Thoughts From a Foreign Toy Collector

The trouble with living on an island continent is that anything not manufactured here gets shipped over via air and sea, and that costs money.  It’s pretty much a captive market too, so vendors often charge higher for little luxuries like electronics, tech, and toys.

In Australia, mass-market action figures often retail for double what they cost in the US.  Our stores tend to stock up on movie-based toys, and lines like G.I. Joe (apart from the Rise of Cobra line in 2009) get short shrift.  No collector wants to pay AU$16-20 for a single figure that may or may not have crappy articulation, and parents are rarely willing to spend that much on a toy they think their child will quickly tire of.  As a result, pegs are crammed with extremely overpriced Star Wars, Spiderman, Iron Man, or Avengers movie figures that end up selling poorly (on the other hand, Nerf guns are big sellers, possibly due to our draconian gun laws, but I digress).

Because of weak sales (particularly with the Rise of Cobra toys), stores have grown a lot more cautious, as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of G.I. Joe Retaliation product on Aussie shelves.

What’s a 1/18-military-themed-toy collector to do?

Apart from Toys R Us and their True Heroes/Chap Mei lines, as well as local chains with a very limited Power Team Elite range, and (shudder) The Corps, most of us have little choice but to turn to online sellers to feed our addiction, but with often higher prices as well as international postage, this hobby can get quite expensive rather quickly, leading many collectors to either quit or shift their focus onto something else more readily available.

Many of us do soldier on despite the blow to the hip pocket, but after seeing zero commitment to G.I. Joe from local brick-and-mortar stores I fear the worst for us foreign Joe fans.  Zero product on shelves means disgruntled collectors and a wasted opportunity to attract new fans.

This lack of local awareness of G.I. Joe was quite evident at the recently concluded Supanova Pop Culture Expo (the Aussie Comic-Con on a smaller scale). A thorough exploration of the 88 vendor booths yielded ONE seller with 6 carded ROC figures at $20 each. Of all the cosplayers in attendance, there were ZERO G.I. Joe characters. TV, movie and video game characters were the order of the day.

Sadly this seems to be a sign of the times, with visual and electronic entertainment taking greater precedence over plastic playthings.

Time to wax nostalgic over the “good old days.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not of the Fighting 1:18th.