The new habit... er I mean hobby.

I, like many others, loved G.I. Joe as a kid. I had G.I. Joe around a full 2 to 3 years before Transformers came out. And they were cheap, comparatively speaking. Needless to say I had a lot of years invested in playing G.I. Joe and a fair ammount of toys. Mostly figures as they vehicles were much more expensive.

So a year or so ago when I first saw the new 25th anniversary line launched I thought they were prety cool but didn't get any. After time I decided to pickeup a few of my favorites, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. I never opened them as they seemed really hard to find. Noting that I did buy a few more of my favorite characters over time but no where near all of them. Then something happened. I had opened Snake Eyes that came with Timber some time ago and thought it was pretty cool but eeh. For some reason I decided to open a few more of them. I mean, what is the point of buying toys if you aren't going to play with them? That makes you a "collector" and those guys are creepy. I'm just weird.
Anyway... The more I opened these toys the more of them I wanted. Then Pokemon syndrome hit... Gotta catch 'em all.
But why? What changed? Honestly, I'm not real sure. They are amazing toys though. The articulation and attention to detail is amazing. They make my old Joes look rather silly.

So while I will never have them all, nor do I want them all, I did go through some effort hunting down what I still could find. Only normal retail stores. No ebay or anything crazy. (Again, that creepy "collector" guy.) So, while I will never be able to get the original releases I did a pretty goood job at getting at least some version of most of the characters they have released. And now they are starting to release some of the original vehicles with a few nice updates/fixes. All pretty cool stuff.

What is it that makes me want to get these toys soo bad? Is it the thrill of the hunt, as they are so hard to find? Is it just because they are such cool toys?
I dunno. It just seems kinda weird to me. I just wish they weren't so hard to find. I see a lot of talk in the forums I have stumbled across, about scalpers. I never really see this in any of the TF boards. It may be partly due to the fact that many of these are store exclusives and released if small amounts by normal toy release standards.
Oh well. Just one more way for Hasbro to monopolize this child of the '80s.