When I look back at my life to when pivotal changes occurred, moments that changed the trajectory I would go on in my hobbies and obsessions, not many are more important than the mundane act of picking up a Transformers: The Movie Diamond sticker collector’s album and some packs of stickers from a 7-Eleven back in 1987. There is absolutely nothing auspicious about the day, or even about the purchase, but this impulse buy was a seed that was planted at a time when I was consciously looking to “find my thing”, which at the time meant a hobby that I’d spend all of my time and money investing into a sort of personality. For a hot minute I thought that would be in collecting baseball cards as I had a couple friends really into sports and card collecting, and I tried to make that my thing. I started picking up a metric ton of the 1987 Topps Baseball cards (those fugly wood-bordered ones that are actually worth less now than I paid for them fresh out of the 25 cent wax packs from that same 7-Eleven.) I tried to go all-in, adopting a favorite team (the Oakland A’s), watching games, and picking up every copy of Becket I could find on the newsstands like they were the stock section of the Wall Street Journal, checking the shifting prices of grail cards like the Mickey Mantle Rookie card, or the Honus Wagner tobacco card. I declared that the new theme park in central Florida (where I lived at the time), Boardwalk and Baseball, was the best that the sunshine state had to offer (sorry Epcot.) Most importantly, I traded away all of my Transformers for a stack of older baseball cards from a kid down the street in the hopes that he had some hidden treasures (he did not.)
The thing is, I kind of hate sports. It’s me, not you “sports”, so calm the F down generic description of a hobby/pastime. The baseball card sets were too big to effectively collect without going kid-broke constantly, while all of the statistics and anecdotes of the game bored me. I didn’t care who won or lost, didn’t really enjoy watching the games, and had zero urge to play myself. All I really liked were the logos and color schemes of the teams. But I stuck with it for almost a year. During that time, I did manage to complete the 1987 Topps set of cards and with my now freed up weekly allowance, I started plunking down my dollar bills and quarters on the above Transformers sticker collector’s book and packs of stickers as I missed my toys and still had memories of the movie melting my brain when I saw it in theaters the year before. Sadly, I don’t have my original book from when I was kid, but over the years I’ve managed to put together a near complete one by accident. But getting back to my point, diving into collecting all of the stickers needed to fill this album, was a pivot away from collecting baseball cards, and toward sticking with the things I was still in love with, cartoons, toys, artwork, science fiction, and fantasy. 1987 was my last year in elementary school and there was a ton of pressure from friends and my family to give up toys and watching cartoons all the time. In their eyes it wasn’t cool, and I kept hearing that I’d regret being into “baby stuff” when I marched into my new middle school. But somewhere deep down in my marrow I knew that they were wrong, and picking up this sticker collector’s album felt right. Little did I know that this one shift put me on the path to sell all of my baseball cards the following year and to go full tilt into collecting comic books, which was a hobby that fostered my love of toys and cartoons as well.
Example of a Lionel Playworld price tag on an unused album in my collection
So, as I mentioned, over the last few years, mainly during the pandemic, I sort of accidentally put together a new vintage collection of these stickers and their respective album. I’ve wanted one since I started letting nostalgia take the wheel back in 2004 or so, but they’ve always been priced out of my comfortable spending range. You see there’s a brisk market for these things, especially with the stickers set complete inside, driven by the European collecting market. Over there (and some of the sets here) were released by a company called Panini, and they’re still very active in the UK and Europe. So even if there was a lull in interest here in the states, there were always foreign buyers driving up the prices of these albums and stickers. Even as far back as 2006, completed Transformers Diamond albums were fetching between $100 and $150. And that was at a time when the collectible vintage sticker market was still a very niche thing, and I was picking up gold for pennies on the dollar. But as the years have worn on they’ve just become more and more expensive. These days a complete book will fetch between $200-$400, and semi complete books, (depending on the ratio) can fetch between $50 to $200.) For stickers. I mean, they’re awesome. But they’re stickers.
Even if you just want to start a vintage album and you’re in the market to buy old packs of stickers, it’s a very expensive desire. Single packs of 6 stickers will set you back at least $6 a pack. Similarly, loose, unapplied stickers tend to cost anywhere between $2 to $4 each. Since there are over 200 stickers in the album, well, I’ll let you do the math on that. The point is, these things are expensive to collect, and even more so to complete. So, seeing as I’ve fairly vocal about my frugality when collecting, how did I managed to put together a near complete album during the pandemic? Purely by accident. At the start of the pandemic, like a lot of folks, I found myself working from home quite a bit. The thing about my job is that it’s mainly an onsite kind of gig. Our government contracting team was split in two and we alternated going into the office every other day. So, there would be days where I sat at my computer at home in the instance that I needed to field any questions from my co-workers who were onsite. To fill this time, I wrote a lot of articles for the site, did some art projects and even started digitally coloring vintage coloring book pages. I didn’t have a lot of books to pull from in my collection, so I went on eBay looking for lots of old coloring books. I wrote about this back in 2020.
I really wasn’t concerned with getting any particular coloring books, I just wanted a bunch to choose from and ended up picking up a few lots that just so happened to include copies of the Diamond Transformers sticker collecting albums. Over three really cheap lots I managed to put together a collection of four of these albums, and to my utter shock, a couple of them were almost 75% complete. Since these albums were just thrown into the lot of mainly coloring books, these went under the radar of most collectors and after the dust settled and I was able to compare the albums, I had what amounted to a 99% complete book when combined. Between three of the books there were only two stickers missing. So. I had a conundrum, a choice of either completing one of the most complete books by buying single stickers or a bunch of packs in the hopes that I got the ones I needed, or Frankenstein the three books, cutting out the stickers from two of them to affix inside the third. As a collector, the idea of cutting up a vintage book is maddening. On the one hand, I could resell it and potentially get some decent scratch to reinvest in other vintage junk. On the other, the thought of destroying something that another collector would want just felt really, really wrong.
Picture above are two pages from a pristine, unused album with all the obscured sticker images and trivia questions.
So these sat in my flat file for 4 years because I couldn’t decide what to do about them. I guess with a few more years under my belt I both don’t really care about selling any of these or destroying some of them, because after stumbling on them again the other day I just said screw it and I started cutting out stickers and finally putting them all in one album.
Luckily all of the missing stickers were single images and not any of the puzzle images. So there were only a handful of stickers I had to cut out of the sacrificial albums to Elmer’s glue them into the main album. One of the aspects that I really adore about this sticker album is the mix between old and new. All of the stickers are from the 1986 film, while all of the interior artwork bits are from the pre-movie toy line. So there’s a wide variety of characters and it includes both the toy art and animation.
A third of the book is also dedicated to the initial attack on Autobot city on Earth, which is both my favorite portion of the film and the most heart-wrenching.
After cobbling together all of the missing stickers I had between the three albums, there was one last dilemma. Do I leave this book as it is, missing two stickers, or do I head over to eBay and try and get them as cheaply as possible. I’m of two minds on this. Typically, I like the idea of having a slightly incomplete collection as a large part of what keep the item vibrant for me is the hunt. I’ll most likely never stumble on loose stickers in the wild, nor will I probably ever end up with another incomplete album to cull from. So if I chose that route, I’d have to know that those two holes would never be filled. The other option is easy, just do a quick search on eBay for someone selling singles (it’s pretty common.) But that would mean spending money to specifically acquire this album and it would no longer be this basically free thing I lucked into.
Though they’re not in these scans, I eventually decided to just buy the stickers so that I could see this album complete. It’s something I’ve always wanted and I’m fairly certain I never complete my original back in the day. If I’m going to have this thing, I might as well have the best version of it right? I do like that I have a second album with no stickers in it too, so that I can go back and look at all the sticker spaces that had fun stuff in them (like the “Sorry, no sneak peek!” bits (which is the only place in the book you’ll see the toy-centric artwork of movie characters like Hot Rod and Ultra Magnus.)
I’m stoked to finally have all of these stickers in one album that I can now flip through at my leisure. One ore personal grail knocked off the list.
Did you have a favorite Panini or Diamond sticker album growing up? Any fun stories of completing them or stumbling on them later in life? Share them with me over at Blue Sky, just click the link below to chat me up.
