I've never seen an action figure prior to 2005 with any redeeming qualities. Model kits and a few chogokin/megazord are the only exception.

I'm a zoomer, so i feel left out of the "community" when someone comes in trying to say how much better vintage star wars or turtles or mego were and the toy we have today are infinitely better sculpted and more accurate.

I think most of the retro toy fad, was nostalgia driven and not because they were any good. In other words they were funko pops for people afraid to collect funko pops

It's a nostalgia thing
Toys are better than they were back in the 80's, but the hobby has a large portion of people just collecting stuff from their time. In the "objective" sense ya those toys are outdated but people collect things for a variety of reasons beyond just accuracy and play patterns
As for the crazies that say shit like how older toys were better, its a blend of truth and rose-tinted glasses. As a Transformers fan who hopped on around 3 years ago, looking at some of those late G1 gimmick toys has me wishing we had that stuff today. BUT those toys had barely any articulation and could be a bitch to transform.
TL:DR elitism is gay collect what you want

Yeah man I never understood this nostalgia shit. I'm a 1:18 collecter and I get anything that looks cool; my old o-ring joes? Never touched them again once Modern Era came; my modern era Joes? Never even looked at them again (except for a core of 5-6 customized ones I did) once 25th ann joes came and then those got surpassed by Pursuit of Cobra, 30th anniversary etc.
O-ring figures objectively suck ass from a practical playable side now unless you look at them as modern art or some gay shit.
6inch joes suck but from a greedy, corporate and scale size point, but that's another thread.

>>11487717 (OP)
>never
>exception
nice muh shitty opinion thread faggot

>>11487717 (OP)
>I've never seen an action figure prior to 2005 with any redeeming qualities. Model kits and a few chogokin/megazord are the only exception.
10th anniversary Spawn is still best Spawn fig. And to this day there haven't been any good alternatives to Stikfas.

Mc Farlane stuff only came late 90s.

>>11487717 (OP)
They are designed to be chucked down the stairs by kids. I know because I did that and they never broke. Most of the items people are calling toys are really models, they cant be thrown down the stairs.

>>11487717 (OP)
I would say the plastic and the paint was much better. Modern transformers almost look like transluscent plastic. A lot of figures today have a lot of detail but then the paint quality suffers because it looks rushed. Even Lego was better back then. Real solid plastic with bright and accurate color when they only had one plant in Denmark. Now some pieces have visible hue differences because of quality control.

>>11487717 (OP)
>>11487731
It's not just nostalgia. While there have been advancements in toy production there's also been a lot of side steps and even more push backs. It helps to break down the pros and cons of each. For example, vintage Star Wars pros:

- created the modern action figure both in scale and design
-could handle the basics(it stands, it sits, it can hold weapons and fight, it can man computer stations or vehicles) and was well designed for play, vehicles and playsets had gimmicks and features
- virtually indestructible, you could find heavily played with toys in still decent condition literally decades after they came out(I got nearly every vintage SW toy over a period of 5 years or so in the late 90s and preferred most of them to the POTF2 stuff)
-massive variety of characters, vehicles, creatures, and playsets that contribute to world building, fun and varied play, and interesting displays
-cheap and affordable and readily available at the time
- toys were streamlined into one primary line with only a handful of alternate sub lines (micro, 12 inch)

Now look at modern SW pros:
- Great sculpts
- Usually super articulated


Honestly that's really all I can say. Yes individual figures look better and can move better. But a lot of them can barely stand. We also continued to improve steadily until around 2013 or so and then severe cost cutting measures started to hit, so even though we have advancements we rarely have access to all of them. So now we have the best sculpted figures ever, but paint is a thing of the past and most figures are engineered with as much as possible in molded plastic, tons of unpainted details and very minimal paint.
Figures have loads of articulation but many of them can barely stand.
Figures sometimes come with little to no accessories, and some of the accessories they do come with are a gummy mess, or they can't hold correctly or have backpacks that fall off easy etc. cont-

>>11487717 (OP)
>>11487731
>>11487982

Cont-
There's also poor distribution, poor character selection and planning- we tend to get random figures from all across the saga and very little feels complete, there's almost never anything on shelves that you can go buy at one time to make a compelling battle scene.

There's also dozens upon dozens of various different toy lines, it's always 1 or 2 or 3 waves of some random chibi figure or new scale concept or squishy mini and nothing ever really catches on or builds up. It means there's lots of Star wars shit on shelves but none of it goes together and it's always remaking the same dozen characters before the line is dropped and some other new concept bullshit comes up, and that's before getting into the split resources of the central toylines since we have black series and vintage and some retro stuff and some kinda kiddish line etc.

It's all a fucking mess.
So yeah, the detail is great. The articulation is better. That's where it starts and ends.

>>11487982
>>11487984
This touched on a lot of reasons why toys from the 80s and 90s are better
Not every toy needs to be some hyper detailed super articulated thing. A toy should look cool and be fun to play with. A lot of people now get so caught up on having screen accurate mini models that they don't pay attention to the fact that it doesn't even work as a toy. There's no gimmicks, shit falls off if you breath on it, there's toys out there that are made entirely in computers and no one bothers to test stuff until it's in full production and too late to change anything, so you get tons of articulation that has barely any range of motion, accessories that can't be held, armor that doesn't fit, and fun action features? Theyre out there, but usually relegated to pre school aged toys when they'd be better served integrated into more detailed toys.

>>11487982
>>11487984
Huh, I hadn't thought of it like that but yeah you make a good point

>old toys are indestructible
Not true, and second not relevant.
>character selection
Arguement used by hoarding retards who think wolfman adds anything of value to the star wars universe
>vehicles
That looked like shit
>the paint was better
No it wasn't. Japanese imports consistently have perfect paintjobs.

There really is no redeeming quality to most vintage toys

>>11487717 (OP)
>I'm a zoomer, so i feel left out of the "community" when someone comes in trying to say how much better vintage star wars or turtles or mego were and the toy we have today are infinitely better sculpted and more accurate.
This is wrong, retro toys are superior, let the king explain why.
https://youtu.be/db95VEQh6Uo?t=291

>>11487717 (OP)
Modern toys are better for display, but retro toys are way more fun to actually play with.
But this of course is all dependent on the figures themselves on a case by case basis.
Articulation is nice, but sometimes it can be too much, I love 5POA, but I remember when hinge and swivel shoulders started being introduced, or bendable knees. That shit was awesome, but then as you got into the early 00s with Toy Biz Marvel Legends (and a lot of Toy Biz figures from that era), a lot of the time the figure ended up just being a floppy mess because of the joints all over the place. But it's not a guarantee. I still think the first Spider-Man movie super poseable Spider-Man is one of the best Spidey figures ever made, but also uses the same base body as the Marvel Legends comic Spider-Man regular and Black suit figures which I have and those are both pieces of shit.
I have probably a dozen Darth Vader figures from all different eras, and my favourite is probably always going to be the Movie Hero Series figure with the light-up saber gimmick, even though it locks one arm in pace and normally I hate gimmicks like that.
The MOTU Origins figures look like the original figures, but the added articulation and modular nature of the design is absolutely a genius move and makes those figures probably the best MOTU figures ever made, but they gave the Street Sharks figures the same treatment and the plastic used on the joints twists before the joint bends like it's supposed to and so the pre-posed 90s figures end up being way more fun to play with.
It's all just about finding individual toys you like.

>>11488400
Zat, why are you alive.

>>11487717 (OP)
I'm a boomer...I think. And i didnt care about 5poa shit when it was new neither. It wasn't until the advent of Marvel Legends that I started to warm up to the actual hobby.

>>11491133
So as a kid you didn't like the cool new toys and now that you're an adult you like the shitty braindead 1/12 shit?
So you've always been a loser, then and now.

>>11487717 (OP)
Idk man, i get what you are saying but i think 5 poa can be fun. I loathe these new o ring styled figures, they just look awful.

>>11487897
And they were 5 poa or occasionally bendy rubber like violater. Ive got a wetworks werewolf (?) Thats 5 poa and thats certainly not one of the earlier figures.
I think alot of those early comic boom period figures were 5 poa, zen the intergalactic ninja and warrior nun were.

>>11491110
Trump protects pedos like him & our hypocrite janitor

>>11491563
You kill cats Diosoth.

>>11491563
Rouge isn’t real.

I think there's a lot of great pre-2005 toys, but most of them would be ones that are ambitious for the time
Since you like some Chogokin/Megazords, you must not only care about articulation, and in that case there's also a lot of cases of build materials and paint apps that were peak in retail lines around the late 90's and 2000's.
Of course, when it comes to more expensive options, we're doing better than maybe ever- thought I'd say prices have also become less of a value for the expense. It feels like even pre-Covid we were getting to the end of the best price value relative to what you got.

>>11491466
>he thinks 5poa was cool
ok loser

I thought the whole point of collecting toys was nostalgia? Why the fuck would a childless adult hoard childrens toys otherwise?

>>11488026
fucking cope harder faggot

>>11487731
>and could be a bitch to transform
explain

>>11491754
ragebait thread, OP didn't think this through

Ultra old fag here.

I noticed a discernible difference between robot toys made in the early 80s versus the latter. While earlier ones contain things like chrome parts and diecast, because they were still figuring out things they tended to be quite fragile (look at Dinobot Swoop from 1985 for example). Later on they got more robust and sturdier I would say around 1986 to 1988..

>>11496452
I remember early we had Zoids. Then they fucked off back to Japan and got replaced with Transformers. A significant downgrade.

Most 80s toys are awful & most 80s toons have delusional fandoms, if they even have a fandumb at all anymore

>>11491596
You will never be white, chomojin. Treat your DDS, I'm not him. Didn't he prove you to be a liar? Go die for the Jews.

>>11496596
In the mid 80’s we got Robostux, which was basically Zoids but with a new mythos and one side were blue and silver and the other were tan, dark red.

https://youtu.be/pI2RXUt-SJw?si=Zhrz2YaQ4wWBGK77

>>11487717 (OP)
Retro toys were designed to be played with and appeal to actual children. They weren't intended to appeal to obese 35 year old autistic losers like (You). You don't like them? Good, you aren't supposed to. Now go fondle your perfectly sculpted, lore-accurate Boba Fett figure with 10,000 points of articulation that no kid wants to touch.

>>11487717 (OP)
A lot of Beast Wars toys still holds up. Beast Wars Optimus Primal came out in 96, it's fucking older then I am and it's seriously the best action figure I've ever owned. The hidden weapons, how they spring out, all the cool blasters, the articulation the over all sick design. It's a fucking masterpiece so much so I'm not even interested in the actual transformers MP of it. There are some other figures that are pretty cool too with gimmicks but yeah I do agree things have improved a crazy amount overall for figures.

>>11496693
>one side were blue and silver and the other were tan, dark red.
Yeah that's the same as Zoids in Europe.

>>11496596
How did you feel about their return years later?

>>11496918
I don't really like how the newer stuff looks. It's hard to explain and maybe I'm just attached to the designs due to nostalgia but the 80s Zoids had a distinct look to them while the later stuff went a more anime/pokemon like direction.