How important is scale?

Posted by Mike Robinson on Feb 10th 2023

How important is scale to you as a collector? I realize this may be a rhetorical question for now as we don't have much of a forum started yet, but scale has become increasingly important to me over the past 10 years or so. Earlier in my collecting career scale didn't matter much. If they were solid figures from a show or franchise that I really liked, I would buy them whether they were 4", 6", 8", 12" or anything in between. One day though I was comparing the same character from the same company but in two different scales (it was actually the Mark I Iron Man suit from Hasbro's Iron Man 2 toy line) and I realized something. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, 3 3/4-inch was always my go-to scale. Star Wars, GI Joe ARAH, Remco Universal Monsters, Micronauts, Battlestar Galactica, Tron, The Black Hole, you name it. If it was 3 3/4-inch, I wanted it. That was the "magic" scale for me. When I dreamed of figures I wanted (very similar to the dream Super7 has realized), whether it was Aliens, Doctor Who, Night of the Living Dead or whatever else, I always imagined them being 3 3/4-inch. I never dreamed of 12-inch versions of my favorite characters, or 6-inch... always just 3 3/4-inch. So about 10 years ago I realized that, for me, that's still where the magic is. So now, 99% of my personal collection is all 3 3/4-inch. I still hold onto a few MASK figures and vehicles and a few 12-inch GI Joe Adventure Team figures for nostalgia, but for the most part all I buy these days is 3 3/4-inch, or 1:18 as we've started to call it. (Although, for the record, 1:18 is closer to 4-inch than vintage 3 3/4-inch imho :) What about you? Do you have favorites when it comes to scale? Or is it more about other factors?