Heroes in plastic

I missed William Shatner in Edinburgh. I live here. Captain Kirk came to my city for a weekend, and I couldn’t believe I’d missed it. So I did what any reasonable adult does and started looking at seeing him in Dublin instead: flights and somewhere to stay, for a photo. I was about ready to spend hundreds of pounds.

Then I remembered how these photos actually go, because I’ve done one. I saw Craig Charles at Comic Con in Edinburgh. I’m a big fan of Red Dwarf, and I enjoy listening to him on the radio. We stood back to back, making guns with our hands, and it’s an awesome picture. I paid for the frame. But it was next, next, next: no second take, over in about five seconds. I’ll treasure it, and it still isn’t on my wall.

An autograph gets you a bit more time to talk, but that costs too. It can be a hundred pounds for the autograph, another hundred for a selfie while you’re there, and another for the official photo, so it can run to three hundred. Chris Barrie signed one for my friend for about £45, and we had a great chat with him while he did. It helps these stars make a living, they do excellent stuff for the fans, and I really respect them all for doing it. At the Red Dwarf panel, someone said the programme had seen them through a hard time in their life. To some people these stars go beyond television. They’re a lifeline, something familiar.

Shatner is a great guy, but he’s not my friend and I’m not his. Out of a few hundred people that day, he won’t remember me. If I’m honest, I can barely remember the Craig Charles day without the photo, even though it was special. The excitement was bigger than the picture.

So what was I going to Dublin for? Not him, really. I was chasing the feeling of watching him in the programme.

Picard, not Patrick Stewart

The same day I was fretting about missing Shatner, Patrick Stewart died. He was 86.

He was a much-admired actor, and people will remember him for many things. To me he was Captain Picard. Patrick Stewart was the actor, but Picard was the man I watched, and Picard taught me a lot about being a good, honest man. Hearing he’d gone, on the day I was worrying about a photo with Kirk, showed me the mortality in all this.

There comes a phase in adult life when the heroes start going. The people we grew up watching are getting old, and some of them are dying. What we’ve got left are the toys: characters we know and love, made in the likeness of real people. The heroes are preserved in plastic, and the people aren’t. I wonder if some of the holding on is about our own mortality too. We become aware of it, and we hang on to the things that made us feel the way we did.

The bridge in the shop window

The first Star Trek LEGO set I bought was the Enterprise, Picard’s ship, which I wrote about in my book. Then I passed the LEGO shop and saw they’ve now got the original bridge, Captain Kirk’s.

And the question I can’t shake is what I’d be buying. The actors, or how the programme made me feel? A plastic Kirk doesn’t bring back how it felt to watch it. It might just be the Dublin trip again, in a box.

It isn’t just me

I wanted to know whether the feeling I was chasing is what the toy business is selling. It is, and it knows it. In Britain, about 30 per cent of toy sales now go to people aged 12 and over, up from 17 per cent in 2016. Building sets grew by a quarter last year and action figures by 16 per cent.

Fig. 1 · Who the toys are for

The companies know exactly who they’re selling to. In 2023 Hasbro’s chief executive told the Wall Street Journal, as Fortune reported, that about 40 per cent of its revenue came from adults, and that the heart of its adult fan business was delivering to 30, 40, 50-plusers the toys of their dreams.

And nostalgia does loosen the purse. In one set of experiments, people who’d been made to feel nostalgic were willing to pay more for the same products, and cared less about money generally. The willingness-to-pay test was 69 undergraduates and most of the rest were paid online panels, and it hasn’t been repeated that I can find. But anyone who has ever paid for a reissue of something they owned at nine will recognise it.

What the heroes cost

I’d assumed Transformers prices go up faster than inflation every year, and that on this trajectory we’ll be paying hundreds of pounds for a figure. I went and checked, and it’s not quite that.

Over the long run, yes. A Deluxe figure in America cost $9.99 in 2007 and $27.99 now. Held to inflation, it would cost about $16. That’s a real rise of around three-quarters. But it doesn’t rise every year. It jumps, then sits still for two or three years while inflation catches up, then jumps again. Over the last five years it has roughly matched inflation. In Britain a Deluxe is £27.99. On the twenty-year trend it would be about £45 in 2035; only if the last two years became the norm would it pass £50.

Fig. 2 · Steps that never come down

And the steps don’t come back down. In October 2025 American prices jumped, Voyagers by 23 per cent, while Hasbro was talking about tariffs. In its latest results Hasbro’s toy division booked a $48 million benefit from tariff refunds. The next Deluxe is already on pre-order at $29.99. And the real premium is further up: the Masterpiece Optimus Prime of 2019, imported from Takara Tomy, was $449.99, which is about $585 in today’s money. Those lines aren’t priced for the ten-year-olds who first loved the characters. They’re priced for the ten-year-olds who grew up.

The next generation

This might be the golden age. Children’s share of toy spending is shrinking, and there are fewer children: birth rates in England and Wales are at record lows. Gaming is the favourite pastime of children aged 8 to 17, and almost every 10 to 12-year-old plays.

I don’t think the urge to collect is going anywhere. But what today’s 10-year-olds love first is Roblox and Minecraft, and you can’t put those on a shelf in thirty years’ time or hand them on. That’s a guess, not a finding. And booms do end: some Labubu figures lost up to 88 per cent of their resale value in the second half of last year.

Where the joy stops

I wrote a whole book about this line, so I’ll keep it short. In it I said the difference between a collection and a hoard is the relationship: a collection is chosen and seen. A study that put hoarders and collectors side by side mostly agrees. Both acquire and both hang on, but the collectors were organised and selective, their homes weren’t swallowed by it, and they had less of it too.

The other thing I learned the hard way is that the hunt is the hit. The excitement was never the shelf. It was the waiting, the almost-mine. By the time the parcel arrived it had already gone, and what was left was a box with no room on the shelf for it, and the small dread of where it all goes. The hunt gave me the joy. The object gave me admin.

Fig. 3 · The hunt is the hit

That’s what the launch-day exclusive is built on. When I pre-ordered the Enterprise there was a little shuttle you could only get that day, and a helpful voice in my head said I’d regret not having the complete thing. The cleverest selling doesn’t create the want. It finds the one you already had and hands it a deadline. The Dublin photo had the same shape: a date, and a feeling I was scared to miss.

A collection is a hobby, not an investment, and it’s allowed to be joyful. The tests from the book still hold: how much of it have I actually enjoyed in the last year, and where will the next one go?

A long time after us

Plastic lasts. A study at the University of Plymouth reckoned a LEGO brick in the sea could survive for up to 1,300 years. Long after all of us, someone, or something, might pick up a little plastic Kirk or Picard and wonder who these figures were that people idolised. They might think they were gods.

They weren’t. They were actors playing people we wanted to be. The bridge set is still in the shop window, and I still don’t know whether I’d be buying Kirk, or how it felt to watch him.