There's A Sucker Born Every Minute. Hey, That's Me!

So, if you've spent any time at all in the Park over the past several months, you've no doubt at some point come across these little characters called Vinylmation(s).  They're in a ton of the stores, and if you've ever given pin collecting even a remote glance, you've probably wandered into a store and seen them -- Westward Ho in Frontierland being one of my personal favorites.

They're very similar to the pins in the fact that they're highly sought after items, highly collectible, and they're trade-able (much like pins, there are "rules" as to how this is done, but I'll save that for another blog).  

Each series of 3" figures comes in sets of 12, and each individually will run you $9.95.  There are 11 standard vinylmation characters in each series, and 1 "chaser", which of course starts out as a mystery character until the figures are released, at which point everyone knows who the "chaser" is.  "Chasers" are of course, more limited than the other 11 (I've heard there is only 1 per every box of 24).

Now, I've dabbled in pin collecting a bit here and there.  For a while, I bought one each and every time I went into the Park.  But it got to be a bit hectic when my kids (of course) started to want to collect, too.  Then we kind of got all over the place with it.  The amount of time I stood around in Westward Ho or PT Flea's while my kids ran around like they were on a Toys R Us shopping spree kind of became unbearable.  I can't really blame them, though.  I can never make up my mind, either.  But with so many choices available, it became torture.  And so now we don't buy pins much anymore.  And we've never traded them.  

Enter the Vinylmation.  What originally made me want to avoid collecting these might in fact be my salvation.  See, the kicker with these is this:  when you buy one, you know what series you are buying from, but you have no idea which one is in the package you are buying.  They're a complete mystery.  You could conceivably buy 5 from one series, and get all 5 exactly the same.  While this would seem to suck on the surface, here's where the trading would come in.  Swap it out (blindly again, but the odds are in your favor for getting something you don't already have this time) for another one, perhaps from a completely different set.  You see where this is going; the variations are endless.  

So perhaps this is the answer.  As a daddy who would love to be able to collect something with his kids, and as someone with a proclivity to obsessive compulsive collecting himself, I think we just might have to give this a whirl.  We'll keep you posted on our Vinylmation adventures.  

In the meantime, the Disney Parks Blog posted a pretty cool video today about the trading process.  I won't say it completely sold me on the idea (yet), but it certainly helped. 

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