What drives me nuts nowadays are the collecting latecomers.

Modern stuff is *not* going to be worth $500 a pop loose.

Definitely not, I don’t expect any modern “collectibles” to be worth anything

VHS tape collecting is crazy too, they aren’t worth anything but people will pay a fortune for them. We sold all of our cheap a while ago

I customize figures and vehicles as a hobby. Loose toys and parts are my jam. Nowadays, people at yard sales want five bucks for a legless Stormtrooper because "It's *collectible*!".

Damn that’s cool, I’ve been interested in the customizing thing for awhile, but decided to just stick to collecting

I’m not an avid collector either, only if I see something REALLY cool I buy it

Same here. I don't actively collect anything.

Back in the day, I had Star Wars, my friend had Joes. He kept breaking them and losing parts.

I'd fix them for him, he'd give me the extra bits. Eventually I started slapping together my own.

Then painting, then carving, then...LOL

I have a Zartan somewhere, his rubber band snapped

So now he’s in two pieces

Easy fix. Hardware store, buy package of small O-rings. Tiny Philips screwdriver, replace.

Cool, I try that out

Zartan's gimmick was criminally underused in toys.

Besides him and his siblings, and much later a couple of Dreadnok vehicles, I don't know of any other toys that really used it.

Thermal changing plastic, yes, but UV is really ignored.

I feel like his ability was a bit to hard to portray with toys, at the time

But yeah they could have done better

They never went back to it.

Modern Zartans don't feature it at all. They just come with clip-on masks.

I had a Batman like that as a kid

It was a Bruce Wayne figure that change into Batman

Yep!

He just had a clip on suit

Clip on gloves and boots, cowl (with cape attached) slid over his head

Yeah, I had that one as parts once.

I had a Spider-Man that could “crawl all by himself!” The gimmick was achieved by making his hands and feet out of a sticky rubber

You were supposed to throw him at the wall then watch him “crawl down”

Oh, *those*. Yeah, wall crawlers were big for about a year.

Those, and the sticky hands things.

Slime! Slime was huge in the 80s then came back in the 2000s

Oh yeah! I never understood the appeal, though.

I have containers that once had slime in them, now it’s more like Kryptonite

LOL

I took a slime-oozing Jabba out of the package recently, the slime was like a chunk of green flesh.

Not hard, but definitely not oozy.

Ew

Slime was fun to play with, but once it got boring it was a pain to clean up

I'm still in the middle of my first full move in thirty years. It's taking forever, and I'm finding all sorts of stuff.