All this week: Retro toys!

It's a bit of a reminder that I'm old, but I've been collecting toys for over twenty years now--not counting my childhood Mego Star Trek or Kenner Star Wars figures. I picked up a Robocop figure while still in high school, the start of the end of that unpleasant stretch of time in junior high and high school when I had to toe the line and not buy toys. I know I picked up a Batman for the first movie, and the first Nightcrawler in Toy Biz's long X-Men line. And then another, and another, and some more...

But, and the first figure we'll look at tomorrow is the one that made me think of this, there are a lot of toys I still have but don't have on display, or use in homemade strips, or even think about until I see them in a tote. Some of them aren't great--they've become dated, or replaced by an upgraded version. Some are characters that aren't around as much any more, popular for their time, then forgotten. And some I frankly don't recall much at all.

So, all this week, we're going back into the bins, for some old but perhaps not entirely forgotten toys. "Retro" here isn't going to go deep back; all the figures we're going to look at are probably no older than twenty years, tops. We'll see how well they've aged, and if we remember the characters. Who should still be on the front of the shelf, and who goes in the proverbial attic? Let's find out! Posts will be more than one a day, and if we're lucky, we'll still have the usual comics pieces as well.

Today: The first Toy Biz Nightcrawler figure, or a reissue of him--the paint makes me think reissue, it's a little darker. The second X-Men/X-Force Deadpool figure, also from Toy Biz, and $64.99 on Amazon? Please do not pay that for him. And again from Toy Biz, the Falcon from the Avengers cartoon: his Redwing has appeared in a batch of strips here. (He's a little more reasonable at Amazon, but not a great figure unless you're a fan.)

Already I've been surprised by the dates on these figures: I was pretty sure that Nightcrawler was from 1990, but he's dated 1991. (I had checked my Robocop figure just before, and he's marked 1988; I was dead positive I bought him in 1990. Of course, he could've just been on the shelves in my hometown Ben Franklin for two years...) Deadpool is dated 1995, and Falcon 1999. I'm going to be kind and say aesthetically, they haven't aged well. Also, you can't tell in that picture, but Falcon has a staple stuck to the magnet on his arm; part of an action feature with his Redwing.

And yet, I still have one of those Nightcrawler figures, hanging on the front window of my apartment. And I probably always will.