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What drives someone to collect Star Wars figures or Transformers or LEGOs or whatever else? Mark, Erica, and Brian are joined by guest Matt Young of the Hello from the Magic Tavern and Improvised Star Trek podcasts to talk about this potentially expensive and life-eating habit. Must we use the word “kidulting“? No, in fact we mustn’t.
For a little extra info, we can look at Wikipedia on the Psychology of Collecting, this incomplete list of nostalgic collectible IPs (that’s “intellectual property”), or this weird list of collections that includes erasers, confetti, traffic cones, and sugar packets. If you collect these things (or old pizza boxes, roadkill, or used gum), you are an insane person. But you definitely should get the Jek Porkins LEGO X-Wing; that’s not insane whatsoever.
Really, most of the literature we found was either about what collections might present a future investment opportunity or other tips for doing this as a financial activity (please don’t try to do this) and surprise that adults buy toys.
If you enjoy this, check out our past episode on LEGOs. If you like Matt, check out our other interviews with Hello From the Magic Tavern cast members: Adal Rifai, Tim Sniffen, and Anthony LeBlanc. Will we ever complete the collection?
This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network and is curated by openculture.com.
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You should do an episode on prog. Is progressive rock, and her sister genres (prog. bluegrass and progressive jazz) pop? It seems to occupy a sphere of popular culture. You can talk about Rush, Dream Theater, Zappa, Can, Magma etc. the same way you talk about other things in popular culture. At the same time they are advertized as bridging beyond rock (or jazz or folk) into a transcendent (and somewhat amorphous) high cultural space. Whether prog rock has a sexism problem is another question entirely. While I do like this question, I like the first question.