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NekroDave's blog

Recently I had a pretty cool experience when famed Japanese toy collector Tom Franck (formerly of CoolJapaneseToys.com) was back in town to deal with what remains of his childhood collection. His mom was selling the family home (and in a bit of small world coincidence, we later found out that she sold it to a friend of CDX alum Mason Fitch!) and he still had lots of stuff stored away that he had to go through and find a new home for, since transporting it all back California wasn't really an option.

Posted 2 March, 2014 - 02:09 by NekroDave

Just in time for Halloween, local geeks John Cimino and Keith Gleason of Hero Envy stopped by my place and we talked about our top 3 favorite classic monsters. It was a pretty lively and fun discussion so I hope you enjoy it.

This was my third appearance on the show. Since I wasn't really posting at the time of the others, I'll link them all below if you'd like to check them out.

In this episode, we talk about bootleg toys! I wasn't really expecting to have to provide all the toy examples so you'll notice that since it's all from my collection, they are primarily blow molded. But it's a fun talk anyway.

Posted 8 October, 2012 - 13:28 by NekroDave

OK, OK, I know I said I wasn't going to be keeping track of machinder sales in 2011....and I didn't. But I guess the idea just won't die. Good friend and Brussels' #1 jumbo collector Mike de Conick took up the challenge and just sent me the collected images from the past year!

Of course, just as in years past, the format of the image titles have been changed just slightly. The date is no longer in the title. Instead, it's written like this:

Grendizer03_2_189000Yens.jpg

In the example above, obviously the character name is Grendizer, but the "03" indicates that it was the third example of the toy sold that year. The "2" indicates that it is the second photo in the sequence and of course "189000Yens" is the sale price. Since the toy sold on Yahoo!Japan, the price is in yen. Most of the images are from Yahoo, but some may be from Ebay. Of course, those will be indicated with the dollar sale price.

Posted 4 January, 2012 - 15:38 by NekroDave

So here we are on the verge of 2011 which means another year of Jumbo Machinder record keeping is at an end. And just like in 2009, in 2010 I made some changes to the way I've maintained these records. Previously, I simply recorded each sale as they happened, meaning that everything was chronological. However, most people were not willing to take the time to sift through the sales for the specific toy/character they were interested in (which always really annoyed me because the time I spent compiling the information was exponentially great, but whatever...) . So this year, I re-arranged all of my files into sub-folders for each individual character. (The naming of each individual image remains essentially unchanged from last year.)

The end result of this is that now you have a format like this:

Machinder Sales
>Popy Heroes
>>Mazinger Z
>>>PHOTOS

Posted 30 December, 2010 - 15:40 by NekroDave

Here is some disturbing news I was told the other night. Apparently, on March 3 congress in Venezuela passed a law that forbids the manufacture, importation, distribution, purchase, sale, rent or use of "violent" toys and videogames. But since the law is non-specific about what actually constitutes a "violent" toy or game, nearly everything that can be viewed as such is now outlawed. So retailers have pulled things like Star Wars, G.I.Joe, Transformers, Max Steel, Power Rangers, etc from their shelves!

Furthermore, auction sites have been pulling toy auctions and the post offices are cracking down on it as well so collectors can't buy toys in stores locally or order them from abroad! To be caught doing so means fines and/or 3-5 years in prison. Of course, I bolded the word "use" above because no one is exactly sure what they mean by that. Is "collecting" the same thing as "using"? As crazy as it sounds, right now people are worried about being sent to prison for collecting toys!

Posted 24 March, 2010 - 15:08 by NekroDave

Recently, Ikea had a one day only sale for their Detolf glass shelves. These are very popular among many toy collectors, but as they are a bit on the small side (ie; not great for jumbos), I never really thought of getting any for myself. But at only $20 each, I figured I would go grab a couple just for the hell of it. I'd try them out and if I didn't like them, I figured I'd have no trouble finding another local collector to take them off my hands.

Posted 15 January, 2010 - 21:36 by NekroDave

More thorough than last year and twice as shocking!

You'll be amazed as Jumbo Machinder Record Keeping returns with a whole new batch of saved auction photos!!

SEE!

........the first known public auction of a boxed Ultraman Leo!!

Sold for 771,000 yen on September 27!

SEE!

........the long anticipated return of Kingdan X10.

Sold for 400,000 yen on December 14!

SEE!

........the SHOCKING DISCOVERIES of jumbos NEVER SEEN BEFORE!!

Posted 4 January, 2010 - 00:00 by NekroDave

Thanks to an alert member of the Universal Monster Army for pointing this out last night.

It seems Ebay has quietly instituted a new policy where the photos you upload for your auctions will be added to their "catalog", starting at the end of the month. Basically, they're gonna steal your photos and let other people use them unless you opt-out of this program. Of course, they sure didn't make much effort to actually let people know this, did they? Not cool at all, imo.

Check this post HERE for details and how to opt-out before it goes into effect at the end of the month.

This sort of thing makes me all kinds of angry.

Posted 10 August, 2009 - 18:20 by NekroDave

Although I don't think any one from this site collects these kinds of toys, nevertheless, this will be us someday.

According to the Bertoia Auctions website, the first part of the sale took place in March and fetched 4.2 million bucks. Sorry if this is old news, but I just saw it at the Universal Monster Army and thought it was worth re-posting here. We can disagree and even argue about our hobbies all we want, but at the end of the day, this is what it should be all about....the love.

Posted 4 May, 2009 - 12:08 by NekroDave

I don't get it. I mean, seriously, c'mon! You're trying to tell me that a Barbie doll was this years best monster toy? Well, according to the results of this years fan voted Rondo Awards , that is in fact the case. I thought it was a neat idea and I've even kept my eyes open looking for one cheap (I wanted to be the first CDX writer to review a Barbie! lol) but best of the year? No way..

Barbie as Tippi Hedren from "The Birds"

I just can't accept it. There were plenty of better options out there, in my opinion, such as the Ultratumba Invasion of the Saucer-Men statue, the Amok Time Pit And The Pendulum statue or even the late entry from Japan, Pilot Ace's Fire Dragon. I just don't get it. Still, I think this is less of an injustice than our own poll, won by the merely decent 12" Bandai MechaGodzilla. If there is a theme there, it might be the the most readily available and easily affordable toy will likely get the most votes.

Posted 25 March, 2009 - 15:26 by NekroDave

I think it's important to try to be your own person, but sometimes it's best to follow those that have gone before. Back when I first got into the hobby, the Japanese Toy Database that was such a great part of the now-defunct Cool Japanese Toys website was a constant source of reference for me as I was starting out as a Jumbo Machinder collector. When I first started looking at it, each entry included a price estimate for a mint in box specimen of the listed toy. After awhile, these were taken down. At the time, I was a bit disappointed in this, but I've since come to understand why it had to happen. It's just become nearly impossible these days to predict what any toy should sell for, but the marketplace for Jumbo Machinders in particular seems to be particularly volatile. (A completed auction search for "Machinder" on Ebay right now will reveal some rather eye-popping final bids for some not that special jumbos.)

Posted 14 March, 2009 - 14:45 by NekroDave

While some would tell you "don't sweat the small stuff", I prefer the pre-existing catchphrase "it's the little things in life that matter". As a Jumbo Machinder collector, it's likely that you may have heard me complain on occasion about a lack of space. But it's not just the jumbos that cause this problem. I've also got about 20 boxes of comic books. And after I stopped collecting comics and before I started in on toys, I had another brief obsession...dvds. For awhile there, I was buying them hand over fist. And while my collection now isn't that big, I do think it's larger than the average person's. I've got just north of 400 of them and as that number grew, it became harder and harder to find a place to display them all. I had a little bookshelf at first, then a bigger bookshelf and then both bookshelves together and finally both were overflowing. I'd tried to keep my eyes open for a better option, but never really made a point of it. But I recently had enough. Something had to be done.

Posted 7 March, 2009 - 22:31 by NekroDave

Today, I got an email from my good friend Juan Carlos Azpurua. You may remember him as the guy who sent us the report from Venezuela's first big anime convention, Convencion Avalancha in 2006. He also provided us with the translation of his friend Alvaro Carvajal's report from his Hasbro Office Tour in 2007. Juan Carlos collects mostly 1980s American toy lines, but also has an interest in Japanese robots and has been an invaluable source for learning about what was produced in Venezuela. Everything I know about Famosa Jumbos is because of him.

Well, a couple years back, he sent me the following picture.

This image was from a vintage Venezuelan toy catalog and shows a Mazinger Z Jumbo Machinder that I'd never heard of before. It's based on the Popy mold, but has yellow limbs. Strangely, although it adorns the cover of the catalog, there was no mention of it inside! So it's been unclear if this was a toy that was ever actually produced... until today.

Posted 3 March, 2009 - 12:46 by NekroDave

Sad news today as Forrest J. Ackerman has passed away at age 92 at his home in LA. "Uncle Forry" as he was known may have been the biggest collector of us all. Besides being the publisher of the legendary "Famous Monsters Of Filmland" and the man who discovered Ray Bradbury, he had one of the greatest horror and sci-fi collections on the planet and would routinely open up his house to visitors who wanted to see his it. I know it was always a great treat for monster collectors to get to visit the "Ackermansion" and I regret that I never did.

Posted 5 December, 2008 - 17:45 by NekroDave
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