This post will be ridiculous and requires a lot of back story, but I haven't written in awhile, so here you go.When I was a kid I played with dolls. Not Barbies mind you, I had MEGO Batman dolls, which were a little bit smaller than Barbies. I was a big fan of Batman because of the 1960s TV show that was rerun every day after school. I had Batman and Robin, and at various times I also had the Riddler, Joker, and the Penguin. I say various times because I got the dolls as presents more than once; they got lost or stolen, and I distinctly remember the Penguin losing all his limbs in the bathtub (they were held in place with some sort of string that was not water-resistant). As I got older I lost interest in the dolls, which I didn't know were called action figures until much later.
I'm not sure when the transition from dolls to small plastic action figures occurred; for me, the Star Wars figures were the first of the small ones. Before that, the aforementioned MEGO dolls and GI Joe dolls were what I knew (in addition to the KISS dolls, which I wanted but never got). Maybe I lost interest when they were made smaller.
Fast-forward to 1991, after my dad closed his bakery and I had to get a real job by myself for the first time. I ended up at Kay Bee Toys in the mall, after having failed to get a job at Suncoast Video, which is where I really wanted to work. I was Christmas help at Kay Bee, but I did a good job and made it past the holidays. The Batman movie had come out 2 years prior, which greatly rekindled my interest in Batman. When I started at Kay Bee, they were blowing out the Batman action figures related to that movie (they were actually from a DC assortment with the movie logo on them). I bought those figures and hung them up on my wall at home. Then I bought the rest of the DC line, and then Batman Forever came out, with its exclusive figure line (from Kenner). I bought all of those figures too. After that I started buying figures willy-nilly. We would get closeout figures like Beetlejuice, and I would also but figures from comic books I liked, like Spawn and X-Men.I think the strangest collection I had was a set of 8 April O'Neill figures from various Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lines. I never read the comic book or saw the cartoon series. I saw the first two movies in the theaters and enjoyed them. But I'm not sure why I bought the April O'Neill figures. I hung them on the wall with the other figures and that was pretty much all I did with them.
Fast forward again to 1998, when we moved to DE. All of the action figures were boxed up for over a year, because we lived in an apartment and didn't want to unpack too much, because we planned on buying a house. When we did get a house in 1999, the action figures stayed boxed up until 2001, when I decided to sell them on eBay. They were just sitting there and I didn't miss them, so what was the point? The action figure market had bottomed out by that point, so I didn't even get a good return on them, but I was happy to let them go. Or so I thought...
The only figures that I regretted selling were those April O'Neills, for some bizarre reason. Sarah says that I brought this fact up quite often. Fast forward again to last weekend. We both got flea market fever in a big way, so we decided to go to a monthly rummage sale a few towns over after I got out of work. The first table we arrived at had 4 April O'Neill figures on it. No other action figures, just her. It was the first time I had seen any in person since I sold mine. My first impulse was of course to buy all four of them. Then the wishy washy impulse kicked in, which asked why I would want these again, since I previously sold mine and had stayed away from action figures for the past 9 years? But Sarah, ever the voice of reason, said that if I didn't buy them, I would regret selling them AND not buying them. They turned out to be a dollar each, so I did buy them. Now I just have to figure out where to hang them up...
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