[Morgan]

Here's a recent purchase: Ro Laren on 1994 Canadian card. This one I just hadn't seen for sale for years, and it came up quite abruptly. Among the 1994 Canadian carded figures this one is not stupendously rare per se, certainly not compared to other US or Canadian-carded figures on these card backs as there are plenty of rarities among them, but it is a little tough to find today.

The Ro Laren figure itself remains a small miracle, since it was such a rarely seen character on TNG, and I think part of the reason it was made was that it was recurring character from the later seasons like Barclay or Troi in duty uniform, both of which are also part of this 1994 release. Since Season 7 was on the air at the time, you can kind of sense that the manufacturer was getting a little desperate for figure ideas, so we got Worf in rescue outfit from the Birthright two-parter, Hugh from I, Borg (another small miracle), and Ro Laren.

One missed opportunity with this figure is that the body could have easily doubled for Commander Shelby, and a Shelby figure had been discussed in an interview with Chris Overley at one point as something the fans wanted in ToyFare magazine. And Overley acknowledged the demand, but was also a little dismissive of it. Obviously, in hindsight, a Shelby figure should have been a modest hit, because female figures tended to be underproduced by the manufacturer, and Laren was as well. But I could see Shelby being a fan favorite to be honest among figure buyers, perhaps to a higher degree than Laren was.

The fact that Shelby (and Laren too) did not return in TNG or DS9 seems like a massive missed opportunity too.

Curiously enough, Ro Laren is a figure that I never saw on store shelves when it was new. Like, at all. I only got one in 1997 or thereabouts from a collectibles shop in the Nashville area, if I recall correctly, after some of the craze had begun to die down about the 1994 figures.

In 1995 or thereabouts I remember calling up a figure collector/scalper in the Seattle area whose number I saw in the back of Star Trek magazine in a classifieds ad about figures, and sent $1 to him to get a list of figures he had for sale. In a phone convo he blew my mind with tales of some of the figures that he had for sale at one point, including a Ro Laren figure from 1994. But even at that point, these figures were listed for like $40 in classifieds in action figure magazines, and being small and impressionable I thought that they would stay like that indefinitely, and that it would be years till I would be able to get one. In reality, it took until 1997 and I paid over $20 for a US-carded one, which was a lot of dough for me at the time. Canadian-carded figures in the US were a rarity at the time, so the one I bought this year remains the only live one I've seen on a Canadian card.