I feel like an old dude sitting on a bench, looking out at Main Street, USA and watching the world pass by when I say this, but “expensive” used to be 25 bucks. Expensive used to be the original Millenium Falcon, or the G.I. Joe Skystriker. Expensive was a boogieman word used by your parents to rationalize why you weren’t getting a specific toy, only to find it under the tree on Christmas morning. Expensive was the AT-AT. Expensive elevated a toy to rarified heights.
Gradually the definition of expensive started climbing, as toys like the U.S.S. Flagg and Fortress Maximus started taking over the aisles. Expensive was now a hundred dollars or more.
But nowadays, current “expensive” makes previous “expensive” look puny in comparison. Now a single action figures can cost more than an entire wave of figures used to cost. Now we measure expensive not in tens and twenties, but in many hundreds of dollars. Which is weird in a world where a DVD player once cost hundreds of dollars but can be had now for under a bill. Things are both topsy-turvy and higgledy-piggledy.
With a variety of interests comes a huge load of want, and that means a ton of virtual window-shopping and the knowledge that despite best efforts, you just can’t buy everything. Not without retaining a certain standard of living beyond living in a big fort made out of empty toy boxes.
Note to self: build fort out of empty toy boxes, charge admission.
There are a ton of toys that could fall into the “insanely expensive” category. Hot Toys alone could bankrupt a man. Right now, these are the top five coolest and most expensive things that I can’t splurge on but would love to if I were a rich man.
From least expensive to most expensive, they are:
Hybrid Metal Figuration Batman and Batmobile
Hybrid Metal Figures, a combo of die-cast and plastic, are made by Herocross. I have their Donald, Mickey, and recent Minnie Mouse figures, and they’re pretty nifty. They have pumped out a ton of random figures, including characters from DC, Star Wars, and other Disney characters. They’ve previously released an Adam West/Burt Ward-styled Batman and Robin separately, but this is the first time the ’66 Batmobile has made an appearance in this line. It’s also their first vehicle. This combo of super-deformed-style Batman and scrunched up, stylized Batmobile is probably the cutest thing ever, and, at $365, it is just too damn expensive to do anything but nod at from across a crowded room.
The Sentinel Re:Edit line is putting out various versions of Iron Man’s comic-styled armors with subtle tweaks to the colors. This one is mostly faithful to the original comic-style Hulkbuster, though, and it looks great. I have two of the previous Iron Men from Sentinel and would love to add this to the collection. The Hulkbuster armor continues to ride high in popularity after appearing in the previous Avengers movie, and while many companies have put out stellar movie versions, it’s nice to see the comic version isn’t being ignored. This is $5 more than the above Batman/Batmobile set and is still super-expensive. Even if you opt to get it from a foreign store, the price is still fairly high when you include shipping.
Boba Fett ¼ scale figure by Hot Toys
Boba is going to be getting several 1/6th scale figures from either Hot Toys or Sideshow this year, and those are much more reasonably priced. But there’s something appealing about the ¼ scale. I know it’s super-trendy, but there’s something undeniable about the gravitational pull of a cool-ass Boba figure, so to get a well-done, high-quality version of him in such an attention-grabbing size is extremely tempting. But at $470 I think I’ll stick to 1/6th and smaller. But that’s a lot of Boba.
The price continues upward, as the next item is NECA’s life size foam Slimer.
I mean . . . look at it. A life-size version of John Belushi’s ghost. At almost $600, the price seems insane, but it’s probably worth it to suspend it from the ceiling and have it float right in the middle of your living room so everybody who visits has to walk around it. “Suck my Slimer!” you can say to them as you toss the large ectoplasmic entity at them menacingly. Sure, you’ll never have visitors again, but you won’t need them because you’ll have Slimer. Even better, he doesn’t need to be fed. I can’t wait until the life-size Stay-Puft!
The final item on this list is expensive enough as it is, but as it requires an extra purchase, the price ends up being inflated even more.
The Hot Toys Back to the Future DeLorean will run you $690. But if you’re like me, you’d need to buy the HT Marty McFly to go with it because you can’t have a driverless car, unless it’s a Hot Toys KITT, which would be awesome but hasn’t happened yet. That requires an additional purchase of Marty at $225, meaning the total package would be $915. That’s so close to a thousand bucks that you may as well call it a thousand bucks. And homie can’t spend a thousand bucks on anything he can’t personally drive around in or on.
All told, that’s $2,720 worth of merchandise that I will have to be content to stare at from afar, because that would seriously eat into my toy-buying budget for the next umpteenth months.
What about you? Is there a toy you’d love to buy but just can’t afford? Leave a comment about what you’re salivating after so we can all console each other and wish for lottery winnings.