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    My Year Collecting Toys 2017
    My Year Collecting Toys 2017
    My Year Collecting Toys 2017
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    My Year Collecting Toys 2017

    By Matthew Marchon

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    About this ebook

    It's not an addiction, it's a passion. I love collecting toys. Okay, yeah, fine, maybe a little bit of an addiction. We'll let you decide.

     

    Journey with me as we take a trip back to 2017. The year my beloved WWF Hasbro figures returned to the shelves as WWE Retros. The year Mega Construx added Masters Of The Universe to their line of mini figures. The year I bought a collection of the 2011 Thundercats and found a bag of He-Man figures at a thrift store in the mountains of New Hampshire.

     

    While traveling New England for my hiking guides, I stopped at every toy store, flea market and thrift store I came across. Not to mention my parents' shed and attic, always good places for old treasures. And of course, good old eBay.

     

    The cover says it all, you know what we're hunting down. This isn't superheroes and Star Wars, I'm looking for those forgotten lines. And a few not so forgotten. We're talking Dino-Riders and Super Naturals. Wrestling and MOTU. GI Joes, Turtles, the ninja kind, not the ones you have to brake for in the road, Transformers and even, ugh, I know people hate it but I'm gonna say it anyway, Go-Bots. And Thundercats, everyone loves them. Does that make up for it?

     

    It was a good year for toy hunting, but not nearly as good as the years that fell around it. Since this book's a little short, we're going to give it away, just pretend it's one of those mini comics that came with 80's action figures. But don't let your kids read it, some of the humor may be a little inappropriate. They can enjoy the pictures though, just like I did with the actual mini comics that came with my figures when I was a kid.

     

    Let's take a look at my year collecting toys in 2017.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOrange Rock Publishing
    Release dateMay 12, 2020
    ISBN9781393973744
    My Year Collecting Toys 2017

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      Book preview

      My Year Collecting Toys 2017 - Matthew Marchon

      INTRODUCTION

      CHAPTER 1 January 6

      CHAPTER 2 January 8

      CHAPTER 3 January 27

      CHAPTER 4 February 16

      CHAPTER 5 March 2

      CHAPTER 6 March 9

      CHAPTER 7 April 9

      CHAPTER 8 April 11

      CHAPTER 9 May 24

      CHAPTER 10 June 29

      CHAPTER 11 July 23

      CHAPTER 12 July 24

      CHAPTER 13 August 17

      CHAPTER 14 September 24

      CHAPTER 15 November 15

      CHAPTER 16 December 26

      CHAPTER 17 December 27

      AVAILABLE NOW

      About The Author

      INTRODUCTION

      Some years are better than others, 2017 was one of my best. Not just in toy collecting, but in general. Yeah, I had a crappy retail job, but I made the best of it. Plus, I was bringing home a pretty decent paycheck. My wife, same, crappy retail job but a pretty good paycheck. Put them both together and we had one hell of a run from 2014 all the way through 2017. For the first time ever, in those years, money wasn’t an issue. And when money’s not an issue, it means there’s a lot of toy buying going on.

      If 2016 was the year of collecting toys, don’t worry, it’ll get its own book soon, then 2017 was the year of hiking. It was a year of growth. It was the year we finally started moving in the direction we wanted to go. And I picked up quite a few toys along the way.

      Looking back, I probably should have picked up more, but at the time we were planning on moving into a condo in the mountains of New Hampshire, which would have meant a lot less room for my collection. So I tried to ease up on the buying. I didn’t do a good job, but I should get an A for effort. Fine, okay, a C- if you wanna– oh screw you all, I did not fail. If I failed I would have bought all the toys I even thought about buying but I didn’t. And now I kind of regret it but it’s okay.

      It doesn’t take away from the fact that 2017 was a great one. We didn’t move, but it became the first year of our new lives. Our being me and my wife Jaime, not like, I don’t know, I have two personalities or something. I finally released my first book. First of many. For years we’d been writers, pitching our novels to literary agents and publishers, but no one wanted to take a chance on something that had never been done before.

      So we finally took matters into our own hands and we released my first off-trail hiking guide, focusing on the abandoned paths of Acadia National Park. And instantly started work on ones for New Hampshire as well. And then with the success of my first hiking guide, despite it being self published, and a hell of a lot of work, we decided to do the same with our novels. 2017 really did change the course of our future.

      But since I did relax ever so slightly on feeding my toy addiction, this book is a bit shorter than the others in the series. And I decided, why the hell not, let’s do this one as a free e-book. I have a diary from that year which makes going back and doing things like this much easier. Not like, a diary diary, I’m not a twelve year old girl. Well, I wasn’t then, I am now, now I keep a regular diary because man do they come in handy, but it’s more about what I did that day than what I’m feeling and what boys I think are cute. I mean, for me it’d be girls but we were going with the whole twelve year old diary thing and we’re getting all off subject here.

      Okay, let’s clear this all up. I am not a twelve year old girl. I am a 36 year old man. I keep a journal, I have for a few years now, but the one I had back in 2017 was used primarily to log all of my hikes. There were so many I started to get confused. But I also kept track of a number of the toys I purchased, which made this book possible to write, three years later. Let’s get into the toys.

      CHAPTER 1

      January 6

      How did I not know ? To be fair, if you were to ask if I’d been living under a rock, I probably could have said yes. Despite all the toys I bought the year before, I wasn’t as up on the industry as I am now, I just didn’t have time. I was out hunting for abandoned hiking trails, unknown waterfalls, forgotten mountaintops and caves as well. Hence the living under a rock joke. That probably would have been funnier had you known I was out tracking down caves.

      Point is, I was too busy exploring the mountains and writing about it to really pay attention to the world of action figures. So when they announced a new set of WWF Hasbro style retro figures set to hit Walmart at the start of 2017, I had no idea. I was quite literally living under a rock. Ha, see, made more sense there.

      January hit and I see a picture that damn near made me crap my pants, those were Hasbros! From 1990 all the way to, well, a grade I’d rather not disclose, I played with these more than I played with myself while looking at Sunny pinups in the WWF magazines. I hunted them down everywhere I went, even getting duplicates whenever they were on sale so that when mine broke, I’d have backups. I could kiss younger me for not taking them out of package, but I won’t because that’d be weird. Gonna do it anyway, mwwaaaa.

      My wife looked up from the magazine she was reading on her tablet like ‘what the hell are you hyperventilating about over there?’ Unable to speak, because of the hyperventilating, I showed her the picture and her mouth dropped. ‘Are those real? They brought back WWF Hasbros? Let’s go!’ Jaime’s awesome like that.

      Probably put on my pants backwards in all the excitement, but hey, at least I put on pants. I don’t typically walk around in the nude, especially in January, I was just in my pajamas because it was in the 8:00 hour. Yes, on days off I was in my jammies by 8:00, I have no social life. Don’t need one, I have toys.

      Still a half hour or so before they closed, I ran into Goodwill on my way by. Never really found much there, at least back then, but I’d always check anyway. This was back when toys were on the far wall near the doors that lead to the loading bay. Never any rhyme or reason to the chaos, just toys strewn everywhere, usually with some inbred Bangor babies slamming them around because their parents ‘ain’t buyin’ no damn illegal alien Dora The Explorin’ doll, or that

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