12 July 2021
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Without a doubt, there are some very wealthy collectors in the US.
The last Hake’s sale netted a cool US$3.6m, which rewrote the company’s history books, this being a new record. On that basis, the toy market in the US shows no signs of decline, one feels.
The auction’s top lot was a 1999 Pokémon Shadowless Holographic uncut proof sheet with 99 cards, including seven coveted Charizard cards, which sold for US$234,171. For those to whom this genre is alien, Shadowless cards lack shadowing around the featured images. They are rarer than Unlimited Pokémon cards because of their smaller print runs. The set came from a Hasbro employee.
If Pokémon took the honours, then the Star Wars Boba Fett L-slot rocket-firing prototype figurine wasn’t far behind. The second to appear in a Hake’s sale, this surpassed the previous example in terms of value, netting US$165,200. Deemed too dangerous for commercialisation, this prototype was never manufactured.
More readily available was a 1980 display stand with six encapsulated action figures from Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back set was unused and swept past its US$20,000 high estimate to settle on US$36,302. Also, a vinyl-caped Jawa action figure encapsulated on a 12 back-A blister card exceeded expectations when it sold for US$24,245.
You can’t get more States-side than Peanuts – and Charles Schulz’s original artwork for the July 3, 1955 Peanuts Sunday comic page, featuring Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and Snoopy, was notable for the fact that all three characters appeared in all eight panels. The 17 x 23 inch artboard, artist signed and dated in the last panel, was bid to US$80,476.