Hello Everyone,
I wanted to give an idea of how and why this website came to be, but I also don't want to bore people with a long story, so I'll try to be quick;
- I played with GIJOE toys in the early to mid 80's as a kid.
- In late 2000, I discovered eBay and Yojoe.com at the same time. Not good. I went through the archives on Yojoe and found the 1988 figure Shockwave. I had never seen this figure before as he came out after I stopped getting toys, but he looked really cool and I thought he would be great to have. So a vintage 1988 Shockwave (complete) was my very first eBay purchase in November of 2000 I believe. That opened the flood gates.
- A year later I decided to bring all my childhood toys back home with me, as they were sitting in a truck at my Dad's house. I had about 25 figures and 10 vehicles. Over the next few years I bought replacement parts off eBay for the few vehicle pieces that had been broken in storage, as well as figure accessories.
- The front fuselage of my Skystriker had been covered in black electrical tape when I was a kid, so I wanted to clean it up and find new stickers. I read forum comments about this guy in Mexico who had repro decals for the Skystriker. I bought them and then restored the front of my Skystriker. The decals looked so good I ended up taking all the old decals off and redid the entire jet. It looked brand new. I then slowly redid all the decals on my original vehicles and then began to buy other vintage vehicles I thought looked cool or remembered friends of mine having as a kid.
- A few years later a splurged and bought an unassembled Defiant. Sadly, the unused decal sheets were all sticky and I wasn't about to apply them to my mint Defiant. I scanned every sheet and sent the images to Ruben (the guy in Mexico) who was able to make full repro sets. I could then restore my Defiant with minty new decals. This also opened the flood gates as over the course of many years I sent Ruben over 100 vehicle and playset decal sets to make repros. About 70% of his current inventory has come from me. He’s been great to work with and is a great resource for GIJOE collectors.
- Once I started restoring my vehicles to like-new condition, I began submitting images to Yojoe to upgrade their archives. The new photos were multi-angle and had a pure white background. At that time, most of the photos on the website were small, older, grainy photos of vehicles that were often incomplete or photographed from a bad angle showing someone's coffee table and shag rug. It wasn't pretty. In the end, I think I've submitted photos for over 100 vehicles. That was a lot of work. Ironically, the first vehicle images I submitted to Yojoe were for the 1982 Vamp. This was before I was bitten with the Vamp variation bug. At that time I only had the ’82 Vamp (purchased as an adult collector) and the ’84 Vamp Mk II (from my childhood). I now have about 50 production variations, 2 prototypes, and over 20 customs I’ve made.
- I then decided to try to film other collectors and have them talk about their toy collections. I called it "Collectable Spectacle" and my first subject was Mark Bellomo. A year or two later I did another series on the collector Airedevon. As I was flying from Canada to different cities in the U.S. to make these videos for YouTube, it became too expensive to continue. In the end I spent about $1,500 just in travel costs to make the videos. I had asked other collectors to donate a few dollars if they liked the videos, but not many people want to pay for things they just got for free. I think I made back about $350. So that put an end to those videos. It was great working with Mark and Aire though, they both started me down the Vamp collecting path. Sadly, Aire’s amazing collection is no more so I’m glad I was able to capture it on film for others to see.
- As of 2014 I’m pretty burnt out on collecting. It’s been a combination of the drain of making my collection website (over 4000 photos), two sub-par GIJOE feature films, endless repaints and reissues of the same action figures from Hasbro, and just wanting to generally focus on other pursuits in life. I’d still like to find the missing pieces for my Vamp collection, but I certainly only pick and choice my new purchases now. How many plastic versions of a ninja does one person need really……?
- I don’t have room in my home to display the collection, but I wanted to have a way to at least share it with other collectors, hence my idea to have a website gallery. My entire collection, minus the Defiant, fits on a series of sturdy metal shelves in a spare room. All figures are bagged and all vehicles are bubble wrapped and stored in numbered bins. Everything is cataloged so that it is easy to find. The Vamps alone take up about 9 of the bins seen on the left hand side (see attached images). I custom built three panels that snap to the metal shelves with strong magnets. The panels not only cover the ugly bins but keep curious cats from climbing inside. I then high-res scanned some vintage comic covers, did some Photoshop work to them, and then added the artwork to the panels to give them some pop culture display value.
So, having said all that, here’s my personal collection. Love it, hate it, or as Humpty Hump once sang “Doowutchtyalike”.
http://www.gijoegallery.comThanks,
Chad
