So I was looking for photos online to see how people actually put their large collections on display, and I stumbled across this:

https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/10/im-biggest-fan-transformers-collector-holds-world-record-spending-50000-toys-10894354/

So, this fellow, named Louis Georgiou, had a collection of just over 2000 Transformers when he filed for the record with Guiness. He'd only been collecting for about eight years. I'm not saying anything about true fans or anything, but that just seems like a shockingly short period of time to amass so many toys. To me, toys that came out eight years ago (2014) I still consider recent!

I actually don't know how many Transformers I have right now, but I think the number might be larger than that. When I photodocumented my collection in 2008, I ended up with 1500 files in my "Transformers" folder, but I've also bought thirteen years' worth of toys since then. I think I definitely could have bought five hundred toys in a thirteen year period. That breaks down to like 38 toys a year. That wouldn't be difficult for me.

I guess it really depends on what you define as a Transformers toy. Do the Robot Heroes figures count? Do Happy Meal toys count? Do Animorphs count? Do custom figures count?

And, here's the thing. I am certain there are fans who have even more toys than I do, because I don't buy everything. I'm fairly choosy. I only got one of each character from the toy lines of the live-action movies, for example. Lots of movie toys that I skipped. I wasn't buying Studio Series at all until they started doing G1 characters. I've hardly touched Cyberverse.

So, I really strongly question whether this guy has the world's largest Transformers collection. It just doesn't compute. All I know is that it's somebody else, and it's almost certainly not me.

I might actually have one of the largest customized toy collections though. It's nearing the six hundred mark, which I tend to think is a lot. But, there's probably some guy out there who has done like sixteen hundred.

A while ago I was reading about some of the largest toy collections in existence. Here's one of them:

https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0217/World-s-largest-toy-collection-breaks-records

The collection spans some 35,000 items and was sold to Sotheby's, and it's so important that it gets capitalized: the Jerni Collection. They displayed it on an entire floor but they could still only showcase about twenty percent of the collection. My brain doesn't even work in numbers that large. Thirty five thousand is a hell of a lot of toy trains.

There's another guy who claimed to have all the action figures and playsets ever produced. I wish I could find information about it online right now, but my Google-Fu is coming up short. I think the estimate was that he had between 85,000 to 95,000 items in his collection. That just seems preposterous. I do a search for numbers that big, and I get results about toy production runs, not collections.

I wonder what we're all missing in our lives that we need so many pieces of plastic. Also, as a thought exercise, I wonder how many different prehistoric skeletons made the fossil fuels that got processed into petroleum to make my collection?

Zob (the Dinobots are made from real dinosaurs!)

Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:
> So I was looking for photos online to see how people actually put their
> large collections on display, and I stumbled across this:
>
>
> https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/10/im-biggest-fan-transformers-collector-holds-world-record-spending-50000-toys-10894354/
>
> So, this fellow, named Louis Georgiou, had a collection of just over 2000
> Transformers when he filed for the record with Guiness. He'd only been
> collecting for about eight years. I'm not saying anything about true
> fans or anything, but that just seems like a shockingly short period of
> time to amass so many toys. To me, toys that came out eight years ago
> (2014) I still consider recent!
>
> I actually don't know how many Transformers I have right now, but I think
> the number might be larger than that. When I photodocumented my
> collection in 2008, I ended up with 1500 files in my "Transformers"
> folder, but I've also bought thirteen years' worth of toys since then. I
> think I definitely could have bought five hundred toys in a thirteen year
> period. That breaks down to like 38 toys a year. That wouldn't be difficult for me.
>
> I guess it really depends on what you define as a Transformers toy. Do
> the Robot Heroes figures count? Do Happy Meal toys count? Do Animorphs
> count? Do custom figures count?
>
> And, here's the thing. I am certain there are fans who have even more
> toys than I do, because I don't buy everything. I'm fairly choosy. I
> only got one of each character from the toy lines of the live-action
> movies, for example. Lots of movie toys that I skipped. I wasn't buying
> Studio Series at all until they started doing G1 characters. I've hardly
> touched Cyberverse.
>
> So, I really strongly question whether this guy has the world's largest
> Transformers collection. It just doesn't compute. All I know is that
> it's somebody else, and it's almost certainly not me.

2000 doesn’t seem like a lot. Combiner Wars was about a hundred toys on its
own (including G2 colors). Titans Return is either a bit smaller, or way
larger depending on whether the heads are toys.

> I might actually have one of the largest customized toy collections
> though. It's nearing the six hundred mark, which I tend to think is a
> lot. But, there's probably some guy out there who has done like sixteen hundred.
>

>
> Zob (the Dinobots are made from real dinosaurs!)

I think oil comes from plankton and plants, actually… but dino nuggets are
actually made from dinosaurs. And mayonnaise.