21 Old Toys From Your Childhood That Are Secretly Worth A Fortune (Check Your Attic)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Somewhere in your house tonight, up in the attic in a box you have not opened in years, there is a toy from your childhood that could be worth more than your car. 21 old toys from your childhood that are secretly worth a fortune. That is what we are doing this evening, and I want you to go and check your attic before the week is out. Now let me disqualify a few things straight away. The bag of plastic army men, the fast food figures, the teddy you love to bits with one eye missing, and the stuffing coming out of his paw, those are memories, and memories are worth a great deal, but they are not worth money. What I am after tonight is a different animal. I am after the thing that got put away still in its box, the duplicate birthday present that nobody ever opened. And here is the reality stamp before we go a step further. Most old toys are worth a few dollars. I valued thousands of them across 40 years, and most of what came across my table was worth the price of a sandwich. But every so often, every so often, something came out of a carrier bag that made the whole room go still. I will tell you now, there is one toy on tonight's list. A little figure that most of you had a whole shelf of as a child, that sold for about $525,000. For one piece of painted plastic. I am not going to tell you what it is yet. It sits at number one, and when I finally tell you what it is, you are going to be very cross with your younger self. By the end of tonight, you will know what to look for, what to pick up, and turn over, and what to never let out of the house. We are going to count them up together, from number 21, the one's worth a little, all the way down to number one, the one worth a fortune, and each one will be worth more than the one before it. Let me be honest with you before we start, because false hope is the enemy of good judgment. The toy in your loft is probably worth $10. The common version of almost everything on tonight's list is worth very little, and I will give you the plain floor on each one before I give you the exception. But, here is what 40 years in the trade taught me. The difference between $10 and $10,000 is almost never the toy itself. It is the box, it is the condition, and it is the one in a thousand that nobody ever played with. The family that kept the cardboard. The duplicate that went straight into the wardrobe. That is where the money hides. And it breaks my heart, because for every treasure I valued, I know a clearance man got to ten houses first. The men with the vans, who cleared the whole estate in an afternoon for a flat fee, who knew exactly what that box was worth, and said nothing to the family. They knew. They always knew. So tonight, I am going to make sure you know too. Now, before we carry on, let me say one thing. The support my channel has had lately has been overwhelming, and I mean that. So here's what I've decided. I'm not putting ads on these videos. You've given me your time, and I won't have it interrupted. If you'd like to support my channel, there's one way. You can scan the code on screen now, with your phone's camera, to get my book. I've put everything I know into one book, the Household and Collectibles Price Guide, 2027 edition. Every common item you might own, how to value it, and what it actually sells for. It even tells you where and how to sell it, who buys it, what they'll pay, and which route to take for which object. To get it, and everything I know, it's over at my website, Malcolmashby.com. That's M-A-L-C-O-L-M-A-S-H-B-Y dot com. Right, let's carry on. Marbles. A jar of them on the windowsill, the ones your father kept from when he was a boy. Most marbles are worth pennies. The machine made ones from the 50s and 60s, a dollar or two for a whole bag. But the handmade German ones, made before the First World War, those are a different thing entirely. A handmade swirl, in good order, can bring 50 to 300 dollars. And a sulfide, the clear glass ones, with a little white animal figure set inside. A rare example can reach two or three thousand dollars at auction. Your test tonight. Take the jar to a lamp and look for a tiny rough mark at one end, a little scar where the glass was cut from the rod by hand. Machine marbles are perfectly smooth at both ends. That rough mark is the sound of money. A lady brought a cocoa tin of her grandfather's marbles to a sale, expecting nothing. Three of them were handmade sulfides. The tin made $1,900. Number 20, the cap gun. Every boy had one on his hip. The roll of caps that smelt of gunpowder in summer. The plastic ones from the 70s, a few dollars. But the early cast iron cap pistols, the ones from the 30s and 40s, with the horse heads and the engraved barrels, those collectors want. A good cast iron kilgore or stevens can bring two to five hundred dollars, and the rarest animated ones, where a little cowboy rears up when you pull the trigger, have passed a thousand. Your test tonight. Pick it up and feel the weight. Cast iron is heavy and cold, and often rusted at the hinge. If it is light and warm to the touch, it is post-war die-cast. Still collectible, but not the prize. A man cleared his late brother's shed and put a box of toys on the tip pile. A neighbor fished out two cast iron cap guns before the lorry came. They made four hundred and sixty dollars. The brother had carried them up the garden himself, not knowing. Number 19, the view master. That red plastic viewer you held up to the window with reels of Snow White and the Grand Canyon. The common reels, a dollar or two. The viewers themselves, not much. But the early reels matter. The single reels from the late 40s, the hand-lettered ones, and especially the commercial and scenic reels made in small numbers, can bring 50 to 200 dollars each. And a rare boxed set in the right subject has passed a thousand dollars. Your test tonight. Look at the reels, not the viewer. Hold them to the light and read the little printed dates and numbers around the center. Anything from the 40s, anything handwritten, anything that is not a Disney cartoon, set it aside. A chap brought me a shoebox of 300 reels, expecting nothing. Eleven were rare scenic reels from 1948. Those eleven made $620. Number 18, the Pez dispenser. The little character heads that flip back so the sweet shot out. Modern ones, a dollar at the till. But the early ones are a serious collecting field. The no-feet dispensers, the ones made before 1987 with no little plastic feet at the base, are the ones to find, and the soft head promotional ones, rarer still. A regular no-feet character might bring $20 to $100, but the famous rarities, a Mr. Potato Head prototype, a 1982 astronaut, have reached several thousand. And the rarest, an astronaut bee, has been valued near $30,000. Your test tonight. Turn it upside down and look at the base. No feet, no little tabs, just a flat stem. No feet means older, and older means money. A woman nearly binned her son's old sweet dispensers in a house clear out. One was a no-feet make-a-face. It's sold for $380. Number 17. The little die-cast cars. Matchbox in the 50 box. Dinky Corgi. Lined up along the bedroom carpet. Loose and played with. Chipped paint. A few dollars each. But here is the rule that runs through this whole hobby. The box multiplies everything. A loose dinky van might be $10. The same van mint in its original box can be $300. And the rare ones, a pre-war dinky delivery van, a Corgi gift set, a trade livery van made for a single year, bring two, three, $7,000 boxed. Your test tonight. Do not just hunt the cars. Hunt the boxes. Look for the little yellow matchbox boxes, the blue dinky boxes, flattened in a drawer. The cardboard you are about to recycle is half the value. A gentleman sold his childhood cars for $40 at a boot sale, loose in a bag. The buyer had spotted, underneath a single box dinky, that alone made $1,100. Number 16. Model horses. The briar horses lined up on the shelf. The glossy heartlands, beloved of children who wanted a pony and got plastic instead. The common ones, $10 to $30. But briar is a deep and serious market. The early glossy finishes, the discontinued colours, and above all the test runs and special run models made in tiny numbers, bring hundreds and sometimes thousands. A rare test colour briar has passed $5,000 among collectors. Your test tonight. Look for the mould stamp inside the back leg or on the belly, and then look hard at the colour. An odd colour nobody else seems to have, a run that looks almost like a mistake, is often a rare test piece and the most valuable of all. A family gave three boxes of their daughter's old horses to a charity shop. One was a special run model worth $800. The charity shop priced it at three. Number 15. The Fisher Price pull toy. The little wooden dog, or duck, on wheels you dragged along on a string. The common post-war ones, $10 to $30. But the early ones, the pre-1950 wooden toys with the named characters Dr. Doodle, Granny Doodle, the early licensed Mickey and Donald pull toys, those the collector's chase. A rare early named Fisher Price, in honest paint, can bring $300 to over $1,000. Your test tonight. Turn it over and look for the paper label and the date, then look at the printed paper on the sides. If it is wood and not plastic, and the character has a name you have to look up, you may well have something. A man found his father's old pull-along duck in a trunk, paint-worn, but all there, a 1937 model. He expected nothing from it. It made $490. Number 14. The metal lunchbox. The domed tin box you carried to school, the cowboy or the rocket, printed across the lid, with the matching flask inside. A battered common box, $20 to $70. But the character boxes are a proper market, and the flask is the secret. A box with its original matching thermos is worth far more than the box alone. The early ones, a 1950s Superman, a hop-along Cassidy, a rare rocket design, have brought one to $10,000 complete with the flask. Your test tonight. Find the flask. Everybody loses the flask. If you still have the matching thermos with its cup and stopper, you may have doubled or trebled the value in a single stroke. A woman kept her childhood lunchbox for the memory and nearly threw out the dented old flask that went with it. Together, the pair made $900. The box alone would have made $200. Number 13. The cast iron bank. The heavy money box where you set a coin on the dog's nose, pulled a lever, and it flipped into the slot. Now be careful, because reproductions are everywhere and worth almost nothing. But a genuine antique mechanical bank, made from the 1870s to the 1900s, is one of the great American toy collectibles. A real one, with its original paint, can bring one to $10,000 and the rarest, a freedman's bank. A girl skipping rope, have passed $100,000 at auction. Your test tonight. Look at the paint and the casting. Genuine old iron has crisp detail and honest wear, with paint aged down into the metal, while a reproduction is rough and grainy, and never, ever repaint one. A collector passed up a dusty dog and lever bank at a yard sale for $2, because it looked repainted. The next buyer saw it was original. It was worth $4,000. Number 12. The pressed steel truck. The big, heavy Tonka dump truck. The Buddy the 50th fire engine. The toy you could sit a small child on, and it would not bend. The later Tonka trucks, $50 to a couple of hundred dollars in good order, but the early pressed steel giants are the prize. The 1920s and 1930s Buddy the 50th trucks, made of heavy gauge steel, bring $1,000 to $5,000, and the rarest early models have gone past $10,000. Your test tonight, feel the gauge of the steel, and look at the wheels. Early Buddy the 50th is thick, heavy steel, with solid or hard rubber wheels, and baked on paint, not the lighter tin of the later copies. A family used their grandfather's old steel truck as a doorstop in the garage for 40 years. It was a 1929 Buddy the 50th. It made $3,200. Number 11. Masters of the universe. He-Man, Skeletor, Castle Greyskull on the living room floor. Loose figures, $10 to $30, and most of yours will be loose and chewed, the weapons long since lost. But carded. Still sealed in the bubble on the backing card, these change entirely. A common figure mint on card can be $100, a rare one several hundred, and the Holy Grails, unproduced prototypes and factory samples, have reached tens of thousands among collectors. Your test tonight. If you have any stills sealed on the card, do not open them, not for anything, and check the back of the card to see how many figures were in the series, because an early short series card is the rare one. A man found a sealed He-Man, still on its card, in a drawer, bought as a spare and clean forgotten. Quick word. If you've got any old things at home, don't do anything with them yet, not till you know what they're worth. My full price guide, every common item you might own and what it sells for, is over at my website, MalcolmAshby.com. That's M-A-L-C-O-L-M, Ashby.com. Or scan the code on your screen. Now back to it. Back to that little figure I mentioned at the very start. The one that made over half a million dollars. Here is a clue for you. Yours was made by the million, and sold in every toy shop in the land. But this particular one was never meant to reach a shop at all. We are getting there. Number 10. Transformers. The original G1 line from the 80s. Optimus Prime, Megatron, the robots that turned into cars and planes, and drove every parent mad with the folding. Loose and incomplete, 20 to 50 dollars, because the little parts always went missing. But complete and boxed, the first series Transformers are serious money. A boxed G1 Optimus Prime, complete with every last bit, can bring three to eight hundred dollars, and a sealed, unopened one has passed several thousand. The earlier Japanese Deer Clone versions go higher again. Your test tonight. Completeness is everything here. Hunt for the little guns, the fists, the trailer parts, and the instruction sheet, because a complete figure is worth many times an incomplete one. And if you find one still factory sealed in the box, stop and get it valued before you touch the tape. A chap sold his Transformers in a carrier bag for $30. One, a boxed early Soundwave with all its cassettes, was worth $700 on its own. Number 9. Lego. Not the loose bricks in the big tub. Those are worth their weight, and no more. I mean the sets. The boxed themed sets with a model on the front. A retired Lego set, sealed and unopened, is one of the best performing collectibles going. A set that cost $100 new can be worth $500 or $1,000 sealed a decade later. The early space and castle and pirate sets, and the licensed ones, lead the way. Your test tonight. Look for sealed boxes first. They are the gold, but even complete sets with their instructions have real value. Find the set number, that little four-digit number in the corner, and never ever tip a sealed set into the brick tub. A father kept a sealed set in the wardrobe, too good to open, meaning to build it one rainy day. The rainy day never came. The set made $1,400. Number 8. Barbie. The doll your mother or your grandmother had. The dolls passed down in a shoebox, some with a leg chewed by the dog. A played with Barbie from the 60s or 70s, $10 to $50. But the very first Barbies are a different world. The original 1959 number 1 Barbie, with the white irises, the pointed eyebrows, the little holes in the feet for the stand, mint in her box, has sold for over $25,000. Even well-loved early ones bring hundreds. Your test tonight. Turn her over and look at the soles of the feet. The earliest 1959 dolls have copper tubes inside holes in the feet and no date stamp. And please, if you have an early one, do not give her a bath and a haircut. You will wipe the value clean away. A lady inherited her aunt's dolls and almost handed them to the grandchildren to play with. One was a 1959 number 1. It made $22,000. Number 7. Board games. Now, most old board games are worth a few dollars. The Battered Monopoly, the Cluedo with half the pieces gone. Do not expect riches. But the exceptions are extraordinary. And this is where a single object can change a life. The earliest Monopoly sets matter, and one in particular. In 2011, an original 1933 hand-drawn Monopoly board, one of the very first made before mass production, sold at auction for $146,500. Early wartime and rare first printings bring thousands. Your test tonight. Look for the oldest games first. The ones with wooden pieces, cloth-backed boards, and dates from before the war. Check every piece is there and original, because a complete early game is worth many times a broken one. A woman found a very early edition of a game in her grandmother's cupboard, complete and soft with age. She thought it was rubbish. It made $2,200. Number 6, Pokemon cards. Now, most Pokemon cards are worth very little. Pennies, the common cards children traded by the Fistful. But the first edition cards from the late 90s, the ones with the small first edition stamp, professionally graded, are a different matter. A first edition holographic in gem mint order can bring thousands, and the very best graded first editions have climbed far beyond that. Your test tonight. Look for that small first edition stamp to the left of the picture. Look for the holographic shine, and above all, do not bend them. Do not sticky tape them into an album, because condition is the entire game. A young man found his childhood binder in his mother's loft, cards he had not seen in 20 years. One first edition holographic in that binder, in beautiful order, sold for $9,000. Number 5, Japanese tin robots and space toys. The lithographed tin robots and rockets made in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, the ones with the sparking chests and the clockwork walk built for export after the war, these were never cheap. Common tin toys bring a hundred or two. But the famous ones, the Masudaya gang of five, a group of large tin robots so rare that collectors spent years hunting all five, bring into the tens of thousands of dollars each. A machine man from that group has passed $40,000. Your test tonight. Look for the lithographed tin, the maker's marks on the foot or the back, Masudaya, Nomura, Horikawa, and the original box, worth a fortune in itself. Handle them gently, condition is everything. A collector bought a dusty tin robot at a flea market for $15. It was one of the gang of five. He later sold it for $9,000. Number 4, antique bisque dolls. Not the plastic dolls, I mean the old dolls with the delicate china heads, glass eyes and real hair, the ones kept wrapped in tissue at the top of the wardrobe. A damaged or common bisque doll, a few dollars to a few hundred. But the finest French dolls from the late 1800s, a jumeau and above all a brou, are among the most coveted toys in the world. A fine antique brou or jumeau in original clothes can bring $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 and the rarest into six figures. Your test tonight. Tip the head gently and look for marks on the back of the neck and the shoulder plate. A name, a number, the word brou or jumeau and feel whether the head is cold, heavy china rather than warm plastic. And never, ever scrub an old doll clean. A lady kept her grandmother's old doll in a drawer, thinking the cracked face made it worthless. The mark on the neck read brew. It made $19,000. Number 3, the teddy bear. And I mean the old ones, the proper ones. Now your own childhood teddy is a memory and not a fortune. I told you that at the start. But an antique bear, an early Steiff from Germany, is one of the most valuable toys in the world. Steiff put a little metal button in the ear and that button is the first thing a value reaches for. An early Steiff bear from before the First World War, with its button worn but honest, brings one to $10,000 and the rarest have gone far beyond. A 1904 cinnamon Steiff, a rare black mourning bear made after the Titanic went down. These have passed $100,000. A Steiff, a Steiff known as Teddy Girl, sold at auction for about $171,000. Your test tonight. Look in the ear for that little metal button, feel whether the limbs are jointed and turn, and look at the long pointed snout and the humped back of the early ones. A family nearly sent grandmother's old bear to the charity shop. The button in his ear said Steiff. He made $6,800. Number two. Model trains. And one maker above all. The electric train set that ran round the Christmas tree. The engine and the little carriages. Hornby, Lionel, Marklin. And I am putting this near the very top on purpose, because the number here stops a room dead. A common post-war set-in, played with condition, $50 to a couple of hundred dollars. But the early and rare trains are among the great prizes of the toy world. Early American Lionel sets bring thousands. And the German maker Marklin, the finest of them all, made hand-painted tin plate trains before the First World War that collectors cross oceans for. A rare early Marklin set has passed $250,000 at auction. Your test tonight. Look for the maker's name on the engine and on the track. Look for hand-painted tin plate rather than plastic, and find the boxes, because a boxed early set is worth a great deal more. And do not run a rare old train, because wear from running cuts the value. A man inherited his grandfather's trains in a tin trunk, oily and forgotten in the shed. Among them was a pre-war Marklin engine. It made $11,000. Here is the thing it took me 20 years on the rostrum to understand about toys. A toy is the one antique that was made to be destroyed. A chair is made to be sat on and kept. But a toy is made to be played with, dropped, chewed, left out in the rain and handed down until it falls to pieces. That is exactly why the survivors are so rare, and why the box, the one thing everybody throws away first, is so often worth more than the toy that came inside it. The man with the van understands this better than anyone. He does not want your toy. He wants the cardboard box because he can sell it for more than he paid you for the whole house of furniture. Now, on we go, and the numbers get serious. Number one. And here it is at last. The one I promised you at the very start. The one most of you had a whole shelf of. Vintage Star Wars. The original Kenner figures from the late 70s and early 80s. And one little figure above all the rest. The loose figures, played with $5 to $20 each. And that is most of what you have. But carded, still sealed on the original card, these are blue chip and a first wave figure mint on an early card can bring many thousands. And then there is the grail. A rocket firing Boba Fett, a prototype with a little spring-loaded rocket in his back, pulled before it reached the shops when the firm feared a child might swallow the rocket. Only a handful of hand-painted factory samples survived. One sold at Hakes Auction for about $525,000. $525,000 for a figure never meant to be sold. And here is the cruelty of it. This is the toy every boy owned and tore from the card and lost in the garden. And so to the last check of the night. Your test tonight is not really a test. It is three questions. The same three I put to every object across 40 years on the rostrum. First, who made it? Is it an original Kenner piece and not a later copy? Second, is it complete and untouched? The card unbroken, the accessories still there. And third, how many survived? Because a thing that everybody owned and nobody kept is the rarest thing on earth. Survival is the whole secret of tonight. The toys that are worth a fortune are not the ones that were precious and protected. They are the ones that were common and ordinary and loved and thrown away by the million so that the small handful that lived are now worth everything. A man found a sealed, early carded Star Wars figure in a box of his son's things, bought as a spare and forgotten. It made $4,200. He had been one shoebox away from it his entire life and never knew. So there it is, all 21, from a jar of marbles on the windowsill worth a few dollars, all the way up to a little Star Wars figure that made over half a million. And if you take a single habit away from tonight, let it be this one. Slow down. Before anything leaves your house, pick it up, turn it over, read the base and find the box. The money almost always hides in the one detail you were about to ignore. Three things to promise me before you go. Never repaint a thing. Never. Because the collector wants the honest wear and a fresh coat of paint turns a $1,000 toy into a $20 one in an afternoon. Never throw away the box or the little cardboard insert, because the box is half the money and sometimes it is all of it. And never, ever let the whole attic go in one job lot to the first man with a van, because once it is up on his lorry, it is gone and you will never know what you gave away. And whatever you do, don't sell it yet. Not until you know what you have. If this was useful, press that like button for me. It is just below the video and it helps an old man more than you would think. And subscribe, because next time I am opening the one kitchen drawer that holds more money than your attic ever will, the junk drawer where the old coins get tipped in, and one coin that millions of people spent without a second glance could buy you a new kitchen. Tell me two things in the comments. One, which of these 21 did you own as a child? And two, which one are you going up into the attic to look for the moment this video ends? I read every single one, and somebody watching this tonight is going to find something. Go and have a proper look. You never know. If anything today looked familiar, have a proper look before you sell a single thing. Everything's in my price guide over at MalcolmAshby.com or scan the code on your screen. I'll leave it up for you. [00:29:51] Speaker ?: I'll leave it up for you. I'll leave it up for you. I'll leave it up for you. I'll leave it up for you. I'll leave it up for you. I'll leave it up for you.