From the Playing Mantis Vault: Finding Vintage Johnny Lightning's in 2016, Part 3

The last sighting was three weeks ago, at my local Toys"R"Us. This was easily the best one yet. There had to have been more than a dozen different models on the pegs, ranging from classic to modern American muscle, to trucks, to fantasy vehicles, and even a Mini Cooper to boot. As much as I would have loved to grab all of them, the price tag kept me in check. Thus, I walked out with "only" four cars in hand: a crazy Plum Crazy Challenger, a pair of '69 Shelby GT500's in coupe and convertible forms, and one insanely sick '68 Camaro. Like I said, easily the best yet.



I forgot to mention one thing about these releases: the hologram sticker. In lead photo, you can see it slapped onto the upper area of the blister. That's the one thing that differentiates these from their original releases. That's it. Is it worth a premium on the secondary market? Hard to tell at this point. A brief check on eBay yields only a few results. However, as is commonly said, buy them if you like them. Don't get caught up in the hype. At the end of the day, when you look back at your collection, make sure you actually like each and every one of your cars.

It's almost a shame because I open all my cars and throw the packaging away. Luckily, this blog is evidence that these are indeed from the Playing Mantis Vault.

As more collectors have been finding these, a few interesting observations have been made, which leaves us with a few unanswered questions. For one, there have been sightings of the same models in different parts of the country. Therefore, there are multiples of some, if not all, of these releases. The question is "how many?" How many cars from the collection are actually out there and how many of each? How are they distributed?

Secondly, there's the whole restocking situation that I mentioned in my last post. If these are supposed to be "limited", why are Toys"R"Us stores are receiving multiple shipments? Or is it simply that they are only putting out a few at a time? For the conspiracy theorists (myself included): could Johnny Lightning actually be producing these behind our backs at this very moment and disguising them as old releases?

We might never know the answers to all of those questions. Mystery can be a good thing. Having not collected during the Playing Mantis years, I'm just happy to have these at all.