A
few years ago I came across a stack of menko for sale on eBay, all featuring
characters from the Transformers animated series of the 1980s. It was a sizeable stack, and there were some duplicates as well. I was pretty new to menko at that point, and wasn't sure I needed such a big lot of them, so I went back and forth for a while on whether I should make the purchase. Thankfully, nostalgia won out, and I gave myself the green light. Here are just some of the cards:
The fantastic artwork and vivid colors were too good to pass up.
After I received the cards and finished sorting through them, I contacted SumoMenkoMan, who had a bunch of cards from this very same set. Together we came up with a checklist and submitted it to TCDB. It was the first time I'd contributed to the database in this way, and it felt pretty good.
And you know what? That one lot of cards I purchased had gotten me fairly close to having the full set—about 75%, in fact. As time went on, I became more and more thankful that I made the purchase. The cards would rarely show up on auction sites, and when they did, it was even more rare that the cards being offered were ones I needed for my collection. A couple of years ago, I was able to pick up three more cards. And then there was a whole lot of nothing for a while.
Recently, however, that changed.
A seller on eBay listed a dozen cards from the set. I eagerly scanned the images in the listing, hoping there'd be at least one that I needed.
There were two.
Quickly I emailed the seller, asking if he'd be willing to sell me those two menko separately. To my great pleasure, he told me that he had a few extra copies of those two cards, and he'd be happy to list them separately, as long as we could agree on a price.
Well, these menko have been going for super-high prices lately, and I wasn't too excited about his first offer. I suggested a trade for some of my duplicates, but he wasn't interested. Eventually, we agreed on a fair price, and I was happy to seal the deal. (I also ended up listing and selling a few of my duplicates on eBay, which definitely lessened the blow.)
Within a week or so, the package arrived. Here are the two new guys, on full display.
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| Smokescreen and Thundercracker card fronts |
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| Smokescreen and Thundercracker card backs |
Smokescreen is an Autobot. Thundercracker is a Decepticon. I'm surprised they made it all the way to my mailbox without blasting each other apart. But it's a good thing they did.
Their safe arrival means I've now got 41 of the 48 menko in the set. And here's what makes it really interesting:
I'm not completely sure the other 7 menko even exist!
When SumoMenkoMan and I were compiling the checklist, we took an educated guess on some of the well-known Generation 1 characters that would almost have to be included in the set, but whose cards we'd never seen ourselves—not even in pictures on the internet.
So, although it's likely I haven't completed this set, I do currently have all 41 known cards in the set.
It's a pretty fun accomplishment for an '80s kid like me, who grew up with that original cartoon, and who still gets hit with a big dose of nostalgia whenever he hears that theme song.
How about you readers? What TV shows or films bring back the nostalgia enough to make you want to collect some of the related cards or stickers? (The A-Team, Magnum P.I., Three's Company, Indiana Jones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc.)
Share in the comment section, and thanks for reading!
