So here we are on the verge of 2011 which means another year of Jumbo Machinder record keeping is at an end. And just like in 2009, in 2010 I made some changes to the way I’ve maintained these records. Previously, I simply recorded each sale as they happened, meaning that everything was chronological. However, most people were not willing to take the time to sift through the sales for the specific toy/character they were interested in (which always really annoyed me because the time I spent compiling the information was exponentially great, but whatever…) . So this year, I re-arranged all of my files into sub-folders for each individual character. (The naming of each individual image remains essentially unchanged from last year.)
The end result of this is that now you have a format like this:
Machinder Sales
>Popy Heroes
>>Mazinger Z
>>>PHOTOS
Thus, if you are only interested in Mazinger Z, you can go directly into the proper folder and see every sale for that character. Now, while more easily searchable, this format produces a lot of folders and rather than increase the amount of them by further separating the character sales by year (or further by month), I simply just lumped ALL sales of that character in one single folder. This means that each folder has the aggregate sales for that character from the last THREE years combined! Further, each image still has the date of the sale recorded as the title so if you want to track them chronologically, simply right click in the folder and select “sort by title”.
Of course, there are more jumbos out there than just the Popy heroes so when you download the records, you’ll find the following folders exist under “Machinder Sales”:
Popy Heroes
Pretty self explanatory, this folder contains sub-folders with pictures of the Popy heroes that sold.
Popy Villains
Again, self explanatory. Sub-folders contains each individual character.
Non-Popy Licensed Jumbos
Under this folder, you’ll find sub-folders for other companies that made LICENSED jumbos only. This includes companies like Takara, Bullmark, etc.. I DO NOT record sales of Shogun Warriors or Unifives, but since it is a less common, more significant toy, I did record many sales of Mattel’s Rodan. Basically, if I recorded everything, I’d have no time for anything so I tried to use some discretion and record only the most significant sales.
Bootlegs
This is where I stores all the full sized bootleg jumbos and organized them by country of origin.
Junior Machinders
Junior Machinders are a hard thing to track but I tried to break them up in a way that made sense to me. Most junior machinders are from Italy so there is a big sub-folder for those, but you’ll also find one for Argentina and the two legitimate Japanese companies that made some.
Carnival Machinders
I often flip-flopped on whether to record these at all, but there are some so they’re included. But it’s a small folder.
Customs
Whenever I saw a notable custom jumbo for sale, I tried to record that as well. Also a small folder.
Accessories
To be clear, I didn’t even attempt to record ALL the accessory sales that took place because again, it would take forever. But the major ones seemed relevant to me.
Spare parts and items of interest
Things that were noteworthy, but not really appropriate for other folders went here. Parts, boxes, instructions, posters….whatever.
Abberations
This is the WTF!?!?! folder. Only 2 items in it, but I’m sure there was a lot more that could have been placed here. While I strongly disapprove of a lot of the prices being realized these days, these two just stood out as unbelievably high prices for not especially interesting toys.
As with the last two years, I’ve uploaded the folder and all it’s sub-folders in a .zip file to MEGAUPLOAD.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=86KUNMMQ
And as the title of this blog post would imply, I hope you’ve made some use of or enjoyed this information because I do not plan to continue to do this in 2011. It’s just too much work and between real life and changing tastes, I just don’t take much pleasure in it anymore. Furthermore, you may have noticed I haven’t been posting anything here at CDX for awhile either and frankly the same reasons apply. So while I’ll never say never, I wouldn’t expect any further contributions from me here after this post. I may someday finish that Junior Machinder overview, but frankly, I sort of regretted even starting that as soon as I did it and during CDX’s downtime, I discovered some new things that I didn’t know existed and some other information that just killed what little ambition I had (such as the fact that the Gundam junior says Ceppi Ratti on the box.. but is stamped “SMC” on the toy. Ugh….).
Anyway, thanks for any and all feedback over the years and I hope I’ve shown at least a few of you something you hadn’t seen before!