |  IDEAL 1985NOTABLE LINES: Robo Force The infamous second year of Robo Force featuring unreleased Robo Forcers. ENDED AT: $55.80 |
 LAKESIDE 1985NOTABLE LINES: Immortals of Change IoC was Crossbows and Catapults with robots and we loved it. ENDED AT: $13.30 |  LJN 1984NOTABLE LINES: Dungeons & Dragons, Dune, Indiana Jones This was one of the highest ending catalog auctions. ENDED AT: $164.50 |
 LJN 1985NOTABLE LINES: Voltron, GoBots Street Force, Switch Bots, V LJN kicks off their Voltron line and tries other robots that weren't as popular ENDED AT: $83.76 |  MATCHBOX 1985NOTABLE LINES: Parasites, Voltron Matchbox kicks off their legendary Voltron and Robotech lines. ENDED AT: $56.99 |
 MATCHBOX 1986NOTABLE LINES: Cargantua, Robotech, Voltron Matchbox Voltrons would get recalled this year. ENDED AT: $100.00 |  MATCHBOX 1987NOTABLE LINES: Robotech Robotech tail enders all over this book. ENDED AT: $89.99 |
 PANOSH PLACE 1986NOTABLE LINES: Voltron Unproduced Voltron figures galore in this one. ENDED AT: $181.49 |  REVELL 1985 MODEL KITSNOTABLE ROBOT LINES: Transformers, Robotech Featuring unreleased Transformer model kit prototypes ENDED AT: $37.78 |
 TAKARA USA 1984NOTABLE LINES: Dougram, Robot Time Machine, Robotroid Lots of ancillary Takara promotional paperwork in this lot. ENDED AT: $145.00 |  TOMY USA 1983NOTABLE LINES: Zoids, Space Pets, Tron If you wound it, pumped it or zipped it, Tomy probably made it. ENDED AT: $57.00 |
 TOMY USA 1984NOTABLE LINES: Popoids, Starriors, Zoids First year of Starriors. Giant Zrk shown. ENDED AT: $44.00 |  TOMY USA 1985NOTABLE LINES: Starriors, Robo Strux, Tribots, Pocket Bots The golden age of Tomy robots. ENDED AT: $64.00 |
 TOMY USA 1986NOTABLE LINES: Robo Strux, Tomics The end of the road for Tomy robot lines. ENDED AT: $86.00 |  TONKA 1984NOTABLE ROBOT LINES: GoBots The only source of many GoBots profiles and nobody bid on it! NO BIDS TO START AT: $49.00 |
Some of the unreleased Revell Transformer model kit prototype photos
SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE
- From Toyfairs of long ago comes a legendary catalog auction…
- Special guest Colin of Fairplaythings.com!
- Speculation on the mysterious original owner of these books
- Highlights of Colin's catalog collection
- The enigma of Bron robot and other Galoob toys
- Auctions that never end would make a lot of money
- The dangers of bidding vicariously through Steve
- Sniping only works when you remember to pull the trigger
- A brief history of LJN
- Colin's mantra-If things were different they wouldn't be the same
- Ebay: preserving friendship by scrambling user ids
- Previous selling prices of the Hasbro pre-toyfair 1990 catalog
- One man's feeling like a loser is another man's having fun
- Awesome Voltronian history in the Panosh Place 1986 catalog
- Being a proprietary douchebag
- Aiming the Voltron cannon
- Coffin of Deception feature in an upcoming Podcastalypse
- Colin getting a $25 Panosh Place Voltron at Botcon
- Revell 1985 model kit catalog with unreleased Transformers model kits
- Takara 1984 goes for $145.00 (Someone really loves Robotroid)
- Remembering the long dead Immortals of Change
- Recap of the auctions we won / damage we did
- Why pay $60 for something yesterday when you can pay $181.49 for it today
- Only feeling like half an idiot
- First world toy catalog collecting problems
- Hasbro Spring 1990 catalog's Action Master peculiarities
- Colin's '88 Hasbro catalog takes one for the team
- Some obscure 80s toy robot line called Transformers
- Catalog collecting from a RoboPlastilogical standpoint
- Cops and Visionaries were the original GI Joe Extreme
- Colin's Shattered Glass Jetfire idea
- The only thing worse than buyer's remorse is the remorse of the buyer's significant other
- Colin is the Dave Mustaine of Toyfair catalog collecting
Unreleased Panosh Place Voltron
8 comments:
Dude, what I wouldn't give to have some of those old catalogs. Pretty cool.
I hope we didn't over-glamorize them and make it seem like every page of every book was full of incredible wonders and unreleased awesomeness. A lot of the time they're mostly filled with a lot of stuff I don't really care about save for a few pages. You have to be a renaissance man of old toylines to truly appreciate them.
I don't really have the toy knowledge to justify spending hundreds of dollars on these old books because I'm only in it for a few pages. In my case oftentimes it amounts to spending 30 or 40 bucks for three or four pages of book. It's hard to justify. But once in a while there is that picture of an unreleased robot or color scheme or whatever that makes it all worth it.
I discovered your podcast while looking for Rom stuff. Great show! Do you have a dedicated RSS feed for the podcast that I can plug into iTunes? Thnkas in advance!
Thanks for the compliment! Honestly I haven't written the RSS feed or put the show on iTunes because I feel like that's something "real" podcasts do and I'm just one dorky guy who's nowhere near professional. I know it's probably not the right attitude. I'm just really embarrassed about putting it out there in a fashion that would attract attention from people used to polished presentation and a certain level of consistency, neither of which I have.
Dude! Please get this up on iTunes. I found this by accident. Polish and panache can be annoying at times. Content is all I'm concerned with and your enthusiasm is enough for me. Stop fronting and get this out you'll find a nice size audience for this I'm sure.
Thanks! Again, I'm not very consistent with output and I don't care to deal with jumping through all the hoops iTunes demands of podcasters. They're the great Satan to me at this point. I've listened to other podcast friends of mine and read listener comments and iTunes just isn't worth all the trouble.
I consider not having a very large audience a blessing. I don't feel pressured to put out episodes or worry about getting positive reviews or stress out over iTunes' problems with mp3 distribution and propagation, which is something listeners tend to complain about. So it's fun for me and I'm happy with the audience I have. I do admit I need to get an RSS feed going. That has been a victim of my laziness.
I'm seeing plenty of catalogs that I'm not seeing the one that I have and it's really agitating can somebody please let me know why in the world I cannot find the catalog I have it's a 1986 where the stars are is filled with the Cabbage Patch dolls the furskins Rambo family action games and sectaurs
I presume you're talking about Coleco '86 an it may have been among the lot sold that night. But since that one had no significant toy robot content that I was aware of, it didn't get included in my recap of catalogs I considered noteworthy.
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