I showed up in the world in the nineteen-seventies, born into a household that both had a TV and allowed me to watch it, therefore I wanted thousands of toys, each new advertising campaign adding something to the list. It's not like I wanted everything, mind you, but if there was even a whisper of SF about it, I probably wished I had it.
I certainly did okay, with a dozen Star Wars figures, a couple of Megos, a die-cast Eagle from Space 1999, a box o' Matchboxs, etc. It's not like I was deprived of the spoils of lower middle-class opulence, but I always got the lower end of the toy line - Boba Fett, yes; Giant Boba Fett, no, etc.
Between my pool of friends, though, I could probably get some hands-on time with most of my favorite toys over the course of a month of visiting. I made do.
Thing is though, what I really really wanted (outside of a jet pack and, slightly more realistically, a personal hovercraft) was an Ultraman doll. I was completely obsessed - as Lixx put it about Space 1999, I watched the show every day like it was my job.
Unlike, say, the Max Machine Nighthawk, or even the Shogun Warriors (I admit I would have killed for any of them. Todd Ferguson had a couple, so I could get my fix over at his house), Ultraman (and Hyata and Baltan and Seabozu and the VTOL and poor, poor Pigmon and Keronia and Dada, and, and, and...) didn't have a TV ad that I could fixate on, didn't have a micro-picture in the weekly color toy circular in the paper to squint at longingly, didn't have a mail-away tie-in with a cereal company.
For all I knew, Ultraman toys simply did not exist! He and his friends (OH, and all his amazing and TERRIFYING looking enemies) only existed for a half-hour, five days a week AND THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH! I remember in one episode this little boy had a Baltan doll and I was so jealous. In another a kid was wearing a Halloween style plastic Ultraman half-mask. Torture.
As time went on I forgot about or stopped caring about most of the toys I fixated on in youth, but my fixation on the imaginary toys never left me for the rest of my childhood, through adolescence, right up to the moment I stumbled on to my first silver and red Bandai on a shelf in a novelty store in the hipster district of Dallas. It's quite a a few years and an unending series of long stories that leads up to the Sofubi and Me of today, but suffice it to say the fixations did not all end that fateful day in Texas.
It is, of course, 2011 now, and just this week I got another Ultraman, and another Baltan in the mail. Unfortunately that doesn't put a dent in my desire to find a ButanNoHana Seabozu, or a BearModel Bullton, or a Bullmark Jirass mini, or...
The grailquests still continue, but most of them still hail from Nebulas M78.
The sickness is in me.
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, but it is really about the stories and the unfullfilled longing. 
!! (thanks for reminding me Slack)
