Collecting « Robot Claw

Archive for the ‘Collecting’ Category

Autographs: Authors

Monday, November 20th, 2023

When I was a child I had an autograph book. I believe I may have had a single autograph in it, and it was a football player I had no interest in but got the autograph of when he made an appearance at a mall. I remember I used to glue photos of famous people in the book and keep the opposite page empty for the autographs I would (of course) never obtain. I was an optimistic stripling!

Autograph collecting dates to a time before photos and the autographs were proof you met someone. Of course these days they’re more often purchased and signers can make a lot of money providing them. But even an impersonal autograph purchased from a shop is still a bit of a special item when it’s of someone you are a fan of, and I don’t judge anyone for wanting or buying them.

Recently I started thinking about all the autographed items we own now, and one thing led to another and then ultimately – as it often does – to this blog! This week therefore I’ll be showcasing most of the autographs Kristin and I have obtained over the years, in five different categories. We’ll start today with authors!

The above I’ve shown here before. I’m a big fan and collector of Fighting Fantasy books, and I treasure this pair of autographs of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the two guys that created the series. These were sent to me by an Australian company in response to me tweeting out photos of my collection!

In a similar vein, I have Joe Dever’s autograph. He was the author of the Lone Wolf gamebook series, and some years ago special (expensive!) autographed editions of some of the books were released. To my great surprise Bernard sent me two of them, which means I have his autograph twice. Joe Dever passed away a few years ago, so this is a somewhat special mark to own.

Keeping in the RPG sphere, a decade or so ago I purchased a used copy of this Forgotten Realms AD&D box set and when it arrived I was astonished to see that it had been autographed. The two shown are Jeff Grubb and Ed Greenwood (who also wrote ‘Good gaming’), and it was also autographed by the editor. These may not be names you recognize, but each contributed enormously to Dungeons & Dragons and are well known to fans from that era.

Lastly I have Kim Newman’s autograph. He’s one of my favourite authors, and even though I already owned four imprints of Anno Dracula I naturally had to buy this fifth one when I saw it was autographed. I’d love to meet him in person and get a book autographed, but this is the next best thing!

I know I have at least one more hiding somewhere in this house, that being the author Tanith Lee who sent me a signed letter response to a letter I wrote her in my teens. Try as I could though I was unable to find it.

These are just the tip of the autograph iceberg. There’s many more to see this week, so stay tuned 🙂

Posted in Blog, Books, Celebrity, Collecting, Gamebooks | Comments Closed

Stardisc Trek

Sunday, August 27th, 2023

A few weeks ago I purchased this in an antique store:

A sealed box of Star Trek: TNG ‘Stardisc coins’! Released in 1994, this was a product I don’t remember but likely would have ignored at the time since ‘stardisc coin’ is just another synonym for ‘Pog’. Yes, this is a box of Star Trek Pogs!

The box contained 36 packs, each of which has six Pogs. I paid $21.75 for the box, or $0.10 per Pog. Would you have bought it?

The packs promise much: “A must for the true Trekker”! Note also the spelling of ‘colour’ and the tease of rare gold versions. I tore open the first pack with some dread…

Each pack contains three cards, each of which has two Pogs. Immediately this seems to be a second-rate product, since you need to punch the Pogs out yourself. This is tedious, and even after opening only two packs I hardly wanted to start.

Each pack also includes a checklist and instructions on how to play a ‘game’ with the discs. These are of course laughable, and I very much doubt the writer ever believed anyone would play it.

The checklist is important since the Pogs themselves don’t have any name on the back, which is unusual since they are uniquely printed (with a number) so they could have easily added the name. Also it’s worth mentioning that the quality control wasn’t great, and more than a few of the ones in my packs were damaged:

The back of the wrapper includes this laughable statement:

At a 1/72 rate, I had a 50% chance of opening the gold Pogs, so I was surprised that I got them in only my third pack! Here they are:

At this point you’re noticing that each card contains two Pogs, which means that for the set of 60 there’s only actually 30 unique cards (since the same two are always on the same card). So in the box of 36 packs, there are 108 cards which could – in theory – net more than three full sets. These statistics seem to hold up, since I was able to complete the set in half the packs, and I completed a good quality (no damaged Pogs) set in about 2/3rds of the packs:

This is a terrible product. The print quality is high, but who wanted these? No one ever played the game with them, and ‘collectors’ would have just put them in a box and forgotten about them immediately. They’re just a ‘thing’ that has no use or even purpose, manufactured and sold simply to profit from that bizarre Pog craze of 30 years ago.

I’ve got a few unopened packs left. If you want one let me know. Even if you don’t, maybe I’ll send you one anyway 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Miscellaneous, Trading Cards | 4 Comments »

Can Collection Update

Monday, July 31st, 2023

I’ve posted about my can ‘collection’ twice before, which you can read here and here. It’s been five years since the last one so here’s an update.

Let’s start with dinosaur cans from the last Jurassic Park film. Once again these were available in various flavours of Dr Pepper and as you can see I only found five (of seven). Interestingly I recently learned that a similar promotion occurred in Australia! I wonder did any of my Ozlandian friends get any cans?

Here we have a selection of game-related cans. The Coke one I got in Japan, and the other two (both energy drinks that I didn’t drink) were bought in the USA. The Sonic can is pretty cool isn’t it?

These four One Piece themed cans – all for various coffee drinks – were all bought in Japan. Licensed cans for this series are common and you could probably fill shelves with them if you were a fan. I’m not, but I can’t resist a licensed can and KLS drinks the coffee 🙂

Some more anime-themed cans, both picked up on recent Japan trips. The Coke was sickly sweet and ended up being poured down a drain!

Even more anime-themed cans, this time for Uma Musume (‘Horse Girls’). The big ones are energy drink and came out of a machine in a Game Center, and the smaller one is coffee I bought in Akihabara.

Three Ultraman themed items. The two cans were bought in an Asian grocer in NYC, and I don’t recall where I got the Ultraman shaped bottle, which I’ve had for almost a decade. In Japan I saw an Ultraman can from many years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was another series with a rich history of licensed cans.

This coffee can featuring Jin from BTS was going to go to Bernard, but I’ve inexplicably kept it. I probably should just throw it away…

Likewise this Black Adam energy drink can, which I believe is the only licensed item in our home featuring Dwayne Johnson. I like this one, since the film was a flop and I haven’t seen any other merchandise.

Lastly we have these six Mountain Dew cans featuring art from various themes. They’re all from 2007/2008, and during this time Dew had several different promotions where aluminum bottles were made featuring designs by various artists. There seems to have been a lot of these (dozens) and some of mine are from the ‘green label’, ‘stars and stripes’ and ‘nascar’ (!) series. According to what I read retail distribution of these was very poor so perhaps it’s surprising I found this many.

As I was taking these photos and writing this post my intention was to recycle most of these cans, but in the end I… didn’t. They went into a box and into the attic, there to remain forever.

Posted in Art, Collecting, Food | Comments Closed

The Ironlords

Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

When I sold my Star Wars figures, I also traded in a small amount of other items for store credit. With the credit, I took these:

It’s a set of five die cast metal figures. Each is about two inches tall, fairly thin of sculpt and with lots of obvious flash. They also have bases, and even though I haven’t opened them, seem to be able to stand well on their own.

Here we have Ghan and Astare, two wild barbarians from some forgotten world, obviously fighting for the same cause as evidenced by their identical shields. Their compatriots have similarly evocative names: Vlad, Dakk and Femaré. How do I know this? It’s on the back:

Holy moly, there’s two other series as well? Reptilians and Demons?!? Fear not good reader, because I got them as well:

These are just lovely, either cast in or painted green and gold metal respectively. The Reptilians seem to be humans wearing lizard-themed armor, but the Demons are legitimate monsters.

That’s Slithus and Gark ready to fight. If only someone would burst them from their packaging.

Released in 1983 by a die cast toy company called Midgetoy (which seems to have folded the year prior), I can’t find anything about these online. But as soon as I saw them on the shelf at the shop they just called to me. As an 11-year old, I would have gone absolutely bonkers for these, and would have waged many fights between the reptiles and barbarians and demons, using a rules system of my own creation. I would have loved these unequivocally, and they would have been my treasures.

And now – 40 years later – they are 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Models, Retro | Comments Closed

Star Wars Friday: What I Kept

Friday, July 21st, 2023

I sold 94% of my Star Wars figure collection, but I kept every R2-D2 figure, as well as similar droids. The R2 figures have always been my favorites, and it warms my heart to have kept a little bit of my collection. Today I’ll show off a few of the R2 (and similar) figures I kept.

The above shows the first three (‘modern’) R2 figures sold, starting in 1995 and to (on the right) 1997. R2 was in the very first wave, which makes my red carded figure 28 years old! R2 was my favorite from the very start, since he was metalized (which is no longer common) and proportionally correct unlike the human figures. All of my figures are in great condition as well, as you can probably see.

The above show three packaging variants between 1998 and 2000. Episode 1 figures were overstocked everywhere, and Hasbro changed the packaging to differentiate the newer releases (note that they kept a small Obi Wan on the card). There were several R2’s released during these years (as well as other, similar, droids) and I have them all.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I stopped seriously collecting around the release of Attack Of The Clones, and from around then (2002) there are gaps in my R2 collection. The middle figure in the photo above is the packaging that was introduced with Episode 2, and the year later saw the irritating ‘Saga’ curved packaging which is very difficult to store! While there was an R2 released in that range, I don’t own it.

More years go by, as we transition past Episode III into the Clone Wars era. I didn’t own a single Episode III figure, including R2, which is a shame since it had a unique type of packaging. As you can see above, they changed it almost every year to try and re-energize the line.

The interesting Darth Maul design was around the time of the 3D rerelease of Episode 1 (remember that?) and I think works well, but shortly thereafter Hasbro switched to smaller figures which were beloved by collectors like me. By this time, I usually had only a single figure in each type of packaging, and often it was only an R2 unit since that’s all I bought 🙂

There was no R2 released in the small Rebels line, and since the figures were poorly distributed in the USA I bought mine in Germany! The black packaging in the middle is my favorite ever packaging, but it was short-lived since the sequels came out and Hasbro developed new, white packaging.

Bringing us to the present time we have the very successful (almost 400 figures as of today) ‘vintage’ line, such as the above left figure. And the above right – bought in Australia – is a remake of an old figure from the 1980s. I’ve shown about 20 different types of packaging here, and as best I can tell there’s been about 25 since 1995.

All told I have kept 38 figures, about 25 of which are R2 and the others similar droids like those shown above. As best I can tell I’m ‘missing’ about 20 others, but I’m in no hurry to buy them. But if I ever spy an R2 in a shop that I don’t own, and if the price is right, then I’m sure I’ll buy it.

In addition I have these two, both made by me at the ‘Droid Factory’ at Disney in Florida many years ago. Since they’re unique, surely they are the prizes of my collection?

But what about these? Technically neither are Hasbro-made R2 figures so perhaps they don’t count, but I love both for various reasons. The one on the right is a small (about 1 inch tall) metal figure made by a Japanese manufacturer that I bought about five years ago, and the one on the left is a bootleg I won in a ticket arcade in Margate (England) about a decade ago as well. It’s shoddily made and the head only turns one way but I love it not the least because it reminds me of that wonderful day we spent in Margate 🙂

And so ends a week showcasing parts of my Star Wars collection, such that it is. As I’ve hinted there’s more weird stuff, and I know of one or two items in the attic that would probably raise your eyebrows. Maybe I’ll show them off in another ten years…

Posted in Collecting, Miscellaneous, Retro, Toys | Comments Closed

Robot Claw