How Many Toys Is Too Many?

I am not shy about the fact that I own something like 3700 toys. That works out to be, on average, one new toy every 2.96 days for the past 30 years. It is entirely possible that there's something very wrong with me and that I'm suffering from some kind of undiagnosed clinical illness. If that's the case, though, then there are untold hundreds of thousands of people suffering from the same sickness, so at least I know that when they wrap me in a straight jacket and send me to the loony bin, it's very likely there will be people there that I know.

I have occasionally stopped to ask myself whether I really need to own these things. After all, probably only ten percent of it is readily accessible to me (the rest is in boxes stacked on top of each other in the storage room; digging for a specific box to locate a specific toy can be a decidedly unpleasant task) and I have so many of them in my possession that it's really impossible to give them all the quality time they deserve (more often than not, after I take them out of the package, they sit at the computer desk for me to admire for a few days and then they go in a box with similar toys from the same toy line). In the end, I've always reached the conclusion that I'm not hurting anybody, that what I do with my disposable income is my business, and it's ultimately a better investment than frittering away my earnings on booze or drugs (toys can be resold, sometimes yielding a much greater return than what I paid for them).

I am no longer a completist. There was a time that I bought one of every different Transformers toy in stores, one of each Star Wars action figure, etc. and I felt my collection was woefully incomplete whenever there was one that I hadn't yet bought or managed to miss out on. The problem with this approach, besides being financially draining, is that toy companies often reinvent their licenses to keep them fresh and exciting, which means that if they created a universe or characters that I disliked, I was "stuck" buying toys that I hated. I was allowing my collecting to be dictated by the whims of the toy companies—they might decide to cancel a given toy line tomorrow, or they might keep it running for ten years. You'd think this would be an obvious and foregone conclusion, but it took me a long time to figure out that I should only be buying toys that I actually liked and wanted to own.

I'm much more selective now. One of the benefits of being very picky about what I buy is that I can concentrate my disposable income on more expensive collectibles that I really enjoy tremendously. (They say that when you're an addict, you need a bigger and bigger stimulus to get the same rush. Well, when gobbling up ten-dollar toys no longer does it for you, try buying hundred-dollar toys instead!) I used to say that I could never afford expensive Japanese collectibles, and I was right, inasmuch as I couldn't possibly do so while sustaining my completist habits. So, not only have I freed myself from making purchases just for the sake of owning a complete set, but I'm enjoying each individual purchase much more than I used to.

So, here's the problem I'm having right now. (Clearly, if the biggest problem in my life is that I'm fretting over my plastic toy collection, my life as a whole must be pretty good.) There are a finite number of characters in a given fictional continuity. Once I buy, say, a Star Wars action figure of Myo or Dice Ibegon or Hem Dazon, it's arguable I'll never need to buy another one (and they're such obscure characters that it's likely Hasbro will never address them again, but that's not really the issue here). It's a little different with, say, Trade Federation battle droids or Imperial stormtroopers. They call toys like these "armybuilders" because you can potentially collect dozens of them and build you own little miniature army of identical soldiers. There really is no limit to the number of plastic stormtroopers I would need to own to possess a "complete" set, though. There is arguably no canonical number of how many stormtroopers were in service to the Galactic Empire, but even if there was some large, hypothetical number (like, say, 1138) that would still be considered essentially unattainable. I really do have way too many stormtroopers. I don't quite know what the exact count is, and I don't even consider some of the earlier toys to be part of the army proper, since the older Kenner sculpts (like the one from the Power of the Force 2 toy line, or even the slightly better CommTech edition) don't compare to the accuracy of the more contemporary version (from the Vintage Original Trilogy Collection). I do know I probably have enough to clear off some space on my bookshelf and do a diorama featuring an entire battalion of stormtroopers. It would not be an unimpressive display.

As an aside, I quite enjoyed the Smurfs toy line released by Jakks Pacific several years ago. I was very fond of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon as a youngster, and the toys were readily accessible, affordable, and made it easy to amass a large number of Smurfs toys. There were one hundred Smurfs living in the Smurf village (plus a handful of "lost" Smurfs who showed up later), but only a fraction of them were ever identified by name on the show. Most of the toys were sculpted to represent specific characters (Brainy, Jokey, Handy, etc.) but occasionally a toy in the assortment was called simply "Smurf," effectively allowing it to represent any of the nameless, faceless background fillers who were never identified by name in the cartoon show. The toys were usually sold at retail in a two-pack, but by a stroke of luck, Target stores were, for a while, selling single-pack baggies of Smurf figures in their dollar section, and the unnamed "Smurf" figure was among them. I could theoretically have bought enough of them to have one hundred Smurfs! I managed to buy a handful of them before they were no longer being sold, but I've always regretted that my collection of Smurfs is, and will likely remain, forever incomplete.

It seems that every toy line has its armybuilders. Besides the aforementioned stormtroopers, Star Wars also has snowtroopers and biker scouts (I grew up in the 1980's; I refuse to use the term "scout troopers") and battle droids and destroyer droids (or droidekas, if you prefer silly nonsense names). Ninja Turtles has its Foot Soldiers. Even the original Transformers toy line had generic troops in the form of the Sweeps (who were all identical to Scourge) and the Sharkticons, though building such an army would be cost prohibitive, since even the unlicensed knockoff versions can run about $50-60 a pop.

The reason I'm writing about this is because I got some Mousers today. Well, actually, they're M.O.U.S.E.R.S., which has apparently been retconned into an acronym for the Nickelodeon version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the sculpt is amazingly accurate to the Mirage Comics versions as well as the ones that appeared in the 1980's cartoon, so as far as I'm concerned, they're capital-M-lowercase-everything-else Mousers. They're available in stores right now in a 7-pack, which is pretty cool, since the last time we got Mousers, you only got two of them in a package and you had to buy April O'Neil to get them. As of this writing, I have more than seven Mousers. Specifically, I have twenty-one of them. I've bought them every time I see them in stores, sort of like what I was doing with Imperial stormtroopers for a while. In each package, you get three silver ones, two gunmetal ones, and two weird black ones that I assume are stealth Mousers or something. (It's like they're turning into Isz from The Maxx. But I digress.) The silver and gunmetal ones are very serviceable as oldskool Mousers, but I tend to reject the black ones as largely worthless. So, maybe I "really" only have fifteen Mousers. I'm not sure how many I will need to buy before I'm satisfied. (In "A Thing About Rats," Shredder created a dozen Mousers to send after Splinter and the Turtles. Well, that was only the first batch, actually. He later cited a production run of 1200, which works out to be about 171 Mouser 7-packs, or 240 if I ignore the black ones, which would run me between $1518 and $2131 before taxes and employee discounts. It's unfortunate Playmates Toys is only shipping the Mousers 7-pack one per case.(Suddenly, that Sharkticon army isn't looking quite so expensive.)

So, I don't have any answers. Obviously, when there's a huge group of Mousers or Imperial stormtroopers or Sweeps or whatever, it's impossible to amass a toy collection that represents all of them. It's so difficult to define when the stopping point should be, though. (It's even harder with Mousers, since the final number has to be a multiple of seven. What if I want twenty-two of them?)