Overstock MOCs

edd_jedi

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I've been thinking about why some MOC figures are more plentiful than others, and my theory is simple - overstock. In my opinion, 90% or more of MOCs in circulation now are not figures that were originally sold when the wave first hit the shops. A good example - Meccano Jawas. There are box loads of them out there, and we know they haven't all come from people who bought them in 1978, they are all from shipping cases sold much later.

I put overstock in to two categories:

1) Sold at retail after original release date, eg the peg warmers or the trilogos that Kay Bee had millions of in the late 80s (most with 2 for $1 stickers!)
2) Overstock that was never sold in shops, but went to dealers in the late 80s when the likes of Kenner and Palitoy collapsed (eg all the figures Toy Toni has)

I think this explains why some characters on certain cardbacks are easy to find, and some are not. It's surely not just luck - there's a reason why there are so many dead mint trilogo A-Wing Pilots and pop-up R2s out there, they all came from Toy Toni :lol:

Interested to know what people think.
 

lejackal

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The logic seems sound to me Edd albeit from my limited collecting knowledge and experience.
 

Dublinjeff

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Sounds about right Edd....I often thought that there was probably a large amount of ROTJ cards sold in Retail at knock down prices towards the end of the SW craze....hence the offers like you mentioned 2 for $1...99p cards etc.
 

Grant

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Your probably right Ed. think about all those unpunched cards out there. Obviously none of those were put on hangers etc. When I used to shop for my carded figures back in the early 80's as a kid all my MOC's were on the pegs all punched.
 

pizzathehutt

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Apart from toy and model shops and also places like Argos, woolworths and debenhams, there were at the time of rotj we had 3 newsagents down my road and all three had weequays and niktos.

I reckon they mass produced a lot and put them in wherever they could I guess. Especially those two easy ones to get.
 

Joe

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Overstock figures that never made it out of their shippers definitely make up a huge portion of the available carded figures out there that's for sure. Generally speaking though the earlier stuff (12 backs through to ESB) usually made it out to the toy sections of the shops that stocked them, some places didn't actually use "pegs" and opted instead for basket shelves that held figures without having to punch the punch (lol).

Definitely true to say that there is far more overstock from the ROTJ/POTF period, especially in Europe. So many figures were produced it was unreal.

One final thing is that in 85/86 and probably later there were several wholesaler type companies that specialised in buying toys from companies that were going bust or that had overstock because interest wasn't there. They would sell them cheap and buy them even cheaper just so that companies didn't have to dispose of things and would get *something* back from the cost of production.
 

jedisearcher

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I think you're right Edd, but there may also have been a period between retail sales dropping off and dealers becoming properly engaged.

When my Mum and Dads shop closed in 1984 all of the SW stock (about 20 boxes of ROTJ MOCs) went to a discount store. A bit later, I also remember a SW mate telling me at the time of seeing tons of POTF at market stalls in Manchester. It's hard to accept now, but SW stuff was pretty much worthless as retail demand died away, you only have to look at the Woolworths 10 packs to see what retailers were doing to get shut of their stock. You couldn't see the films in the cinema, there were on TV maybe once a year so it's easy to see why demand disappeared, so I guess I'm wondering why dealers would have bothered getting involved at this point, as making a profit would have been tough. I'm talking 1984-86 or so I suppose. So my point really is that as retail demand died away and dealers took interest, it's possible market traders, discount stores, car boots(?) might have been quite heavily involved, along with some of the dealers who thought they could make money.

All that said, most retailers would still have cherry picked the good stuff out of boxes for customers (we did), and they'd have been sold over the counter in the normal manner. But peg warmers like Madine, Klaatu etc. would still have gone unsold, particularly as the assortments at that time were mainly ROTJ and the suppliers had massively overestimated how many would sell of those. Klaatu is the best example can think of, you can still get him for 10 a penny. I can remember being really disappointed when I opened box upon box of ROTJ figures when I knew the kids just wanted newer stuff (the Leia Endor, Han Trenchcoat, Emperor type assortment rather than the earlier ROTJ Palitoy 65 back stuff).

I also remember a dealer in Manchester running off to Portugal after a warehouse find, probably in 94/95 or so, but he came back with nothing. It goes to show though, that once SW came back into demand in the late 80's and early 90's, the dealers were actively doing everything they could to get hold of stock again.

Can anyone remember when the ironer got his stock from Arthur Brown? It looks like a good decision now to buy that stock, but I bet at the time he had no idea that demand would go nuts and it was actually a bit of a risk buying it all.
 

jedisearcher

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Great minds Joe :lol:

Agree 100% re: the shippers Joe, most never came out of the box. But also, I think Palitoy didn't give away the POS peg units, you had to buy them (maybe the first one was free, or perhaps the big traders got them free, I'm not sure), so faced with a cost to actually display the stuff, our MOCs went onto shelves and so were unpunched. Add to that places like Argos, Makro and the catalogues whose stuff would have stayed in boxes it's not difficult to see why many are unpunched even now.
 

Dublinjeff

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pizzathehutt said:
Apart from toy and model shops and also places like Argos.....

Funny you should mention I distinctly remember Argos , I distinctly remember that my mum travelled North to Belfast one Christmas to get ROTJ cards. ..no Argos in the South at the time!

Surely most of their stock was Unpunched?
 

theforceuk

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My Dad got me a Meccano Jawa from Tesco's in the mid 80's. What is the deal with them? Their seem to be loads still MOC.
 

x-pack

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My dad had carboot sales on his pub car park in the 80's and I remember dealers with boxes full of crappy Jedi figures for 50p each. That would have been 1986ish, during the short period in which I didn't think Star Wars was cool anymore :oops:

Because I saw this kind of thing first hand, and then a few years later saw the stock in clearance shops, the abundance of Jedi figures has never really surprised me. What does though is the number of mint Empire and ANH MOCs. These are much older toys that would have had to make way for each new line as it came out. What happened to the unsold old stock? Were they reduced to clear, sold to dealers, left languishing in the store or sent back to Palitoy/Kenner as a sale or return deal ?

Does anyone remember if ANH or Empire toys were still for sale alongside Jedi logo'd items ?
 

jedisearcher

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The number of Kenner SW and ESB Mocs around is surprising, but there seems to be continuous finds of Mocs over there as people stashed them away thinking they'd be worth something in a way that us Brits never did in the same numbers. There are just find after find of full sets of 12 backs etc., it's pretty amazing.

I think Palitoy shipped what they had and when stuff ran out shipped whatever they had on the most up to date cardback, so within the time gaps from each film they'd just move on to the next film cardback. Palitoy never really had the same number of variations that Kenner did do it would be fairly straightforward.

The returned stock is interesting. I think they must've stripped them and recarded them on the newest card backs and shipped them to the next customer. I can't remember whether Palitoy 65as and 65bs came together for example, but I know you'd never get ESB and ROTJ cards together.
 

Gorneesh

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I remember in 89/90 we was on holiday in Weymouth, and the Toy Master there had these wire bins full of MOC's for 50p each,must of been about three of them outside. My dad and I had a rummage througth but there was no one interesting they were all the normal ones Madine, Klaatu, etc.
 

poncho

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great thread :)

whats the deal the meccano jawa. how come there so many? is it the equilvant of a jedi klaatu.

im assuming there were loads of boxes of them discovered at some point but youd think there would be another meccano character in those boxes
 

Hooch

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poncho said:
great thread :)

whats the deal the meccano jawa. how come there so many? is it the equilvant of a jedi klaatu.

im assuming there were loads of boxes of them discovered at some point but youd think there would be another meccano character in those boxes
I have seen a few shrink wrapped shippers of Jawa's posted over the years. Finds like that would definitely help flood the market more
Been a few finds of shippers full of the same figure. I have seen shipper finds of Rancor Keepers, Potf Lumats and recently Rombas
Stuff is still out and about waiting to be bought
 

Captainsolo1978

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Or its dealer's like toytoni hoarding "rare" figures and bleeding them over the years. Or creating some in his case.
I never saw SW 12 or 21 backs during the Jedi period. Only some Ackbar 48 backs. I think retailers sent older figures back to be recarded on Jedi cards. Maybe why small head Hans are on ESB cards. That's what John Kellarman states in his book.
 

Pomse2001

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I think you are correct edd about the overstock.

But I also remember from when I was a kid. The supermarkets in denmark had big metal cages that was maybe 4 or 5 meters high full of star wars moc in the 80s. The store used a ladder to get up there with an open box so the could pouring them out of the box from the top of the cage. The the kids could only take the moc out from the bottom of the cage and each time you took some moc the pile of moc sank from the top. There must have been more than 1000 moc in that cage.

I also remeber other toy stores had some small cages with no top cage on them.

So many of this moc must have been unpunched, I think.
 
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