[Morgan]

I got Red Data in the year 2019 in the most ridiculous and authentic way possible: by buying him and two other figures, 7th season Picard and Troi which were part of the original J.C. Penney pack, for about $30 for all three of them. That's about as close to the original price of the figure offer by J.C. Penney back in the day, even if not adjusted for inflation. So that's pretty crazy, but also hilarious at the same time -- I never thought I would get a Red Data this way, with two other J.C. Penney pack figures, for close to the original price. I didn't have a US-carded Red Data until this year, but I didn't think I would get one in this manner.

This is also the first US-carded Red Data that I've owned. I currently have two other Canadian ones, and had paid $300 for another Canadian one back in the '90s which took the better part of the year to save up for.

This is probably my all-time favorite figure, just because of the mystique and exclusivity that it had back in the day. J.C. Penney had offered it with three other figures back in 1994 (Picard, Troi and Crusher) but didn't tell Trek collectors about it, publishing it in the Xmas catalog, so by the time scalpers found out about it a big chunk of them had already been sold. Pmates caught some flack for this, because this was the first truly limited figure that completists and those pretending to be completists lost their minds, but Thomas Riker, Esoqq, and Q in Judges Robes were also pretty pricey on the secondary market at the time. (Just Esoqq was at least $80, and Riker could be priced for as much as $200. So they weren't far behind).

They say that 5,500 examples of red Data had been produced, and another 2,000 for Canada, but this is dated information that has been passed down through the ages, so I don't know how much trust I would put into numbers this round. Pmates has been tough to get specific info out of, and some of their numbers are a bit wonky. And the foot numbers on these figures, by the way, are all over the place: this one is 70,157 for example, so they didn't have their own specific run from 000,001 to 005,500 like the 1701 figures did. So are these just foot numbers from the regular run of Data figures, or?

This figure was also something of a test run for the much more exclusive 1701 figures, but it seemed to have pretty stable pricing on the collector market, at least back in the 1990s. Everywhere I've seen these advertised they ranged from $280 to $330 back in the 1990s, so that's a pretty narrow range, at least when it comes to dozens of adverts from big action figure stores that advertised in Tomart's and Lee's. But how much they actually changed hands for between collectors is another matter. And those values were not really related to the production run, per se, because Sarek and Troi with pogs were not advertised for that much, while being rarer when it comes to production numbers.