Episode 6: Collecting M.U.S.C.L.E. Men toys (and more) with Morgan Boyd

More Devils than Hell can Hold short story collection by Morgan

Friday the board game (what's poppin' from Morgan)

 

 

Nathan:
This is going to be fun, we're talking collecting this week.

Haeny:
Yeah. Welcome to another episode of Pop and Play.

Nathan:
We just keep them coming this season. You thought, whoa, what was it? Six episodes was enough? No.

Haeny:
Yeah, there's so much more.

Nathan:
We got more. So this week we're talking collecting, and I'm excited for us to have this conversation. This is a topic, this is a guest, a theme that we have been kind of coming back to throughout the three seasons that we've done here on a Pop and Play, because collecting is such a core part of growing up. It's a core part of playing when you're a kid. And let's be honest, it's also a core part of playing when you're an adult as well so it's important that we have a conversation about collecting.

Haeny:
Truly. I think when we talk about play, I think sometimes we like to talk about the chaotic, but there are different ways to play and some of that play can be so organized, it can be curated, it can be put together. And I think sometimes people really get some joy out of the order and the curation of things.

Nathan:
Yeah, absolutely. That can be really playful, really fun to organize and to curate.

Haeny:
Yeah, and creative, right? The things people collect. So Nathan, have you collected anything growing up?

Nathan:
Of course, everybody collects things when they're growing up. I definitely had at one point a collection of random crap I found on the ground, like this was a piece of broken glass, and this is a nail I found, and I would for some reason collect all these things. But the more kind of thoughtful collection we should say, I want to say, is that I collected cards. So I collected baseball cards and I collected some basketball cards. This was pretty popular whenever we were younger.

Haeny:
I collected basketball cards, some baseball cards, so the other way around.

Nathan:
So the other way around?

Haeny:
Yeah, and the only reason was-

Nathan:
Because you lived in Chicago.

Haeny:
Well, yeah. Yes, Bulls. Awesome.

Nathan:
Bulls, absolutely.

Haeny:
But then I don't think that was the case. I think because I liked basketball and I knew enough about it where I watched it regularly and I could kind of tell what it was about. Baseball, I was not interested in it all and so if I got something aside from Ken Griffey Jr.

Nathan:
Yeah, you're like I don't know what to do with this.

Haeny:
I had no idea who this people were.

Nathan:
As I've said in other podcasts, grew up in rural Missouri and baseball was certainly a sport that we all played and we all watched. I was a big Cardinals fan, still a little bit of a Cardinals fan. And so I would collect a lot of different baseball cards. I would enjoy going to see baseball games, go to see the Kansas City Royals, or go to see the St. Louis Cardinals; both of those were kind of equidistant, roughly equidistant from where I lived, but I collected a lot of cards as well. And my prize possession was an Ozzie Smith rookie card. Ozzie Smith was my-

Haeny:
Who is Ozzie Smith?

Nathan:
... favorite player. He was my favorite player. He was the shortstop for the Cardinals and his, in addition to being just an excellent... and in fact a Hall of Famer that he is now, one of his tricks was he would come out onto the field and do a back flip as he came out onto the field. He was just incredibly athletic.

Haeny:
Spicy.

Nathan:
Yeah, real spicy. And I saved up some money when I was young, probably around 12 years old or something like that, 13 years old maybe and I bought an Ozzie Smith rookie card for $20 from my local comic books shop, because back then that's where you did all this. So you went to the comic bookshop and you bought the cards. And I also bought, I paid another, I don't know, $4 or whatever for this massive, thick piece of plastic to keep my card in forever because eventually, it was going to be worth a ton of money. And let me just tell you that I have recently looked to see about my investment.

Haeny:
Nice.

Nathan:
And here's what I found.

Haeny:
I'm excited.

Nathan:
During the pandemic, people were selling their collectibles like crazy. And so the cost of these things, the value of these things skyrocketed. And so I thought, heck yeah, man, it's finally time to cash in on the rookie card. I looked up my Ozzie Smith rookie card and the last perfect condition, Ozzie Smith rookie card that sold, sold for like $30,000.

Haeny:
What!?

Nathan:
Yeah, I'm not kidding. 30 grand, so I'm pretty excited. And I think, well, my card's probably not worth... it's probably not in perfect condition. The picture is a little kind of crooked, it's a little off-centered, but it's one of the lower quality rankings.

Haeny:
Okay, so $15,000?

Nathan:
Maybe, yeah. It got to be like 15, right? It's got to be close. Turns out my card, the quality of card that I happen to own is worth $25. So in the 30 years that I've kept this card...

Haeny:
In your very thick plastic sleeve.

Nathan:
In the sleeve of thick plastic, it actually is only... also the card, what I paid for the card plus the plastic. I've made $1 back.

Haeny:
Oh, so you made a profit.

Nathan:
A profit. So if you need me to invest for you, send me a DM.

Haeny:
That sounds amazing.

Nathan:
How about you? Did you ever collect anything?

Haeny:
I did. I collected stickers. So I didn't have a vast sticker collection, I don't think. But my friend who lived down the block from me in Chicago, her name was Amber, and she had a very...

Nathan:
That's a great '80s name.

Haeny:
Amber?

Nathan:
Yeah.

Haeny:
Yeah.

Nathan:
Love it.

Haeny:
She had a very extensive sticker collection. So she would come over to my house and we would just kind of look at each other's stickers, I don't know why I would think that was fun, but it was extremely fun.

Nathan:
That's what you do. I see my kids do the Pokemon thing and they do the same. They go and like, "Hey, you want to look at my cards?" Didn't you look at each other's cards last time you were together?

Haeny:
Exactly. And we played together all the time. So it was like we were just looking at each other's stickers for every other day basically. And so I think part of it was to have something new to show Amber, and I think maybe vice versa. I think that's maybe part of the draw. And so, one of the years, I don't know when it was, she was moving, so she came over, one of the last few times we saw each other, and she brought her whole sticker collection, and then she left it there on accident, I think.

Nathan:
Oh, no.

Haeny:
Oh, no, is right.

Nathan:
Oh, no.

Haeny:
Oh, no for her.

Nathan:
She left her stickers.

Haeny:
She left her stickers. And I guess I could have had the opportunity to bring them back to her, but I did not capitalized on that opportunity.

Nathan:
Haeny...

Haeny:
And so I inherited on accident a whole bunch of stickers for my sticker collection. And I think the thing that I really liked about what she had was that she had such a great way to curate it. She had those books and she put them... mine were just in boxes and hers were stuck on books.

Nathan:
Organized.

Haeny:
Yeah, and I really loved that. I was kind of jealous of that.

Nathan:
Amber, if you're listening...

Haeny:
I don't have your stickers.

Nathan:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry that Haeny did this to you.

Haeny:
Yeah, sorry about that.

Nathan:
I'm surprised you said stickers. I had you pegged for Garbage Pail Kids.

Haeny:
Yes. Okay. Loved Garbage Pail Kids.

Nathan:
Was I right?

Haeny:
Yes. Okay, so Garbage Pail Kids I loved because I felt like around this time, Cabbage Patch Kids were kind of a big deal in the '80s when I was a kid and I was like, everybody wanted one. And then all of a sudden they became subversive and someone made Garbage Pail Kids and they were amazing because they would have-

Nathan:
They were so gross.

Haeny:
They would have these gross names and it was just so fun to have them.

Nathan:
I was kind of always grossed out by it. Those things were so gross. I think that was my deal, they just were gross.

Haeny:
Oh, I just loved it.

Nathan:
The pictures were gross-out.

Haeny:
I just loved it, going back to our friend Henry Jenkins, who talks about carnivalesque part of play.

Nathan:
Totally.

Haeny:
Where you just really enjoy the subversive nature of it. Being able to do something that you're not allowed to do, and just all of the grossness and being allowed to revel in it was I think was a big draw for me, because I also grew up in a very conservative space.

Nathan:
We talk about kids, but adults also collect things. And sometimes they are collectors and it's a passion or it's a hobby that we identify. And then there's also times where we don't exactly call it collecting, but maybe we're still engaged in it, right?

Haeny:
Yes.

Nathan:
Do you collect anything today?

Haeny:
Well, I think right now I'm collecting zines. So every time I go to a bookstore, I always notice it. Or I go to coffee shops. Coffee shops are ripe for zines. I feel like it's one of those things that I've informally started collecting, but now I realize I have a pretty good collection of them.

Nathan:
Nice.

Haeny:
So now I'm just trying to figure out, it goes back to the sticker thing is I don't mind the collecting part, but I don't like to accumulate things. I'm not like a hoarder of any sort. I usually like to throw things out, but I have them right now in a Babysitter's Club tin. So I took out the Babysitter's Club-

Nathan:
Ooh, call back to a previous episode.

Haeny:
Yes, exactly. And so I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to curate this, because I feel like part of the fun of collecting things is figuring out how to curate things.

Nathan:
Yeah. You want a way to sort of know what you have.

Haeny:
Yeah, exactly. So this week we're talking to Morgan Boyd, who is a collector in the true spirit of collecting.

[theme music plays]

Haeny:
Maybe you could just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do, where you are.

Morgan:
My name is Morgan Vasconcellos Boyd. I live on the Monterey Peninsula with my wife, and we have a five-year-old daughter.

Haeny:
Nice.

Morgan:
I did my undergraduate work at Hunter College on the

Nathan:
Just down the street.

Morgan:
Upper East Side. Yeah, I have a degree in theater.

Nathan:
Nice.

Haeny:
Oh my gosh. You and Nathan have a lot in common.

Nathan:
I have a degree in theater, yeah.

Morgan:
Excellent.

Nathan:
Way back in the day.

Morgan:
Theater buddies. And then I moved back to California around 2008 and did my graduate work at San Jose State University in television, film, theater, and radio. And I write crime fiction. And I recently came out with a book of short stories called More Devils Than Hell Can Hold.

Nathan:
Oh, nice.

Morgan:
And these days I teach high school English. I'm a 12th grade high school English teacher in Salinas, California.

Nathan:
Oh, nice. John Steinbeck, right?

Haeny:
I was just thinking of East of Eden.

Nathan:
Absolutely. That's fantastic.

Morgan:
Fantastic, yeah.

Nathan:
So you're a collector, I hear.

Morgan:
I am, yeah. We had my daughter, was about 40 years old so I started late and a couple of years ago she started collecting toys. And all of a sudden, this flood of nostalgia came back to me and I realized I loved toys. I loved playing with toys when I was a kid. And some of the toys I really enjoyed, I loved M.U.S.C.L.E. Men and He-Man, GI Joe and Star Wars. Those were probably the top ones that I played with. I collected some Garbage Pail Kids and stuff like that too, baseball cards.

Haeny:
Oh my God. We were just talking about Garbage Pail Kids. Amazing. It's almost like you read our mind.

Nathan:
He's listening in.

Haeny:
I know.

Nathan:
You're hitting all this stuff because we also did an episode together on He-Man. I was a big He-Man fan when I was a kid. We've talked about Star Wars a ton, did an episode on that too.

Haeny:
And we just talked about Garbage Pail Kids.

Nathan:
And we just talked Garbage Pail Kids.

Haeny:
And how amazing they were. Nathan did not collect them because he was scared of them.

Nathan:
I didn't. I Was a little scared of them. I'm not going to lie. They freaked me out a little bit when I was a kid.

Morgan:
Sure. They were wild.

Haeny:
They were pretty wild. Should we start with pop or nop?

Nathan:
Oh, yeah. So I feel like we're already kind of in the groove, but one of the things we'd like to do to get people under the groove to just to have some fun together, is to play a game. And we thought specifically since you are a master collector, that we wanted to get your expert opinion on whether things classify as a collection or not.

Morgan:
Okay.

Nathan:
All right. So we're give you a collection of things and you need to decide whether or not it is... you're allowed to call this a collection or if it's just you got a lot of stuff. So this is a game we call collection or crap. I just made that up in this moment.

Morgan:
Nice.

Nathan:
So collection or crap. The first thing on the list here is books on your bookshelf?

Morgan:
Oh, collection for sure. Definitely.

Nathan:
No- Wow. Well, you came right out of the gate with that. Tell us why that classifies as a collection.

Morgan:
I collect books, man. I'm a book collector. I love my books. I like to collect signatures. I've got a Ray Bradbury signature I'm really proud of.

Haeny:
Oh, no way.

Nathan:
That's cool.

Haeny:
Yeah. So next on our list. I'm going to use Nathan's term collection or crap, I guess. Shoes.

Morgan:
I guess I collect shoes too. I like my shoes. I collect them. I put them up on a rack, there's like a rack and they're all organized nicely. So I guess that would make it a collection. It's not just a pile.

Haeny:
Yeah. So shoes are a collection. It can be displayed.

Nathan:
Absolutely. I like that there were developing some kind of definitions, some heuristics, right? Can I organize them? Yes.

Morgan:
It's on a shelf or something.

Haeny:
It's on a shelf. It's not piled in the corner.

Nathan:
And I'm realizing, I'm a big fan of my title of this game collection or crap, but I realize that crap suggests something negative if it's not a collection, it's negative. You can have crap and still be wonderful crap, just to clarify that.

Morgan:
Positive crap.

Nathan:
Positive crap.

Morgan:
Positive crap.

Nathan:
Okay. Here's another one. How about kitchen utensils?

Morgan:
Okay. Yeah, that'd probably be some positive crap right there. That stuff's just piled in some drawers.

Haeny:
Okay. This is actually from my dad, tools in the garage?

Morgan:
I guess for me, that's just a pile, that's positive crap.

Nathan:
Pile of positive crap.

Morgan:
It's just not very organized. I keep meaning to.

Haeny:
Can I diverge a little bit?

Nathan:
Please.

Haeny:
So what do you think constitutes a collection? So it has to be beyond organizing. Morgan, what's the frame that you're using to think about whether something's a collection or not?

Morgan:
That's a good question. Maybe perhaps one element might be that there's a desire for it, people seek it out perhaps, it's like a bunch of different people want this one specific thing and so you cherish it, you prize it. It's like I got it. I got this figurine that everybody wants for my collection, perhaps that might be an element of a collection.

Nathan:
I like that.

Haeny:
Desirability.

Nathan:
Yeah. That was way better said than filling gaps, like I say. Yeah, it's something about there's a community of people. I think also, maybe community is part of the word that we're missing here too. There's a community of people that kind of ascribe value to this thing. And you are part of that community, you used the word earlier that you're curating. You're not just organizing, you're also kind of curating your collection so that you can display the value to other people in different ways. I like that.

Morgan:
Yeah. That's great.

Nathan:
I feel like we're in it. I want to know more about your collection. So you mentioned that you started re-collecting, I think toys?

Morgan:
Yes.

Nathan:
And one of the things that you mentioned was that you collect M.U.S.C.L.E. Men.

Morgan:
Yes, indeed.

Nathan:
So I sort of remember these, but can you say a little bit more about what M.U.S.C.L.E. Men are and how you got into collecting these?

Morgan:
Definitely. So M.U.S.C.L.E. Men were these little tiny, I guess like inch and a half, two inch little... they were pink, but they called them flesh colored toys. It's interesting, these little pink toys, they sold to boys back in the '80s and it's a acronym for Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere.

Haeny:
I did not know that.

Nathan:
I did not know it was an acronym. That's amazing.

Haeny:
My mind is blown right now.

Morgan:
And the funny thing is though there weren't millions of them. There were 236 of them.

Nathan:
That's a lot.

Morgan:
Right. And so 236 really kind of common ones. Well, one of them, the 236th one is not that common. It is, but collectors get it and they won't let go of it, so it's more expensive to get the final one. And then there are several, what they consider ultra-rare ones that collectors will pay thousands of dollars for.

Nathan:
Oh wow.

Morgan:
It's pretty wild. But there's, like you said, there's this whole community of people, your goal is to try and collect all 236 of them. And then there's just a lot of people, and I really enjoy this aspect of it that bootleg them or use 3D printers to manipulate them or change them or head swap. And it's fun to collect those. I really like just the weird random things that people are making nowadays that are M.U.S.C.L.E. related.

Haeny:
How did you get into them? Do you remember?

Morgan:
Yeah, again, they came out around '84, '85, and I was probably 10 or 11 years old. And I liked He-Man, I liked Star Wars, I liked GI Joe. And those are posable figurines. But M.U.S.C.L.E. Men, they don't move at all and they're small and they were a lot cheaper. I saved up some money and they came in either 3 packs, 12 packs or 24 packs, and I saved up to get a 24 pack. And then I had 24 toys to play with as a child, as opposed to I had one or two He-Man, if I was lucky, one or two. But then you're able to just get a whole bunch of these little toys. And so I think that's why I really liked them is because I had a little army of them. You could trade 'em. You and your friends could trade and stuff like that.

Nathan:
That's great. So you mentioned that your friends, did your friends collect them as well or play with them?

Morgan:
Yeah, I remember friends having them, and we probably did a couple trades here and there and whatnot. But another, a friend, for my birthday, he showed up with a M.U.S.C.L.E. from when he was a kid and he gave it to me. And it's my most cherished M.U.S.C.L.E. because it has a connection to a friend's childhood. It's not just these ones I bought on eBay or traded with some other collector. This one is very, very precious to me.

Haeny:
Yeah. That's really meaningful. Giving someone something that you've collected when you were a kid, that means something.

Morgan:
It was awesome.

Haeny:
Yeah. So I'm thinking I definitely resonate with... I want to have 24 rather than two, because I think as a kid, quantity is always important. So I'm thinking about around the same time, I'm also thinking about what is it about the M.U.S.C.L.E. Men that was more appealing than, let's say, how they would have those Green Army men and pots of like a million to...

Nathan:
Bag of army men.

Haeny:
Yeah. What do you feel like drew you to the M.U.S.C.L.E. Men versus that?

Morgan:
That's a good question. I probably didn't realize it at the time, but there's more detail. The figurines are a lot more interesting looking. I guess the stories, they were these sort of cosmic wrestlers, there was good and evil and they wrestled each other. I think there was originally a comic or was it a manga? And then I think it became a popular cartoon but I guess it was considered too violent. So they didn't... for the United States children's for some reason, the cartoons here. So it never really...

Nathan:
The children who were watching GI Joe. The M.U.S.C.L.E. Men are too violent.

Morgan:
Right. These wrestlers.

Nathan:
Cobra! That's awesome. I didn't realize there was a whole space aspect to M.U.S.C.L.E. Men that these were aliens. Yeah, that's cool.

Morgan:
Yeah. One good thing about Facebook is you can find all these communities of people that have a similar interest. And yeah, there's a few M.U.S.C.L.E. Men collecting groups and they like to show off their collections. One guy does this thing every Tuesday, he does a bio on one of the M.U.S.C.L.E. Men. He does all a bunch of research and then you can go read about, oh yeah, I remember that guy, but I didn't know his history. So you can go read about these different M.U.S.C.L.E. Men or things like that. It's pretty fascinating for me.

Nathan:
That's great.

Haeny:
Well, tell us a little bit about the extensiveness of your collection. If I were to go and look at your collection right now, what would it look like?

Morgan:
So my goal was to get to 236. And as a child, I never even thought about collecting all of them, I had no idea. And so eventually I got them all. And the real famous one, it's the number 236, it's called Satan Cross for some reason.

Nathan:
Oh, wow.

Morgan:
And I found it in a really big lot of M.U.S.C.L.E.s, and I think a lot of collectors missed it. It was just kind of sitting in there and I was like, that looks like the one. And I kept comparing. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure, people weren't bidding on it. And so I bid on it and I won the bid. And then when it came, it was like, there it is. I got Satan Cross. It was the hardest one to get outside of the super rares. So that was the one I thought was going to give me the most trouble, but I was able to get it relatively easily. And then once I got those, I just started collecting bootlegs. People like doing head swaps or making different versions of them.

Nathan:
Yeah. Nice.

Haeny:
Have you gotten into making them too?

Morgan:
I have. I Started buying epoxy resins and different things to make molds, and I started making them. And then you make a couple, but they don't turn out right. So you do some more research and you're like, oh, well I need a pressure pot. So you go make a pressure pot, and then you're like, oh, but the mold isn't working now. So then you go get these special chambers that suck out all the oxygen. And then pretty soon you need the little tools to manipulate things-

Nathan:
Next thing you know, you have a collection.

Morgan:
Collection. So yeah, I've been trying to do a couple of things. Doing some head swaps. I make copies of them and then I hack them to pieces. I'm always trying to make some kind of new M.U.S.C.L.E. figurine or something. I don't hack original M.U.S.C.L.E.s to pieces because there's only a certain amount of them out there.

Nathan:
That's awesome. You mentioned earlier that part of the reason you started getting into this collecting and other collecting was because you had a child and you started seeing their toys and thinking about your childhood. I'm wondering, do they collect anything? Is there anything that they're collecting or thinking about collecting? Do they like M.U.S.C.L.E. Men?

Morgan:
She is five years old and she's really into these dolls called LOL. Have you heard of these?

Haeny:
Yeah, I know what they are.

Nathan:
Yeah, I think I've seen these.

Morgan:
She has so many LOLs at this point.

Haeny:
They're kind like M.U.S.C.L.E. Men for little kids.

Morgan:
So she loves the LOLs. I'm just trying to get her to keep them organized on a shelf or something, because there's little pieces everywhere, you step on it and stuff like that. That's definitely her thing and she's been getting into Legos.

Haeny:
Yeah. Tell me, how do you organize your M.U.S.C.L.E. Men? I'm assuming that you have a lot, and so where do you keep them? What do you do with them? I'm assuming they don't go in a pile by the definition you gave us at the beginning.

Morgan:
Right. Good question. So the doubles and stuff, I do keep in these glass jars on a counter so I can just kind of see them in these glass jars. But my father-in-law, he made me this big shelf with little rows on it, and then I put them all in order, 1 through 236, maybe much to my wife's chagrin, but I have all the M.U.S.C.L.E.s on full display in our bedroom.

Nathan:
Wow. In the bedroom.

Morgan:
Yeah.

Nathan:
It's just like what your bedroom looked like in fourth grade.

Morgan:
Man, yeah. The dream bedroom in fourth grade.

Haeny:
So as you know, Morgan, our podcast is about just the joy and creativity and imagination that comes with play. And play can be so many different things. And we are talking about how there's play that can be chaotic and indecipherable, which I'm sure you've seen with your five-year-old, but then play that can also be orderly and curated and have more of a structure to it, which you probably have also seen with your five-year-old. And so I'm wondering, how does collecting M.U.S.C.L.E. Men bring you joy?

Morgan:
Yeah. Again, it's that nostalgia for one, it reminds me of my childhood. It brought back childhood memories that I'd completely forgotten about like pretending to be sick at home so I could lay in bed and play with my M.U.S.C.L.E. Men all day or something like that. And then again, there's something very cathartic about setting a bunch of them up and to like, not necessarily an army or something, and they all stand on two legs, so it's just fun to just look at them as I don't know, a crowd or something of these different unique characters. And then also my daughter can grab them and smash them together and it can be chaotic too. And she enjoys that, it's fun. They can fight. I don't know why, they do fill me with joy.

Nathan:
That's great.

Haeny:
You teach high school, right?

Morgan:
Yeah.

Nathan:
Do your students collect anything that you're aware of?

Morgan:
Today, I went around and asked some students. One kid's like, "I collect records," and then this one student, he said, "I collect these special kind of Hot Wheels, the monster truck ones," and he wants to go off to college to learn how to work on and drive monster trucks.

Nathan:
Oh, cool.

Morgan:
He's getting ready to go to Iowa. He sent me this huge email detailing how he only collects from this year to this year because they changed logos and he's like, "I'm a true collector and I don't like what they did after this year." He was really into it, it ended with a quote and everything. I was really impressed.

Nathan:
And you're just sitting there, "One of us, one us."

Morgan:
Yes. Right. This is awesome.

Haeny:
Wow. That's really cool.

Morgan:
That was a nice-

Nathan:
There is something kind of... there's an obsession that of what you've described with your own kind of search and the other people in these communities. Their searches, there's an obsession quality as well. I know we're kind of going backwards to the beginning. What is collecting? There's organization, there's a community, there's some sort of obsession to find the right ones.

Morgan:
Obsession, yes. That is definitely right. Obsession is in there for sure. All-consuming.

Haeny:
It's just a cathartic thing. I like what you said about that. I think sometimes we kind of downplay how important that is to have in our lives, just to have downtime, to be enjoying something just for what it is.

Morgan:
Yeah, it's simple pure joy. It's just there and it is cathartic, it's relaxing. It takes your mind off of the stress of the day and it just feels good.

Haeny:
Yeah, for sure. Do you want to talk about what's poppin'?

Nathan:
Oh yeah. So before you leave, one of the things that we always like to do with our guests is find out what you're into besides the topic of the day. So maybe there's different shows you're watching or games you're playing, or books you're reading, and we like to just ask you what's poppin'?

Morgan:
Okay. Yeah, what's poppin'? I recently got into solo board games. That's fun. You play a game, it's a board game, you play by yourself. Those are challenging and fun. I've been, recently, just getting really into those. There's a lot of Kickstarters out there, trying to get those up and running, so that's fun.

Haeny:
Give us some examples of solo board games. I want to know.

Morgan:
This one I've been playing it's called Friday. And you're this guy named Friday and you're on your own little private island. And then all of a sudden, Robinson Crusoe shows up and he needs help, he's not very smart. He can't survive. And so you have to help Robinson Crusoe survive on this island, but you don't really want him there. So you want to help him get off the island so that you can get back to enjoying this peaceful island by yourself. I haven't beat it yet, but I got close a few times. But it's really fun. And then I am writing a book right now. I wake up every morning about four and write for about two hours-

Haeny:
We need to develop that habit.

Nathan:
Yeah.

Morgan:
And it's a crime fiction novel that is set in a collecting community.

Haeny:
Very cool.

Nathan:
Bum, bum, bahhhh...

Morgan:
Based off of these little figurines called Flankers. And this guy, he gets obsessed with trying to collect them because of this nostalgia. And he kind of starts to ruin his life because he gets so obsessed with them. And eventually there is a murder within the community that he gets drawn into so I've been working on that novella for a little while too.

Haeny:
That is very cool.

Nathan:
Sounds great. Here I was hoping that one of the Flankers came to life and murdered somebody. Maybe I just gave away the... I hope I didn't give away the ending there.

Morgan:
There are definitely some dream sequences where things like that happen-

Nathan:
Perfect.

Morgan:
... for sure.

Nathan:
That sounds awesome.

Haeny:
Yeah. I think it's so neat that you're an English teacher who also writes, it's very exciting for the kids-

Nathan:
That's cool.

Haeny:
... to learn.

Morgan:
It's fun, yeah.

Nathan:
Well, thank you Morgan very much for talking with us about your collection and helping us think through and talk about what it means to play when play is organizing and curating and collecting. It was a lot of fun.

Haeny:
Yeah.

Morgan:
Yeah. Haeny, Nathan, thank you guys. Really appreciate it. That was fun. Good times.

Haeny:
Wow.

Nathan:
Wow. Collections, man. That was great. That was fun to talk to Morgan about his experience with M.U.S.C.L.E. Men, with kind of collecting when he was a kid. I particularly loved the idea of getting kind of super into this collection, but having that happen because he saw his daughter playing with toys. And being like, oh yeah, I remember doing that. I'll do that again.

Haeny:
Yeah. I think sometimes as he was talking, I was thinking about collections as a memory. There's all this... okay, not to get all academic and dorky.

Nathan:
Let's get it.

Haeny:
Okay, let's get it.

Nathan:
Let's be who we are.

Haeny:
But there is this thing about how the line between adulthood and childhood can get kind of blurry when we think about time as not time, but all of us have experienced it. We sometimes live in our adult selves and then our child self is always in there, living out some kind of period in time where we're still adults, but we're also the child within, kind of thing.

Nathan:
I feel like you and I have made careers out of that dance, right? Are we really grown-ups?

Haeny:
Speak for yourself.

Nathan:
I'm sorry. I guess I'm the kid here.

Haeny:
Yeah. But I think it was a nice reminder that collections are a form of play, collections beyond M.U.S.C.L.E. Men are a form of play and we all kind of have it, whether it's short-lived or have the same kind of longevity as Morgan's.

Nathan:
Yeah. Something you come back to, something you did, something you're doing, something new you want to start, it's always a chance.

Haeny:
Yeah, brings you back.

Nathan:
Brings you back. What fun.

Haeny:
Indeed.

[theme music plays]

Nathan:
This season of Pop and Play was produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudevan, Billy Collins, and Joe Riina-Ferrie, at Teachers College, Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute. This episode was also produced by Lucius Von Joo. Audio editing and production by Billy Collins.

Haeny:
For transcripts and to learn more about our guests, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leafeaters by Podington Bear. Pop and Play, of course, would not be possible without the fabulous team that helps put this together. Thanks to Oluwaseun Animashaun for running the Pop and Play social media accounts where you should follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok under popandplaypod. You can also follow us on Twitch under popandplay. Special thanks to Drew Reynolds, Jen Lee, Blake Danzig, Brianne Minaudo, Moira McCavana, and Lucius Von Joo, who all helped with our outreach and or website support. Shout out to Ioana Literat for the Trashies. Watch on Instagram and TikTok. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.