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Pictures and Essays
Here are the only pictures I have of my collection; someday I may haul the camera out and document the series, a-la the Breyer page.
Here are some Simpsons related rants I wrote in 2001, at the height of the collecting insanity. Collecting
action figures: is it wrong?
 Lately
the sheer velocity of my own simpsons figure mania (reading
newsgroups on joint articulation, the merits of re-releases,
and custom figures) has caused me to question my own degree
of nerditude.
No,
actually, what is causing me to question this is the slightly
raised eyebrow of those who do not comprehend staking out
Targets and mentally crafting flame mails to Playmates Toys
about the lack of updates to their cobweb
of a site.
Maybe
I should just confess now that I had a crush on Chekov
when I was eleven (and Agent Mulder when I was 25) and that
denying uncoolness would never hold up in the court of public
opinion?
Why
World of Simpsons action figures?
Why
in hell would I, by collecting these heinous TV toys, put
myself through the rigors of what I call manufactured obsolescence,
the odious practice of introducing toys in "sets"
that are deliberately discontinued before a large portion
of the collecting market ever catches wind of their existence,
thereby creating a totally unneccessary price-inflated e-bay
black market?
Hundreds
of dollars later, I still don't have an answer.
Winning
collectable figure search strategies
- Employ
shopping envoys in other states
with a lesser nerd population. It helps if they are related
to you and understand the depth of your compulsive collecting
issues
- Morning
weekday trip to the Target, reinforcing the deserted,
depressing alternate universe of weekday retail
- Call
toy department people frequently, make them feel like an
important part of your mission
I
neither confirm nor deny attempting any of the above
strategies... I might have made my parents buy three interactive
environments in an Arkansan ToysRUs and then ship them to
me... or maybe I didn't...
My favorite Simpsons episode
First, lest we forget what the Simpsons is all about, an episode guide...
I thought I would take this moment to point out that my favorite episode of the Simpsons is called "in Marge We Trust," but is more well-known around here as "The Mr. Sparkle episode." It concerns Homer's discovery of a box of dishwashing detergent from the Mr. Sparkle company in Hokkaido, Japan.
 For a truly haunting example of fandom obsession, which no novice like me could ever match, view the web page that contains transcripts from this episode, a deconstruction of every second of film, and long, seroius discussions of every concievably related topic.
Mr. Sparkle also has his very own fan site.
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Update: If you are here looking for World of Simpsons junk and you haven't seen the encyclopedic database on 