Watch Your Step - Toy Underfoot May Be A Collectible

You’ve got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuffed in the nooks and crannies of your sofa and a Barbie doll shoved under the driver’s seat of your car. If you trip over another Power Ranger, you’re going to scream.

It may sound like toy hell, but before you get mad and pitch them into the garbage, consider this: The toys that populate your kid’s closet may be the pop-culture collectibles of the future.

Sure, you know that baseball cards and basketball cards are collectibles.

But did you know that collections of Hot Wheels cars of the 1960s and ‘70s are bringing thousands of dollars at auctions? Beatles toys are fetching big bucks: $675 for Yellow Submarine wristwatches, $110 for Paul Bubblebath and $250 for a Beatles lunchbox. Pez dispensers featuring Bullwinkle the cartoon moose can command up to $150, and a Supergirl figurine from 1967, if she’s in perfect condition, is worth a whopping $2,000 - enough to make any parent salivate over the toy box.

So what should you scavenge from your kid’s toy box - and what should hit the junk pile? To find out, we polled collectible experts around the country. We asked them to tell us what toys currently in toy stores might be valuable in 20 years - when today’s kids will be collectors themselves.

Hit the preteen market. The key question, says Ted Hake of Hake’s Americana in York, Pa., is what do 12-year-olds like?

“The general rule is this: People start collecting for nostalgia reasons when they hit the age of 30. And the things they collect are the things they remember from around the age of 12,” Hake said. “So whatever the 12-yearolds think is pretty neat or hot today is probably going to be hot 20 years from now.”

(That probably explains why swimsuit editions of Sports Illustrated are considered collectibles.)

If it’s dirt cheap now, it may be dirt cheap later. So what do you save? Take Star Trek merchandise, for example.

“Of the gobs and gobs of stuff that they’re putting out, not everything is going to be collectible,” said Martin Krim of the New England Auction Gallery in Peabody, Mass. “If they put out something nice, like the Christmas ornaments and the action figures, then keep those. But cheap things - such as coloring books, tablecloths, napkins - that’s not going to be worth much.”

Indeed, says Krim, one rule of thumb for collectors to remember is this: If you found something in the bargain bin at the toy store, it probably won’t be a collectible.

Can you say “recalled by the company”? One of the hottest lunch boxes on the boxcollectors circuit now is the Jurassic Park lunch box that Thermos issued shortly after the movie debuted in 1993.

The box was pulled off shelves in 1993 when parents objected because the thermos bore a “warning” sticker that closely resembled those found on hazardous-waste containers. Thermos later reissued the Jurassic Park boxes with new stickers. But the original “warning” versions are keepers, said collector Bill Henry of Oak Ridge, Tenn. They are worth $20 to $40 today.

And Thermos is betting that its Flintstones lunch box - a plastic pail that appears to be carved out of rock accessorized with a bone handle - will be a keeper in years to come.

Bad is good - at least when it comes to action figures. Villains are much more interesting than the Dudley Do-Rights of the world.

“There are always exceptions, but when you’ve got your nice goody two-shoes people, they don’t create the interest such as a Darth Vader,” said antique dealer Krim. Krim, who says that good guys are boring, notes that Rambo and Chuck Norris action figures didn’t thrive on the market because Rambo and Norris are good - albeit violent - guys.

Save TV- and film-related toys. “Those ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ dolls from a few years back are going to be popular when those stars go on and make movies,” said Ira Gallen, a New York-based pop culture collector who hosts a cable TV show.

Reruns - such as Nickelodeon’s decision to rerun “The Brady Bunch” - can create a spurt of interest in toys from that series. And the recent Batman movies have pumped up interest in Batman toys and kept Batman alive for another generation of kids. “Star Trek” was a short-lived TV series, but thanks to reruns and a series of movies, Star Trek collectibles are a dependable market.

For example, action figures of characters from the original TV show produced in the mid-70s - originally sold for $5 to $6. Today the less popular characters are commanding big bucks because there were fewer made. Dr. McCoy and Scottie figurines sell for $80 to $100. And aliens are worth even more - a Romulan still in the box sells for $800, while even a used one can fetch $350.

And it’s not just toys that may be future collectibles. The proliferation of movie and TV T-shirts and baseball caps has convinced Josh Lowitz, owner of a TV memorabilia boutique in suburban Chicago, that they will be valuable 20 years from now.

When collecting dolls and action figures, think women and minorities. “Black dolls and black characters are always collectible because there are so few of them,” said Gallen. Likewise, another collector notes that one of the most collectible of the Mutant Ninja Turtles figurines is the female April O’Neil character.