Trek Thursdays: A ‘Trek’ Toy Collector’s Challenge

It’s Star Trek’s 60th anniversary in 2026, and the team here at Comicon.com is all in on celebrating. I mean, we’ve been trying to get Vulcan ears on Senior editor Brendan Allen since January, and Austin Gorton, Scott Redmond, Anton Kromoff and I have been fighting over who gets to be Riker in our group cosplay. (Editor-in-chief Erik Amaya already has his Christopher Pike cosplay ready to go.)

One of the great aspects of Trek, though, is no matter what part of the collecting side of fandom you’re into, Star Trek has been there. In the late 1980s/early ’90s boom of the franchise, one of the big Trek “things” was the massive Playmates toyline. Literally, if a character or alien appeared on screen and looked cool, they got an action figure. If a lead character was mutated, they got an action figure. If they changed clothing at all, ever, they got an action figure.

So in the spirit of that, we’re kicking off a challenge in the Comicon.com offices.

While Scott Redmond is covering the 60 greatest episodes of Star Trek between now and September, we’re going to start trying to hunt down a group of Star Trek figures to add to our toy collection. And what is that list?

1 lead character from each series

1 alien unique to each series

1 lead character in an alternate uniform

1 TOS movie figure

1 TNG movie figure

1 lead character in disguise

1 lead from their appearance in a different series

1 mutated lead (i.e. Salamander Tom Paris)

Worf in a silly costume

Data in a silly costume

A complete out of box figure from each series

So here are the rules:

• Outside of that last item, the figure could be still in-box or out-of-box.

• The alternate uniform in item three means one they didn’t wear regularly. It could be the dress uniform, a character in an atmosphere suit, Sisko in his TOS-era uniform from “Trials and Tribbleations” or Worf in his Klingon dress uniform, but not Picard in his TNG season 1 uniform.

• No more than three figures from any one source. I’ll definitely be able to do this all on eBay and maybe WhatNot, so I’m adding a restriction to make it more of a challenge. Different toy stores count as different sources, as long as I’m not going through eBay.

• This will be strictly for the original period of the Playmates license; TOS–VOY only. Enterprise and Discovery figures are generally rare and/or expensive, Strange New Worlds has only high-end figures and Lower Decks only statues that I can find. Plus, it’ll keep the scale and design generally consistent for display purposes.

• Figures can count for more than one category, except for the Worf and Data in a silly costume categories.

We’ll check in on my progress through the next six months. So stay tuned!