Rare G1 Transformer Query

[matt]

Hi,

I was going through the loft the other day and came upon a stash of old Transformers. Amongst everything was a character called Overlord with its packaging featuring some neat artwork. Looking things up, Overlord seems to be a character exclusive to the Japanese version of Transformers and this toy was a European release sold in the early 90s. I was thinking about selling this thing along with a few other pieces and then saw some of lofty prices being put up on eBay for Overlord. I don't know now whether I should keep hold of the toy or, if I do sell it, what is the minimum I should expect. Any help?

Kind regards,

Matthew

[we_are_forest]

Best bet is to have a look at the completed listings on ebay to get a fair idea of how much they go for.

[Death's Head]

If its boxed, in excellent condition, with the manual and everything then you'd be looking at £250 - £300. some auctions have exceeded this of late due to the character's appearance in Last Stand Of The Wreckers, so some examples have been hitting £400 - £500.

[Specimen-17]

"Rare" is a bit of a misnomer, the toy's common as dirt in Europe and Japan, but because it wasn't released in the US, American collectors have this fixation that it's some uber-rare foreign toy. Apart from a couple of often-broken accessories it's easy as hell to find - I have 3 MIB in my collection.

Regardless, what it's worth depends largely on the condition and which accessories you have, as they play a large part in the value. If your reason for keeping it is anything beyond wanting it for yourself, my advice would be to sell it now. At the moment a lot of people are collecting that era (toys tend to peak in value around 20 years after release - stuff from 1989 I sell on eBay now is going for about 30% less than it was 2-3 years ago, whilst the 1991 Overlord has doubled in value since then) plus demand was pushed up massively due to the popularity of the Last Stand Of The Wreckers comic Death's Head mentioned, but that's a couple of years old now and demand won't stay this high forever.

If it was actually rare I'd say hold onto it, but going by my 10 years experience of selling on eBay, I'd say the value is more likely to drop than rise significantly. The same thing happened with toys like Bludgeon and Thunderwing in the past - got to about 20 years old and had some comic appearances, bam, tripled in value. A few years and some new toy incarnations later they've fallen to a halfway point.