30 Years Hunting The World's Weirdest Toys!

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Every toy convention has dealers, but every once in a while, you run into a dealer that feels more like a museum curator. Someone who's spent decades hunting down the weirdest toys, the rarest movie memorabilia, and collectibles most people have never even seen before. And at the short circuit 40th anniversary convention, we found exactly that. His name is Billy Galaxy. And after spending a few minutes at his booth, I realized he might have one of the most interesting toy stores in America. I sold all Chessy. Did you? Oh yeah. I was kind of hoping. You didn't, but I figured you might have. [00:00:39] Billy Galaxy: Yeah. What did you sell? Well, we've sold a lot of Goonies stuff since we are in Astoria, Oregon, where Goonies is filmed. And we've sold almost every short circuit thing that is here since it's an actual short circuit event that we are at. Tell me who you are. Hi. I'm Billy Galaxy from Portland, Oregon, and I'm here in Astoria, Oregon at the short circuit 40th anniversary. Do you have a store in Portland, Oregon? I do have a store right in the center of downtown Portland, Oregon. A real honest to goodness brick and mortar that's been open there for the last 30 years. What do you specialize in? I specialize exclusively in vintage toys, collectibles, comics, memorabilia, cards, the good stuff. We do have a couple of items left over here. Some Japanese only buttons that would have been sold in the theater at the time of release of both of those films, and Japanese roadshow promotional postcards from Goonies, a couple short circuit paper things from Japan, a movie program, and a chirashi. And I think that is about it for our Astoria memorabilia. Did you have a question about anything? No, I just love it. Thanks. Let me know if you do. [00:01:57] Speaker 1: What's up? I've noticed that there's different things in different parts of the country. What are the toys that sell the most at G.I. Joe's and the biggest ones? Well, sell the most of it depends on the day [00:02:12] Billy Galaxy: and what we have in, because it's not like we can order inventory that's selling great. So if we get a good G.I. Joe collection in, we're selling a lot of Joe's, get a good Star Wars collection in, we'll sell a lot of Star Wars. But, you know, stuff runs dry, the sales will slow down. So we're always out there [00:02:26] Speaker 1: buying and buying. What's some of the crazy stuff you have in the store? Well, we've got some good [00:02:34] Billy Galaxy: stuff set aside for Star Wars Celebration coming up in L.A. next year. We've got like a carded Turkish Uze Blue Stars. I'm considering selling my Rocket Fett. Did you have a Rocket? I had four. We've got some really cool trading card stuff like in the pipeline right now. We've got a couple huge shipments at AFA that should be coming back pretty shortly with a lot of pretty interesting stuff. We're doing Joe Fest in Augusta, Georgia coming up and we've got some really pretty interesting Joe stuff set aside for that. We've got some Toll Toys pieces, which were exclusively distributed in New Zealand and Australia. And then we've got some pretty rare mail-away G.I. Joe's some Japanese, 1960s, like 12-inch stuff. We've got some really cool stuff for Joe Fest. [00:03:36] Speaker 1: Tell me about these ALF. What are we doing? Okay. [00:03:41] Billy Galaxy: We're talking about this lovely ALF, I'm going to call it menswear, even though it's children's wear. These are small. They're kids pants. Found them at Toyplosion in Germany. The dealer had a whole box of these under his table and I totally freaked out and bought all of them. And it turns out I was more excited about them than most people are. So we still have some varying varieties of ALF jeans at the store. If anybody is tiny and wants to wear these or cut them up and turn them into a badass backpatch. Godzilla caught my eye. It's $76. The $76 Godzilla is about $300 less than we normally sell him for because somebody took a bite out of his tail. He is rough. But look, he's got his own little unique footprint. Because even though this guy was made by Beatland, is technically listed as a distributor. These were actually produced by POPI of Japan, which is sort of the predecessor to Bandai and the stopgap between Bullmark and Bandai when you're getting into Japanese Kaiju and Sofubi. And in the King Zara series, which is weird because there are Toho Kaiju even though King Zara was a Tsuburaya Productions Ultraman character. Every Kaiju, and there's a hundred or so in the series, has a unique footprint. And the standard size ones were even packaged with a sticker of that footprint. And I've been searching for years for more stickers and they're impossible to find. [00:05:11] Speaker 1: So he's worth the $76. Oh, that's the bargain [00:05:15] Billy Galaxy: basement price because he's all jacked up. No, we get them pretty regularly. He's fairly common as far as like older Godzilla vinyls go. And yeah, he sells pretty quick at multiples of that price when he's in nice condition. This one is very not nice, but he has shelf presence. Posters we get from Japan. It's a country. Their currency is pretty affordable right now, though we've been doing it for quite a while. It's not always been as affordable it is at the moment, but love traveling, love Japan, especially even going there forever. Used to have a store there actually. Yeah. And yeah, they, especially on the paper, toys too, but yeah, they do everything awesome over there. But there's a really strong culture of printing in Japan. I mean, it goes back to, you know, hundreds of years and producing amazing prints and paper and, you know, it continues to this day. Like if you look at a Japanese movie ticket, I grab one of these for me real quick. So that is what a Japanese movie ticket looks like. And if you can visualize what an American movie ticket looks like, you can't because it looks like nothing. It looks like somebody printed it down on a dot matrix printer. And that's exactly what it is. It's there's no graphic element to a US ticket 99% of the time. Almost every Japanese ticket has killer graphics. Like, yeah, this stuff is good. [00:06:49] Speaker 1: What does that go for? [00:06:50] Billy Galaxy: Yeah. The original Ghostbusters movie ticket is $27. That's great. That's cool. How did you start a store in Japan? That's a whole episode by itself. I'm assuming that you are a Cocoon fan. I am a Cocoon fan. [00:07:09] Speaker 3: But don't hold me to know anything or remember anything from it. I just, I don't think anybody does. [00:07:15] Billy Galaxy: Okay. Okay. These programs are cool because they have a ton of killer images. And a lot of times in Japan, they got a different set of press materials. Was that Ron Howard? Oh, nice. Look at that. [00:07:31] Speaker 3: It's a good thing he shaved. I like the mustache. You like it? I do. On him, he needs it. Yeah. I mean, not he needs it, but you dislike the mustache. That's awesome. Is that in the movie? I do not remember this from the movie. This is- I feel like that is- I mean, it must be, but deleted scenes? Who knows? Maybe at the end or like trying to get a surf. Holy moly. [00:07:58] Billy Galaxy: Oh wait, he's here. Yeah, he is here. Shit, I forgot he was in this. Yeah, me too. Linda Harrison was in this? So I'm sure this says a bunch of really interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah. If we got out our phones and translated it. So they would give this out at the theater? No, they would sell this at the theater. This is too fancy to be given away. Ron Howard's Cocoon. That's awesome. See, all these programs have like cool stuff. This is actually relatively like pedestrian as far as these go. Like some of them have really crazy stuff. Yeah, like a lot of details. Like the Gremlins one has a pop-up in the center with a little gizmo coming out of the box. Wow. So yeah, [00:08:34] Speaker 3: they kept it tame with cocoon. These are legit Japanese movie tickets for these movies. They have way cooler tickets than we do. And this is the movie program from Japan for the movie. And it has, I guess it should open it up. Look at it. Hold on. Where's the really awesome one? There we go. How awesome is that? I'm so excited about this. I don't know what I'm going to do with it or where I'm going to put it, but I'm happy to have it.