What do you mean a closet is supposed to hold clothing?
A few weeks ago, I was channel surfing and stumbled upon a new series on SyFy called Collection Intervention. What’s this? A room with wall-to-wall comic book boxes? Interest grabbed.
So I DVR’d the series and recently sat down to watch a mini-marathon. If you’re the stereotypical nerd collector-type, you’ll likely see a bit (or a lot) of yourself in the “hapless” souls featured on the show. And when I say “hapless,” I mean, “WOW, I wish I had that stuff!”
To go nutshell on you, Collection Intervention is a combination of Hoarders, Antiques Roadshow, and Pawn Stars with a liberal dose of Intervention thrown in for good measure.
The premise of the show revolves around the theory that just as a “hoarder” can bring physical, mental, emotional & financial doom upon themselves by keeping 3,000 empty pizza boxes and 800 lbs of cat feces (for example) in their home, so can the obsessive “collector” with his/her mountains of comics, action figures, games, movies, and all the myriad other things we geeks amass.
The five or so episodes I’ve seen have focused on collectors of comics, Star Wars, robots, Catwoman, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, and Flintstones “stuff.” The host of the show, Elyse Luray, is a pop culture/collectible expert who once worked for eleven years at the famous Christie’s auction house and she seems pretty well-versed in the stuff-centric world of nerd culture.
My big mistake was watching this show with my wife in the room. In particular, I can’t tell you how many times I glanced over to catch her cutting her eyes at me during the comic hoarder episode. As you might guess, this guy’s wife wasn’t loving her home consisting of wall-to-wall comic boxes. Apparently that made it hard to “entertain guests” or some such nonsense. My wife had that “So, I’m not the ONLY one” look on her face. Admittedly, Before the fire, I had about 100 boxes of comics, and I was known for getting creative in my storage “solutions.” Clearly the episode was stirring up bad memories for her.
As a collector myself, this show is kinda hard to watch. Unlike the typical Hoarders episode where you want to beat some of those people with a wet sand-filled Wiffle bat, I usually find myself rooting for the nerds on C.I. to hold out against Ms. Luray’s pressure to downsize their collections. Now granted, most of these folks need to get their you-know-what together and put their houses in order. But having involuntarily lost all my collections to a fire, I sure know the pain of cutting loose of certain things that hold a lot of emotional value. Oddly, I have yet to hear anybody suggest either moving to a bigger house or getting a (climate-controlled) storage space. Problem solved.
In the end, most of the collectors cave in and part with some of their treasured swag. And watching them sell their stuff for oftentimes low-ball offers almost brings a tear to my eye. On the bright side though, you do tend to get some pretty good ideas for new things to collect from watching the show. I’d almost forgotten that Shogun Warrior figure I had back in 79. Logging into eBay…
So, if you’re into collecting those things that make the nerd lifestyle worth living, give Collection Intervention a peek. Just don’t watch it with your spouse. Until next time…stay nerdy my friends.
Copyright 2014 It Came From The Nerd Cave