Hello beautiful people.
Lately, I've been nurturing my inner child and revisiting stuff I loved as a kid.
I started watching the old Transformers cartoons on YouTube along with Robotech before moving onto The Transformers: Headmasters.
The Headmasters was originally released in Japan before receiving a truly awful dubbing into English.
It's like the producers just dragged random people with no voice acting experience off the street, stuck them in the recording studio, gave them the script and said "Read this."
So I watched the Japanese original with subtitles.
All this leads me to today's blog topic - Adventures With eBay.
As part of my inner child nurturing, I started searching online for reissues of the old Transformers toys and made a shocking (not really) discovery: vintage Transformers toys from the eighties are selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
Even some of the reissues are selling for over a hundred Australian dollars each.
Wanting to pick up some of the toys I didn't have as a child, I got into a bidding war over a commemorative reissue of Starscream with fancy packaging.
It's the Aussie dollar. On a good day, it'll buy around 72 US cents. Starscream sold for $60 US plus shipping.
Taking into account the exchange rate, it would have cost me around $118 Australian.
Later that day, I received an offer from a Canadian seller offering a Starscream reissue for $57 Canadian plus shipping. Even with the exchange rate, and sales tax (the Australian government has to have its pound of flesh) it came to just over ninety Australian dollars.
Shut up and take my money.
The other day, I stumbled upon this truly glorious Japanese reissue of Optimus Prime:
Fun fact: in Japan, Optimus Prime is called Convoy
For comparison purposes, here's Optimus with his usual trailer.
Now imagine if he was remote controlled and you could drive him across the floor to deliver a bottle of soda.