no batteries, no tracks

The financial juggling required by homeownership has put the kibosh on such frivolities, but before adult responsibilities choked off my disposable income in the fall of 2004, eBay and I had quite the torrid love affair going on. I bought a number of cool items through the auction site; it was an invaluable resource for tracking down various popcult artifacts that I had either missed out on in the past or had once owned and lost to the sands of time.

Some of my more memorable purchases included:

- various punk and new wave records that I was never able to locate in the local used vinyl shops, such as UK Decay’s singles, the UXA album, Bonnie Hayes and the Wild Combo’s Good Clean Fun, plus band-related promotional posters and other materials.

- a Pakistani “katana,” which is little more than a 30” razor-sharp meat cleaver. I’m not one of those guys who gets all hot and bothered over weaponry, but I always wanted to own a real, honest-to-gosh sword, and the price was right. (Under $25, if I remember correctly.) My wife gets extremely uncomfortable around it, so it’s currently buried somewhere in the back of the bedroom closet.

- several G1 Transformers toys. Most, if not all of these, were repurchases of toys lost in the great upheaval of 1988 (following my mother’s death). Though the Transformers mythos always struck me as puerile (even when I was a kid), I have an immense love for Japanese robot toys.

- an original animation cel from Akai Koudan Zillion featuring Apple in an evening dress. It cost me all of eight bucks, including shipping. I know there are scammers passing off repro cels as originals and selling them on eBay currently, but I’m almost certain the cel I purchased is the real deal. It was a case of some anime retailer doing inventory and thinking “Who the hell is going to buy a cel from a generally hated series? Dump it on eBay and see who bites.”

I was never able, however, to get my hands on the one childhood artifact I really, really desired, a relatively complete, working SSP Smash-Up Derby car with a ripcord. Damn, those were fine toys. The noise the gyro-wheel made as the car screamed across the maroon linoleum floor of the dining room of the North Woburn apartment… My mother’s cats running for cover as it slammed into the baseboard and sent bits of snap-on plastic shrapnel flying… Oh, to be able to relive those moments with a new generation of household pets. That’s about as near as I get to a pre-midlife crisis.

The problem is that we’re talking about a thirty year old toy designed to crash into things and fall apart on impact, and vintage toy sellers happy to reap extortionate amounts of money from thirty-something nostalgia addicts with more cash than sense. As much as the desire to recapture a bit of that old childhood magic burns in my breast, I could never justify the cost outlay required to attain my holy grail, even when I had disposable income a’plenty.

Even after scaling back my ambitions to more attainable levels – a working non-Smash Up Derby SSP car (with ripcord) that didn’t look like it spent two decades buried in a sandbox – my dream still remains unfulfilled.

Basement Jaxx - Supersonic (from Kish Kash, 2003)

Spandau Ballet - Toys (from Journeys to Glory, 1981)

808 State - Crash (from 808:88:98, 1998)