Dark of the Moon toys Street Date today! A lesson learned...

I guess if you are a fan of the movie toys today is a great day for you since it is the street date for all DOTM toys in the United States. If the movies aren't your thing then today is just another day. For me it is the latter; I've learned my lesson. In 2007 when the first Transformers movie was about to come out I had a very specific plan as to what I was going to do. The toys for that movie were to be released in early June. I had actually planned to take the day off from work, and hit six or seven different stores to get all the figures I wanted. I also had saved up quite a lot of money so I could get everything on the release date. Back then the movie universe was just another aspect of Transformers that I planned to collect just because it was Transformers. It didn't really matter whether I actually liked the toys or the designs.

However all that changed as more and more movie toys were released. I believe it was sometime around January or February of the following year that I realized I didn't actually want all these things coming out. I was just buying them because they were new Transformers toys. They really all started to look the same after a while and I had no desire to keep collecting them. This wasn't the first time in my collecting experience where I stopped buying new figures due to lack of desire. The first time was in 1999 with Beast Machines. I bought about five or six figures from Beast Machines until I couldn't make myself buy anymore. But that is another story.

So between 2008 and 2009 I got rid of many of the movie toys I had accumulated. I really only kept figures of characters that were in the actual movie. Then Revenge of the Fallen toys were released and I lapsed. I didn't make the elaborate plans like I had for the first movie, but I did end up going out on the day they were released and picking up ten or twelve figures. During that time I was in the process of moving so I actually didn't get to open them for a few days. Once I finally did I ended up transforming them once and putting them on the shelves. And never touched them again. Not long after that I actually went to see the disaster that was Revenge of the Fallen and was quite dismayed. (To this day it is the only Transformer media that I do not own and have no desire to ever own). I realized after that I didn't really like any movie toys or the movie aesthetic at all. So again I went through a toy purge and got rid of almost all my movie toys. The only ones I actually kept were figures that spoke to me for other reasons. I kept ROTF Leader Prime because he is an amazing feat of engineering, and I kept the original movie Brawl for the same reason. I also kept the twins' Ice Cream truck because my wife likes it so much. And finally I kept the Legend version of Devastator because it represents what Hasbro/Takara could have done with the large Devastator had they really tried.

So to recap I have learned my lesson time and time again. This year I have absolutely no plans at all to purchase any Dark of the Moon toys; in fact only one figure from the entire line has looked interesting to me and that is because he is a homage to a G2 figure. So thank you movie toys, you've made me realize that I don't have to own every transformers figure that ever comes out, because many of them suck in the end.