This hobby consumes me. I can't seem to keep it out of even the most adult, polite conversation. It's my thing. It'll be my thing for as long as I live. Yours too perhaps. You are, after all, reading a blog about toys. So what is the layperson question I get more often than most?
Well.
It's the title of this article, so don't make me repeat it. Any second-year student will tell you it's pretty amateurish to repeat the article's title, word for word. So there.
If you get this question as often as I do, it sets your mind aflight on a number of tangents. How do you quantify a toy collection? Each individual figure no doubt includes accessories. Some of those accessories can be the size of, if not bigger than, other figures. Do vehicles including a figure or figures and accessories count as one, or do you break the set down into smaller components that can each answer to the catchall word 'toy'? It soon becomes a mind-bogglingly complex task and a definite conversation killer you wished you hadn't embarked on, as the glazed over look in the girl you are trying so hard to impress becomes more apparent.
Doesn't stop it from being a fascinating question for the self-respecting toy geek, tho.
To answer it satisfyingly, you have to limit its scope a little. Set some criteria. define the ambit.
I have my answer, I got it by limiting my census to the scale world I overwhelmingly collect. That being the 3 to 4 inch, 1:18 scale a la GI Joe, Star Wars, and now Marvel Universe, to name but a few. That is not to say I don't have other scaled toys. I do. Everything from Micromachine people to 12-inch Gundam suits. But for now, I'm satisfied to know how many 1:18 people inhabit my home. Thus...
Well.
It's the title of this article, so don't make me repeat it. Any second-year student will tell you it's pretty amateurish to repeat the article's title, word for word. So there.
If you get this question as often as I do, it sets your mind aflight on a number of tangents. How do you quantify a toy collection? Each individual figure no doubt includes accessories. Some of those accessories can be the size of, if not bigger than, other figures. Do vehicles including a figure or figures and accessories count as one, or do you break the set down into smaller components that can each answer to the catchall word 'toy'? It soon becomes a mind-bogglingly complex task and a definite conversation killer you wished you hadn't embarked on, as the glazed over look in the girl you are trying so hard to impress becomes more apparent.
Doesn't stop it from being a fascinating question for the self-respecting toy geek, tho.
To answer it satisfyingly, you have to limit its scope a little. Set some criteria. define the ambit.
I have my answer, I got it by limiting my census to the scale world I overwhelmingly collect. That being the 3 to 4 inch, 1:18 scale a la GI Joe, Star Wars, and now Marvel Universe, to name but a few. That is not to say I don't have other scaled toys. I do. Everything from Micromachine people to 12-inch Gundam suits. But for now, I'm satisfied to know how many 1:18 people inhabit my home. Thus...
So how many toys do I own? Well, as of the making of this video, 703 souls inhabited my home. A further ten turned up a day later, they had been hiding in various places I'd missed. As of the writing of this article, a further 85 have entered my life so I am two figures short of 800. It took me about 10 hours of labour finding, sorting, setting them out and then packing them back. It was sometimes fun, most times back breaking, and left my room in a complete shambles with vehicles strewn about the floor, stripped of their drivers. I should have taken a picture of that. Did you notice how they've been ordered according to date stamp from old to new? Of course you don't, because that is on skuzzy clip. That was a royal pain in the ass to do. But it is done and I have my answer. Totally sleep better at night now.
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