Sometimes You’re Not Buying the Toy. You’re Buying Five Minutes With the Kid You Used to Be.

There is something slightly ridiculous about being a fully grown adult, with bills to pay and things to remember, getting genuinely excited over a toy you haven't seen since you were eight.

And yet, there it is.

Maybe it’s a Polly Pocket compact. A particular Barbie. A Tamagotchi. A battered action figure. A plush toy with a face that nobody else would describe as particularly remarkable.

You see it and, for a second, you’re not thinking about work tomorrow or what needs paying or what you’re supposed to be making for dinner.

You’re thinking:

I HAD THAT.

And suddenly you can remember exactly where you kept it.

That’s the strange thing about old toys.

They remember things we forgot

We talk about nostalgia as though it’s simply remembering something fondly, but toys can be much more specific than that.

Sometimes you can barely remember what you did last Tuesday, but put the right toy in front of you and apparently your brain has been carefully storing the layout of your childhood bedroom for thirty years.

You remember where the toy box sat.

You remember taking it to your friend’s house.

You remember seeing it in a catalogue and circling it for Christmas.

You might even remember the accessories you lost.

Especially the accessories you lost.

Somewhere out there is an enormous alternate dimension populated entirely by Barbie shoes, Polly Pocket people and tiny plastic weapons.

Maybe we’re collecting the feeling as much as the thing

For me, that’s a huge part of the appeal.

It’s nostalgia, obviously, but it’s also getting to briefly go back to a time when I didn’t have to worry about the world around me.

As a kid, you weren't thinking about whether you'd remembered to reply to that email or what everything was going to cost next month.

You were considerably more concerned that somebody had moved the toy you had positioned very specifically before leaving the room.

Of course, childhood wasn't perfect. Nobody’s was.

But certain objects become attached to those little pockets of life where everything felt smaller. Safer. Simpler.

Finding one again doesn't actually transport you back there.

But sometimes it gets surprisingly close.

Then there are the toys you never had

This might be even more dangerous.

Because adult you has something child you generally didn't:

your own money.

Maybe you stared at something in the toy aisle every time you went to the shops.

Maybe your friend had it.

Maybe it was the big Christmas present that never appeared.

Or perhaps your parents gave you the devastatingly sensible answer:

"You've already got enough toys."

Which was clearly nonsense.

Twenty or thirty years later, you find one.

And now nobody can stop you.

This is one of my favourite things about collecting. Your collection doesn't have to recreate exactly what you owned. It can include all the things you wanted to own too.

There isn't really a correct way to collect

Some people want every figure in a particular series.

Some only want toys they personally remember.

Some collect sealed pieces in immaculate packaging.

Others would choose the slightly scuffed one every time because it looks like somebody actually loved it.

There are collectors interested in rarity, variations, packaging, manufacturing history and obscure releases that most people wouldn't recognise if you handed them one.

And there are people who own twelve Furby toys because looking at twelve Furby toys makes them happy.

Both are perfectly legitimate collecting strategies.

Actually, the Furby person may have the stronger argument.

The point is that something doesn't need to be valuable, rare or impressive to anybody else before you're allowed to care about it.

If seeing it on your shelf makes you happy, that's a pretty good reason for it to be there.

The hunt becomes part of it too

Once you start looking for older toys, you quickly discover that you can't just assume another one will come along next week.

That's a huge part of what makes what we do at Previously Played With so much fun.

Our stock isn't a warehouse full of identical products that we can simply reorder when one sells. Many of the toys that come through PPW are one-off finds.

We might find another tomorrow.

We might find another in three years.

We might never see one again.

Which makes discovering your one feel rather different from putting something mass-produced into a shopping cart.

Incidentally, there are advantages to actually reading things rather than immediately scrolling past all the words looking for the pictures.

PPWJOURNAL15 will quietly take 15% off your order.

That's between us.

Anyway.

Old toys are tiny pieces of history

And I don't mean that in a dramatic “this belongs in a museum” sort of way.

Although some collectors may disagree.

Toys tell you an enormous amount about when they were made.

The cartoons children were watching. The films everybody was obsessed with. The technology that seemed impossibly futuristic. The fashions. The advertising. The packaging. Even what adults at the time apparently believed children would find entertaining.

Sometimes the result was brilliant.

Sometimes you look at an old toy and think:

They really just released this, didn't they?

And thank goodness they did.

Keeping these things around preserves a tiny piece of everyday history that usually isn't considered important enough to preserve.

Not kings and wars and major historical events.

Just what was sitting on a bedroom floor in 1994.

I think that matters too.

You don't need to call yourself a collector

This is perhaps my favourite bit.

You don't have to decide you're starting a vintage toy collection.

You don't need a display cabinet.

You don't need to know every variation ever released.

You don't need to understand why two figures that appear completely identical are apparently different because one has a slightly different copyright stamp underneath its left foot.

You can simply find something you used to love and decide you'd quite like to have it again.

Then perhaps you find another.

And another.

And then one day you're explaining to somebody why you absolutely needed the version with the original hat.

At which point I have some news for you.

Maybe that's why we keep looking

Vintage toys can be rare. They can be valuable. They can be fascinating pieces of design and pop-culture history.

But I don't think any of those things completely explains why we still care about them.

Sometimes an old toy is just an old toy.

And sometimes you pick one up and suddenly remember a room, a person, a Christmas morning, an ordinary Saturday afternoon or a version of yourself you haven't thought about for years.

You can't actually buy your childhood back.

But every now and then, you can find a little piece of it.

And maybe that's worth making room for on the shelf.

Previously Played With

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