[Morgan]

Here's a fairly recent find, and my first from the Picard/Tasha/Barclay trio that was infamous during the '90s. Number 870 out of 3000. Prices for this one, at their peak, were listed at $500 by the big shops in action figure magazines, just below Picard and Tasha which were dealing with somewhat lower production numbers. This is also a figure that I just never heard of anyone finding in a store, even though I'm sure some people bought them "unwittingly" and just opened them up.

The scalper situation at the time was intense with networks of informants rivaling the Stasi, so even though I was looking in stores when these were new I never really expected to find one at the back of some peg, behind a dozen copies of The Traveler. I had no illusions about just happening upon this figure in Target just as the stores were opening at like 5am.

There was a big brouhaha about Picard/Tasha/Barclay and people were ripping their hair out, swearing off the hobby, slipping $50s to back room clerks for tips when stuff came in, sitting in their cars at -20 degrees just as stores were opening at the butt crack of dawn, and writing Very Strongly Worded letters to toy magazines -- this was the 1990s equivalent of being Mad Online. And doing all sorts of nonsense. And of course, these were the completists who were already like $2K into the hobby and gawd knows how many hundreds of hours of browsing stores. I always thought that the hair-pulling was a little too much, especially since it was mostly the Very Serious collectors who were blowing a fuse about not being able to get one of these at a retail price, as if the manufacturer had a gun to their head or something.

About the complainers I always thought that, "well, collectively, Barclay at $500 was like buying five Bridge Playsets at the time for $100 each, so just suck it up and buy it if you're losing that much sleep over it and going on America On Line Dot Com and writing emails to the CEO of the toymaker with a lot of exclamation points." The toymaker has stated on multiple occasions that 80% of their Trek figures were going to adult collectors anyway, so if you can't swing $500 for your hobby, you need a cheaper hobby. I saved up $300 to buy Redemption Data at the age of 13, and that took like 8 months I recall.

25 years later I'm surprised there wasn't more of this sort of thing from this toymaker -- if I were in charge I would have totally embraced this sort of very limited figure approach and would have gone crazy with different card designs and variations (it would have been a goddamn nightmare) -- the sort of thing Hasbro was doing with a wink to the "serious" collectors but somehow never got the bad press for it.

Playmates, on the other hand, got the bad press for the Picard/Tasha/Barclay trio (and then released the 3-pack to atone for it), but other toymakers also cranked out fairly limited stuff (granted, to a smaller audience) and never rereleased some convention exclusives. If some convention exclusive was gone, it stayed gone, and nobody was ripping their hair out.

Part of this -- and this is sort of taken for granted now -- was the non-existence of eBay. If you didn't find any of the Picard/Tasha/Barclay in stores, your choices at the time were pretty limited. You had to find Lee's or Tomart's and figure out what was going on, call up a shop, and fork over some dough. So there were some steps involved if you were committed, and you had to keep up with the market, obviously. And a huge part of the problem was that these "evil" scalpers couldn't advertise their stuff very well: All they had were some lame Tripod websites and the magazines, so purchases of these things from shops/scalpers typically took months -- you couldn't just go on eBay and click But It Now while you were drunk on half a bottle of pinot grigio. At least not until 1998. So you had to rely on monthly magazines to find one of these things for sale.

Contrast that with 25 years later, when my phone chirps at me at 3am and tells me someone in Germany has something I might to want to press But It Now for. Honestly, just eBay and more widespread internet would have solved this 1701 shortage, because shops and scalpers were reasonably loaded with these, but couldn't find buyers fast enough or advertise well enough. The scalpers did not want to hang on to these for a quarter of a century till they lost 90% of their value -- they wanted to flip them then and there so they could keep scalping.