It’s one thing to invest in the companies that make this crap, but to invest in the crap itself?
I'm making this a separate post to keep things from being too long.
It varies from product to product as to what makes it potentially collectible or why.
1. In some instances, the product in question is legitimately uncommon or even rare. One example of this is the original prototype pink 1969 Hot Wheels (C) Beach Bomb vehicle, pictures of which can be seen here:
link. There are maybe 12 known to still exist, and the one in the article fetched over $125K at sale.
Another example is with the "G. I. Joe" franchise. In the 1970s, Hasbro decided that instead of bothering with international sales and distribution, they'd just give licenses to local toy companies and let them have molds for the product. This led to many international variations on different lines, particularly G. I. Joe and Transformers. There's a particular Brazilian figure - I want to say Cobra De Aco - for which there are only five known samples still in the original packaging. About 15 years ago one of those showed up on E-Bay, and the bidding was well north of $5000 on it.
2. Changes in the legal or political environment restrict the ability of the manufacturer to make more. In the mid-1990s, the US government overhauled the toy safety laws. Many things were banned outright, while other products fell below new manufacturing guidelines. Other restrictions have been put in place since.
One thing that was banned was the use of spark gimmicks. At one point, you could get toys that shot real sparks thanks to a working flint and metal wheel gimmick, just like in a lighter. Hasbro, for example, produced 9 "Transformers" figures in 1987 & 1988 that used this feature. But in the early 1990s Mattel produced a Barbie doll whose roller blades included the gimmick. Someone discovered that if you had Barbie shooting through a puddle of flammable liquid it could start a fire, and the gimmick was permanently banned in the US... much to the consternation of toy collectors and comedians alike.
Also banned was the use of lead in gaming miniatures. Gaming miniatures were re-classed as toys under the changes, and so were subject to the toy safety laws accordingly. Most gaming miniature manufacturers in the US made them out of lead, which could no longer happen for obvious reasons. A type of pewter became the industry standard, but there was experimentation with plastic and resin even back then; when the price of pewter went up, a number of companies stopped making metal miniatures all together and went fully plastic.
Toy guns have gotten hit harder and harder as time goes on, such that you can't even sell them on E-Bay anymore due to all of the restrictions. The old cap guns we all used to play with are scarce now and wildly unrealistic-looking, and barring one exception Hasbro will no longer even *try* to sell Transformers figures that turn into guns. [1]
And as I mentioned before, things that were once OK now weren't. For example, the 1987 Transformers figure Fortress Maximus stands at 3 feet tall, making him as big as some of the younger kids who would be playing with him. The only way for Hasbro to make a figure that large given the toy technology of the time yet still make him affordable was to make him hollow, which in turn made him surprisingly fragile when dropped. There are actually standards a toy must meet for what happens when it gets dropped from a fixed height, such as how many pieces it breaks into and if there are any resulting sharp points, and while Max was just fine in 1987 Hasbro discovered that he no longer met the revised standards when they went to re-release him in 2001 as an F*A*O Schwartz exclusive in line with his re-appearance in the cartoons. This led to a situation in which Canadian members of the Transformers community acted as middlemen for American buyers seeking the Japanese or South Korean releases of the figure; US Customs would have been all over the figures if they'd have come in straight from Asia and likely rejected them once they investigated, but at the time US Customs didn't really care about "gifts" sent from Canadians to US pals.
3. The product represents something famous or popular.If there's something in a line that gets to be more popular for whatever reason, of course more people are going to want it. That means more people will pay higher prices for whatever that is.
For example, the Transformers figures Nightbeat (1988) and Bludgeon (1989) go for higher prices than the other figures in their product assortments because writer Simon Furman gave them heavy focus in the comic books. This in turn has fueled multiple new product releases for them, bringing more attention to the original toys.
4. The product was short-packed.It may seem similar to #1, but there's a key difference.
One would think that a given case assortment of a given product would have an equal mix of all product in that case. This isn't always so. Toy companies may artificially restrict the amount of item A in an assortment to give more room to item B. For example, a case of six action figures may include three of a really popular guy, two of a new guy, and only one of an older guy who isn't as popular. This is known as "short-packing", and generally really, really annoys collectors and retailers alike. That less popular guy is going to be suddenly more valuable as there are fewer of him for no good reason.
One infamous example of short-packing is the 1980s Transformers character Skids. The original release plan for 1984 called for 12 figures in the "Autobot Cars" product assortment; at 12 items to a case, that would be one of each figure. Instead, for the first few months of the product assortment, the cases only contained
11 figures, with the Mirage character getting two figures per case; for reasons that have never been explained, the "Hauler" character seen in the three-part pilot was held back. Someone at Hasbro finally realized how awkward this looked and took the Skids character - originally planned for the 1985 assortment - and shoved him out the door, packing him in place of the second Mirage figure in a revised version of the case. But this was done far too late for him to appear in any 1984 episodes of the cartoon, and the people who were doing the case assortments for the 1985 figures came to regard him
as a 1984 character and so shorted him along with the other old guys (1 every
other case[/i] instead of 1 per case) to make more room in the cases for the new peeps. So here you have a character who was released in short supply,
and oh by the way the US comic briefly made a star of him for a few issues.
I'll end this here so that you all can stop and get some aspirin.
[1] The original version of bad guy leader Megatron transformed into a replica Walther P-38; the mold was borrowed from the Japanese "Micro Quick Change" toy line, and in the toy line was a working cap gun; Hasbro gutted that ability for safety and cost reasons. Even as early as 1994 Hasbro came to realize that having him become a gun was no longer something the watchdogs would care for, and things have been iffy since. A planned re-release of the original 1984 figure was scrapped because they realized he'd have to be garishly neon to pass safety standards, and even a 2004 version of him that turned into a Nerf gun was pushing the boundaries.
Japan, meanwhile, has no such legal restrictions, and so not only have they received re-releases of the 1984 figure, a "Masterpiece" - grade collector's figure intended to be accurate in all ways to the original cartoon design was also released. Numerous collectors in Australia who tried to import this figure ended up getting nasty letters from Australian customs officials, who were intercepting all such figures as they entered the country; even though he was a robot who merely
turned into a
replica of a gun, the customs officials regarded this as people still attempting to import firearms, and so demanded that the individuals arrive in person to claim him. It caused a rather significant to-do in the international fan community, leading to government officials having to issue some hasty clarification so as not to be seen as a punchline.
