Giant Robot Toys
Okay, so now I know more about Gundam toys.
It was actually a fairly illuminating visit for me, because up till now, the toy area of the geek-o-sphere was a place I’d never really gone to, having burned myself out on my Star Wars toys collection back between the ages of 5-12, and then more or less completely abandoned it with the introduction to the Atari 2600. Now I feel like a more well-rounded geek since before I had passing geek fluency in TV, Film & Comics, with total fluency in Gaming and Genre Literature, but my Toy-speak was incredibly weak.
I went down to a place on Orchard Road commonly known as Orchard Cineleisure. This was also the same place that Neil-O showed off Mirrormask and did his signing. The shop I went to was a little place called Rapid Culture, which was started by this guy by the name of Yanjie. He started the shop in another building, with zero marketing, catering only to toy collectors that had a thing for Transformers and some of the rarer toys available for it, but word of mouth got around and eventually he had a nice following of collectors and he expanded from just Transformers to other stuff, including Gundam toys, which he told me are his “cash cow.” Transformers are more expensive, and have a higher nostalgia value, but because Gundam has a new iteration practically every year, that’s his “mainstream product” that most people go in to buy.
I got the crash course in Gundam toys and models with all kinds of talk about non-gradeables, high grade, master grade and perfect grade, and saw some of the toys and models. It freaks me out that some of these things practically require an engineering degree to put together, calling for you to assemble the internal skeleton, and then wire it up so the lights actually work. And then you start getting into limited editions, rare editions, the endless variants from clear to special edition colored… the list goes on and on.
I think this kind of hobby is for the exceedingly rich geek. With prices on perfect grade models starting at $200 and going up from there, this is just waaaaaaay too expensive for the average toy lover…
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I think it says something about my tastes as a toy collector that the only two robot figures I own are two different versions of Marvin the Paranoid Android from the recent adaptation of “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” and one of those is a plushie. Yeah, the whole techie Transformer/Gundam/Evangeline thing really doesn’t do it for me. I like some whimsy with my toys, so they feel like–y’know–toys.