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The PopCulteer
March 16, 2018
You may have noticed that PopCult has been largely devoted to toys for the last few weeks. We had the International Toy Fair in New York last month, and this month we’ve been bringing you lots of pre- and post-ToyLanta coverage (with more to come). However, we have to take a moment to talk about the biggest story in the world of the toy industry this week, the not-unexpected impending demise of Toys R Us.
Last year I wrote about the real cause of TRU’s woes. It was not a downturn in sales or competition from Walmart on Amazon. Toys R Us was the victim of a perfecly legal, yet lethal, financial transaction, a leveraged buyout.
In 2005, Bain Capital, a firm that had already systematically destroyed KayBee Toys in exactly the same way, teamed up with two other private equity firms to buy TRU and take it private, and in the process they saddled the company with a debt load that could only be paid off if sales went up and all their competition went out of business.
The surprising part of what happened was that Toys R Us was so big that it took them thirteen years to run the company into the ground, with somewhere between five and eight Billion dollars in debt (reports vary). That’s “Billion” with a “B.” Outside of military contractors, it’s hard to run up a loss that huge.
The most important lesson that should be taken away from this is that, perhaps, the government should consider whether or not the practice of leveraged buyouts should even be legal. I realize that the prevailing philosophy among those currently in power is that all government regulations are bad, but that philosophy is evil and self-serving. We need banking reform and new regulations on Wall Street, and we need to consider banning such predatory financial manuevers as short-selling, derivative trading and leveraged buyouts.
Bryan Tatum has been creating cool mini-diorama pieces to go along with the convention figures for the past few years, and this year he came up with a really cool radioactive alien scene, complete with a working strobe light…
The folks at 3Rd Son Books always have an impressive spread and can be counted on to make great deals and fun trades…
I was lucky enough to score two great impeccably-tailored Mark Cole uniforms from Steve Stovall, who I will be seeing again at his Kentuckiana GI Joe Show in late July. Steve also curated the unofficial Joelanta Nifty Knock-off Challenge, which I will tell you about later.
I always wind up dropping a ton of money with James Wozniak and Classic Recasts. Each one of these figures pictured below came with a full set of accessories, and I got even more stuff that I haven’t had a chance to photograph yet. The little astronauts with helmets are going to Mark Wolfe…
I only picked up one outfit set from 6 Scale USA, but it won’t be the last. These guys do incredible work, and I can’t wait to get this cool SCUBA suit on one of my Adventure Team guys soon. I’ll be seeking them out next year for more.
What can I say about Cotswold Collectibles that hasn’t already been said? It’s always great seeing Greg Brown, and it’s really cool because I was buying stuff from Cotswold for twenty five years and from Greg for fifteen years before I ever had the chance to meet him in person. This company has been carrying the 1/6 scale collectors hobby through feast and famine, and they’re pioneering new ways to bring customizers together to create and collaborate on the cool new projects that Hasbro can’t be bothered to consider.
I always get a ton of stuff from Cotswold, and you can see that I have some custome flocked heads, spare bodies, 3 D printed goodies from Sean Huxter and cool 1/1 scale “dogtags,” among other coolness.
Of course I went back to the Cotswold booth to pick up some goodies from Rob Humprhey and Firebase Ryan, for future diorama use…
I’m going to wrap up this PopCulteer here, even though I have a few more of my ToyLanta goodies to share with you. It’s getting a bit late in the day, and I have more ToyLanta posts and videos to work on. Please check back for our regular features and listen to our sister internet station, The AIR, where you still have a few more chances to hear Radio Cult’s ToyLanta concert on Radio Free Charleston International.