The Maryland toy show was held on Sunday March 20th. Normally the Maryland Toy Show is held on a Saturday, but this year it was held on a Sunday. run by Dave Hart Shows the show had eighty dealers. We almost did not go as the weather people were saying we would get snow on Sunday up to six inches. By Saturday the story changed to little or no snow. I decided to take a chance and go down.
We got up early and left the house around 7AM. The two and half hour drive is highways and there was no traffic. We arrived about twenty minutes after the show started. The Maryland Toy Show was in lower building Maryland Fairgrounds which had another show going on as well and we walked right in. Our first stop was to our very good friend Gerry Watts so he knew we were in the building. Gerry had mostly toys that he had picked up but he had a couple of playsets and several lot of figures. Gerry was helped by his son Collin. We headed down the row to another very good friend Chris Lamont. Chris deals in action figures. His wife was not feeling good so she had left night before for home. (They allow the dealers to set up the day before).
After checking in with a friends we started up the rows. The Maryland Toy Show has very wide aisles that we have to go up one side and down another. The first few stands were disappointing. they had figures but the prices were too high or the figures were too common. One dealer had Marx Mexican reissue figures but they were starting at $20.00. Another dealer had Marx 45mm army figures at $2.00 each! I usually bundled these figures into lots. At that moment I was getting a little discourage then I found a dealer who had a nice variety of figures. We then found Kerry from Maryland and I got some more figures including some junk lots. In the one lot I found a small stagecoach I am going to keep. We also found a dealer that had some Starlux and Greek Athena figures for sale.
After making the rounds we said our goodbyes seeing Mark Hageman and Alan Ford on the way out. We stopped at Bob Evans restaurant as we lost ours years ago. We headed for home.
I think a show that has 80 dealers is a pretty good-sized show.
When it comes to the dealer who had over-priced Marx reissues: When I first got back into toy soldiers in the early 1980s, the prices for original Marx figures were frequently, in my opinion, outrageous and often unaffordable, based on the figure list prices I was looking at in Tom Terry’s PFPC.
I therefore welcomed all the reissues from StoneCastle, MarxMan, and Hobby Bunker because they made it affordable to create large armies with figures that came from the same molds as the originals, the only perceivable difference usually being a non-flat, slightly shinier surface. I ended up acquiring thousands of the reissues, which I still have, and which are still good for setting up big Civil War and Alamo battles.
But as I get more into the hobby, I began to develop in many cases a strong preference for Marx flat-color originals, along with the shinier Heritage figures. And I began to confine my new acquisitions to just originals. For some reason, probably illogical, I just felt a closer kinship to the originals.
And now, as a sit here in 2016, with thousands of reissues in my basement, I see at the toy soldier shows that there is almost no market for the reissues, whereas even the common-place Marx originals have continued to hold some value, even though there’s been a decline there as well.
But for the Maryland Show dealer who’s trying to sell reissues at a high price, I suspect he’ll soon find out they are difficult to sell at even a very low price.
Don
I feel that the dealer had them for along time. There was nothing really unusual for me that I had to buy it. I did buy a lot of reissue Marx civil war figures. I am curious if anyone will buy the lots as they will have 15 Confederates kneeling firing in each lot! I have sold reissue the trick are how it is packaged and the price.
I recently acquired many Marx vintage and re-issued figures. One of the figures was a damaged orginal Marx cream Mexican, Since he was damaged I was going to use him for one of my conversions. However, once I got hit to the dissection lab I noticed how nice he was, how clear the details are, the feel of the figure itself and the briillinace of the color, so I decided to keep him. Many of the vintage Marx Civil War figures and cowboys that I get are brittle and once I try to cut them up or pin them to attach parts they crumble or snap, that’s normally not the case with the old damaged Marx Mexicans. Re-issued figures are just not the same, while I understand they fill a need, I just don’t like them.
I have discovered it is cheaper to buy damaged original Marx figures rather than using recasts to convert. For example, just bought a bunch of old Marx CSA flag bearers with missing flags @ $1.00 each. I put on new wire poles & a variety of CSA state flags or CSA guidons, color printed from the computer, and new heads. I am as happy with these as the originals that I own, plus, I feel it is more “noble” to repurpose a damaged figure than to cut up an intact reissue. Funny thing: the old Marx figures I own seem to be losing value while the ones I want like Johnny Ringo and the Gunsmoke set seem to still be high priced!!
I’m still a bit of a novice at conversions, but have repurposed some of my damaged Marx originals and even painted one or two of each pose so I have the pose painted for use in a diorama. For the most part as I age and painting my 1/32 scale figure collection seems more attractive than “finishing up” the hoards of 1/72 scale figures I have waiting for me, the idea of painting up and/or converting the many recasts I’ve bought over the years seems more acceptable than carving up my old “friends” from childhood. Those, I think I am going to put in separate containers for safety and maybe break them out on those occasions when I want to fall back into being a seven year-old general refighting the great battles of history on my bedroom floor or in front of the TV.
I only convert vintage if they are badly damaged, I like to think of it as giving them a new life. Usually they have a broken or missing weapon or part of them was badly chewed, some are missing all or part of limbs. In any case they are unusable in the condition in which I acquired them. I do not hesitate to chop up newer or reissued figures.