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Since the creation of Do You Remember on the podcast, I’ve spent multiple hours searching eBay for treasure. It turns out that selling your old toys at carboot sales in your early teens is really stupid. Regrets? They’re a very real thing right now.
To quickly recap what Do You Remember is (Please listen to our show!). We have to show something that we think the other person hasn’t thought about recently. It might be a toy, food or even a song but they can’t have thought about it in a year. If they have? No points. If they’ve never heard of it? No points again. You can check out the scoreboard here on the site, just click up in the menu or here.
To share the pain, let me show you some of the things I stupidly sold.
Bandai Egg Monsters (Tamagora)
Parents are great, they can typically pull out of the bag exactly when or where you got something. In the case of the Bandai Egg Monster, everyone drew a blank; this included me by the way.
This fantastic transformer got played with a fair bit and looked awesome. I vividly remember it not always transforming easily, often having to be bent to a dangerous degree. Despite this, it survived and I was very fond of it.
Up to the present time, this particular model goes for between £30 and £50 on eBay. Ouch.
Boglins (miniature and more)
I’ve spoken about Boglins before but did you know how expensive they are now? The first Boglin I got was Doink while my brothers got Klang and Squitt. It was an amazing Christmas Present which I adored.
Coming in to the 90s we got more Boglin goodness in the UK. Baby Boglins were released and damn were they cute. You got an egg and inside it was the most perfect finger Boglin to love. Finally there were Mini Boglins, blind bags for the 90s generation. Plenty of trips to Ramish our Newsagent for me to pick up another surprise. These were so much better than stickers in everyway. The most exciting of these were the glow in the dark specials.
Turning to eBay we find a very sad truth – the majority of ‘affordable’ Boglins are in terrible shape. The material is breaking down and they look a sorry state. Baby Boglins have survived a little better but yet again, the price of these seems to always be on the up. Mini Boglins are an odd one though – there were millions sold so it isn’t unusual to find them easily at a good price. That is, until you want a glow in the dark model. Then you better look for a mortgage. Glow in the Dark regrets really hurt.
Warhammer 40,000 and Epic
There have been so many iterations of these models since I first started painting them. The first I ever held and owned were lead, then they turned to white-metal and now? All plastic but the same price. Although I don’t have a problem with the all plastic approach, I do miss the weight and feeling of buying something expensive.
In the mid-90s, I tried something difference. My big Space Marines and Tyranids were boring me and I wanted something new. In came Epic 40,000, a miniaturised version of 40k with hundreds of figures for the same price of 5 Space Marines. What could be better?
I had hundreds of Rhinos, Land Raiders, Predator tanks plus a handful of titans to go along with my marines. Everything got painted to the best standard then pre-teen me could do. I never did get to play a battle though, it just never interested me enough to learn the rules.
Checking out eBay now and the regrets are definitely real. To amass any sort of army compared to what I had when I was small? A fortune.
Wallace and Gromit
I will never forgive myself for this. As regrets go, this is the biggest of my ‘stupid selling’ ones.
I grew up loving Wallace and Gromit, I had an alarm clock, the whole magnet range and more. It made me so happy watching a Grand Day Out and the Wrong Trousers. I wasn’t the only one in the family either, one of my cousins was a huge fan too. So much so, she wrote to Nick Park enquiring about when posable models would be released to buy.
This was the mid-90s and I would suggest, if you sent such a letter now you would receive a) nothing or b) a thank letter signed by a printer. Instead, what she received back was beyond mind blowing. Wallace and Gromit dolls made out of latex that stood no more than 30cm high. They had a wire underframe allowing you to somewhat pose them.
Why was this mind blowing? Well firstly, no money changed hands. These were given freely based on the letter she had sent. Secondly, these were non-production, demo models as it turns out they couldn’t be produced to a high enough standard. The latex was poor and even after a few movements, you could see the paint flake away and material cracking.
This is where regret kicks in. Pre-Teen me wanted money and this new fangled website called eBay had started trading. We didn’t have the internet at the time (or a computer) so I posted these up to my Uncle to sell for me. They made about £15.
To this day I know they should have made more money. They were such a limited item and we were peak Wallace and Gromit but no, £15 is all that came. I can’t post you an eBay link for what they sell for now as I have never seen them again. No matter the search, I cannot find any evidence they even existed.
