Pop Culture League: Buying Blind

Wha-hey-hey….the whole of September thus far had been TOTALLY on posts in response to the assignments given by Cool Captain Brian of the Cool and Collected blog. What happen to the regular posts you might ask? Well, they’re still there. I’m still writing whenever I can in between juggling commitments and this other thing called ‘life’. Those articles remained unedited and heaps of photos arising from my countless late night photo shoots still linger around in my SD memory card. I really should settle my backlogs. More stuff had been coming in the past couple of weeks and there’s a heckuva catching up to do.

I’m also in the midst of re-arranging my man cave so you can almost imagine the chaos I’m in right now.

But for now, it is time for me to respond to yet another weekly challenge given by Cool and Collected:

“Pop Culture League: Buying Blind”

While my wife, son and I dabbled in many blind bag collecting bug thus far, I think the one that really got our hearts pumping is the LEGO minifigures series. My son was into the Playmobil blind bags some time back but the LEGO minifigs remained the real deal for us. I wished we had more blind bags from other lines or series e.g. FUNKOs The Walking Dead series over here in Malaysia, but they don’t really appear at retail stores at decent price points therefore I’m just gonna ignore the fact that I’d have to pay loads of cash to purchase them at specialty toy stores around town.

So I’m just gonna talk about LEGO minifigures today.

I’m not sure how it is in other parts of the world but we Malaysians rarely depend on deciphered codes or bump codes to determined which minifigures/figures contained herein in any particular blind bag. So how do we do it then? Why, the old grab-and-feel technique of course! I heard that some stores banned their customers from doing so in fear of packet breakage. Those are still fragile packaging mind you.

It’s no fun to NOT know what you’re buying but it certainly satisfying to beat them scalpers to those oh-so-hard-to-get minifigures. So it’s technically a race to see who is the fastest to ‘identify’ what figure is inside the packet you’re holding.

I’ve read the article written by another blogger that says it’s practically cheating if you use bump codes and whatnots to determine which figures you get but I can say that I’d be more annoyed to find the same figures making its way into my collection again. So whatever techniques you feel necessary just employ them! Anything to get the minifigures you want to complete your collection, right? Just don’t be a scalper. Leave the extras for the next collectors because it’s a noble thing to do.

In the end of the day I’m just glad that Marvel Legends action figures are not sold via blind bags because that would’ve really taken my level of annoyance to a whole new level. Nuff said.

These are some posts on the subject by other Pop Culture League members, so check ‘em out if you have the time:

The Last Hometown talks about his fondness on Funko Horror Mystery Minis. 

Green Plastic Squirt Gun has a few lines goin' on at the same time
Alexis' Universe also collected a number of blind bag lines..

20 Years Before 2000 talked about Garbage Pail Kids..

Read more over at the Cool and Collected page HERE.