 Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. I hope you are enjoying Cobra Convergence 7 and this time we have a special interview with Peg Warmers. The pegs are warm because we have Peg Warmers. Hello, Kevin. Kevin has participated in Cobra Convergence for several years now. So Kevin, if you don't mind, just introduce yourself and tell us about what you do on your channel. Hi, I'm Kevin. My channel is called Peg Warmers. I do a variety of different toy related content. I'm maybe one of the less GI Joe specific people on Cobra Convergence, but GI Joe is my all time favorite IP. Don't let the giant he-man box confuse you there. I love GI Joe and so I do a fair amount of joke content every year and I love being part of Cobra Convergence. And we're happy to have you, of course, every year. I love what you do. I have not met every Cobra Convergence participant in person, but I have managed to meet you in person a couple of times, so that was pretty cool. So you're not specifically or I guess entirely Joe focused. You have a broader collection. Can you talk about what you collect and how GI Joe or Cobra fits into that? So as a kid, I collected a little bit of all of the 80s brands, right? But GI Joe was always one of my main focuses. A lot of toy lines like maybe Mask or Hasbro's Cops and Crooks. I would have a handful, you know, a bad guy and a couple of good guys. But GI Joe was like the line that I collected hardcore. I remember counting how many Joe's I owned at one point and it was 250. I counted a few doubles because I had like two vipers and two motor vipers from yard sales. And when I did that count, I was like, I wonder how many there are and if I can get them all. And that started the like trend of trying to collect the whole series. Eventually, like when I was in middle school, the internet gave me the ability to find out how many GI Joe's there were. And I started systematically working at it. The only one I don't have right now is a Goldhead Steel Brigade. And when I was really working hard at collecting them, he was considered a variant at the time and I wasn't worried about variants. And now I'm kicking myself for not buying him at the price he was back then. Yeah, the prices have gone up a little bit, a little bit. So you were involved with GI Joe, you collected GI Joe, among other things. At one point, I would say you're an experienced collector as an adult. You're an experienced toy collector, is that fair to say? Yes, I transitioned from playing with toys to collecting toys, probably in high school. Although I did do some odd, like how toy photography has become sort of a popular thing for adult collectors. I did stop motion animation with toys when I was in high school and college. As I was working on collecting a lot of those Joe's in that run, but I have been an adult toy collector for my entire adult life. So for you, it wasn't, for a lot of us, there was a gap. Like we would play with toys, we'd move on to other things and then eventually we'd come back. But for you, it was a transition from being a kid playing with toys to being a collector of toys and you've continued that then. Right. Are there any big trends that you have seen in your experience? Anything that you've noticed that has changed, especially more recently, as were maybe catering more toward adult collectors? I tend to notice the way people collector, the order that people collect has shifted somewhat. There's a lot of people that get into collecting a toy line and they go for those like grail level toys first and people will post a picture of their collection. There's nothing right or wrong about it, but like they'll have a very small collection with a couple of extremely rare figures. Whereas I feel like when I was early on collecting, people were trying to get like all of the main figures and you dreamed of having the steel brigade or the Brazil special mission guys and things like that. But now those seem to be sort of like the feather and the cap and you try and get them before you worry about having everybody from 84 or 85. I can relate to that a little bit because I didn't do it that way. And now I'm thinking if I had bought that rare stuff, back then when it was more affordable, I could have got that and then the common stuff is still around. Then you can just pick up the rest of the stuff at your leisure. But you have some decent Joe items in your collection. I see the mobile command center box behind you. That's my childhood best friends box from his childhood. Nice, nice. Well done preserving that. I have none of my boxes from back then. His dad wanted it out of the house. He's like, Kevin, come pick this up. That's, well, hey, that's a great thing about people knowing that you're a collector. Yup. When they really, really want to be done with this stuff, please come and get it. So your channel is peg warmers. And your channel has kind of gone through some eras. You had different approaches and it's evolved over the years. Talk to us about what you're doing now with your channel and kind of how that's changed up to this point. So in the beginning, the channel was originally called SEO Tour Review and we focused a lot on like kids toys and the current trends. But I am such a big collector that I kept saying like, well, can I just do something that interests me on a certain day? And it sort of became Wednesdays became the collector day. And so we would have like kiddie videos and then something more for adults. And over time, that slowly kind of took over, especially then when COPA went through and it became hard to do any content related to kids. It just dropped, I dropped doing all the kids content. And then fairly recently, there was sort of a bigger rebranding and some friends were trying to do a podcast network type of thing. And so there was a video game show and a movie show and a toy show. And we were all doing kind of podcasts in a similar format and trying to like be on each other shows and things like that. And it kind of worked. And then, you know, we sort of changed formats again and I moved and I had a lot of stuff going on. So now I'm shooting most of my episodes in my basement. I do still try and do guests once in a while. Sometimes over stream yard like this, sometimes in person. Back in May, I did a couple of Batman ones with the guy from the movie Stuff Hack the Movies and I went to his studio and shot those. So... Yeah, and I love your show. I love what you do. It's always fun. New episodes you usually have set for a premiere. So if I can catch it so we can, you know, actually chat while watching, that's always a good time. But here we have Cobra Convergence upon us and my understanding is that you know what you're doing for Cobra Convergence. We're recording this a bit in advance. So you may not have it ready yet, but by the time this goes up, your contribution should be up. So you can talk a little bit about it if you have any thoughts or just any general ideas of what you would like to do for the Convergence this year. So early in the planning process, somebody mentioned that the CC7 logo could kind of work like a 007 concept and we started talking about doing like espionage and saboteurs and whatever. And the first thing that popped into my head was the agent faces figure that was a male away in the Crimson Guard uniform. And I know he's not actually a Cobra figure but because he's dressed in a Cobra uniform, I just decided to do him anyway because the rules for Cobra Convergence are kind of loose and you can do what you want with it. And I just decided after doing Cobra Commander and the Cobra Log Eyes and Televiper and whoever else I've done in the past, I was gonna kind of change it up this year and do a Joe. Very creative choice, very creative choice. I like it, I like it. So, but this is maybe a figure that some of like the older collectors or some folks that focus either on vintage or on certain other areas that may not be as familiar with. You get some of those other eras of GI Joe figures beyond just vintage. What do you think people are missing if they're not looking at these other eras of GI Joe? There were a lot of new characters that came out in that Joe vs. Cobra era and I know people were not a fan of the body style, but we called it the new sculpt era. Interestingly, Agent Faces had both a new sculpt figure and an O-ring figure. His new sculpt figure was just sort of a traditional Joe and he came with some rubber masks you can put on him during the spy troops era. And then there was also the mail away figure which I think might've come first but I would have to actually check the releases on that. But I was super excited to be able to mail away for a Crimson Guard, whether you took the helmet off or not. But I always love guys with removable helmets and things like that. So I thought it was super fun. I ordered multiples. I was actually in college and when I would find Joe's at Toys R Us or KB, actually it was where I shopped a lot in college because there was one at the mall near my university. I would save the points and every month or so I could mail away for another one because the window was pretty long for mailing away for those guys. So I have three or four of those Crimson Guard agent faces. That it's very nostalgic the idea of collecting flag points and sending away for something. Maybe they should bring that back. Yeah, I don't know if the last one was Doc, like 25th anniversary had Doc and the agent faces won and there was an unmasked storm shadow during that new sculpt era also. And those are kind of the last mailways I can remember from GI Joe. Well, I would say, I mean, they should introduce mail aways for GI Joe classified but a lot of them you do kind of have to order online anyway. So I don't know, they kind of all are all mail aways if you look at it and depending on how you shop for them. But yeah, you said that GI Joe, that's your number one property. What would be number two? What's your second favorite thing? So when I first became a collector, my number two property was Star Wars. When I sold off most of my childhood toys, I kept GI Joe and Kenner Star Wars. But I think now because Star Wars just sort of ended for me, like once I had all the Kenner guys, I collected during the prequels and it just didn't keep my attention as much. I think Ki-Man has sort of taken that secondary spot for me. Yeah, and that attorney box behind you, that's a flex. It's nice. Yeah. Well done, that's very good. So you've got your Cobra Convergence plan, you've got your topic picked out and it's a really cool one. Going back, let's talk about like the ones that you've done before because you have participated for several years. Of the episodes that you've done in past Cobra Convergences, do you have a favorite? Do you have any that stand out to you? So one of my favorite ones for like personal reasons is the Cobra Law episode. When I was in college and doing the stop motion animation stuff, I did a multi-episode storyline. It was basically toy story in a dorm room and the toys were trying to escape. And we had so many characters in it that my friend and I who like wrote it and edited it together, we never like finished recording all the voices while we're in college. So we actually finished it post college and one of my coworkers voiced Sergeant Slaughter for me in it. And that came out the year that he was retiring from work. So I got him to re-voice Sergeant Slaughter for me for that video. And so that's kind of a special thing for me. He's one of my best friends. He was actually my best man in my wedding. And so to have him do literally record those lines at work on his last day of work was kind of a special moment. So I like that one a lot. I had you as a cameo in my Hooded Cobra Commander episode. And last year I did one about the kind of the wackiness of the cartoon and some ugly figures with my friends from Far Point Toys in sort of a round table podcast episode. Those were all a lot of fun and I've been mean to Cobra Law in the past. Thank you for tolerating me. Thank you for forgiving me. But I love your Cobra Law video as well. So yeah, you mentioned the stop motion. You've now mentioned the stop motion a couple of times. Do you still have any of those stop motion things that you made? So a lot of it's on YouTube but has been like grabbed because of content ID. We used to just use popular music because production beds are hard to like find with the kind of the motif you want. So a lot of the stuff has been grabbed over the years I tried to like remove the audio. We don't have the original files anymore to like go back into the editing software and just mute the audio, the music tracks. So it's really hard to remove that music and try and fix it up. But there are some videos on my channel where I put in little scenes that I tried to pull the audio out of. I used to do commercials for a local convention called Retrocon. It's so time consuming though. I really don't do it much anymore but it was basically pre having a YouTube channel was my favorite way to interact with my collection. Now it's making these videos. That sort of has become my way of playing with the toys as an adult. But before that it was the stop motion stuff. I think you have provided a great segue about how you enjoy your collection because people have different goals. Some people want everything as pristine as they can get. Some folks still play with the toys. G.I. Joberg does some really cool video movies and their scenes with them. That's awesome stuff. In what mode do you most enjoy your toys and your collection? If I had time I would probably still be doing the animation stuff because it's just so much fun but it's super time consuming. So for me now mostly it's one making videos about toys that I am interested in talking about and then just playing stuff here. I recently moved. I lived in a house for 12 years that was basically all my space and there was kind of toys everywhere. I had a couple of rooms that were mostly focused on toys but there was literally stuff everywhere. And so I now moved after I got married. I have a family now so I have two step sons. So now my toys are in the basement and I'm working on slowly setting that up and it's a challenge because I'm trying to figure out how to fit a big collection into a smaller space and make it make sense. Like there's sort of an L shaped wall down here that I was using as my carted wall and I started on one end with just one sample of a bunch of different toy lines I thought were kind of interesting then I transitioned into some master of the universe stuff and then I was gonna finish the wall with G.I. Jo and when I got to the end of G.I. Jo I realized I probably just should have started with G.I. Jo because I don't have enough room for Ninja Force and Star Brigade. So it's a challenge. I can relate it's it can be overwhelming and like trying to fit things into a smaller space I can relate to that a lot. That is a challenge. Your experience as a collector you probably have a lot of advice and suggestions for newer collectors. People who are either just getting into it or they're accumulating a collection that is now starting to take up some space. Of course again, everybody's gonna approach it differently but in your vast experience and knowledge do you have any advice for folks who are getting into it and are looking at maybe expanding a collection? The number one thing that I tell collectors as I've talked to them is collecting is a marathon. You don't have to own it all now. Enjoy the process of collecting the things enjoy the new things you get. If you are collecting stuff so fast you're not opening it or looking at it or enjoying it or displaying it. You're just scrolling it in the closet. You're not getting the full satisfaction out of it. So maybe slow it down just enough that you can kind of keep up with that. I know that I do it sometimes I'll order a whole wave of something and just never look at it. And then it's like, I forget I own it. I'm like, wait, did that come out? Did it arrive? So especially if you're trying to collect like all of vintage Gijia or whatever, right? You don't need to own every figure all at once. It's fun if you have like a checklist of the order you wanna get things in but I tend to go by what I can find at a reasonable price. It depends how you shop. If you shop at toy shows and toy stores it's a little bit more of what's available versus if you're shopping via eBay or whatever where almost everything's available at all times then you're just kind of looking for the deals or the thing you want the most. And then my second piece of advice is don't be afraid to let something go later. If you buy something and you decide it's not giving you the satisfaction you want most things in your collection you can replace later. If it has something sentimental like this being my friend's box I wouldn't sell that if it was your childhood figure or if it's something really rare that you just aren't gonna see again but if for some reason you need to downsize your collection and you decide I don't need the 90s Joe's after I collected them it's okay to let them go you will find them again or if you decide you bought all the vehicles from a couple years but now you just don't have the space and you wanna slim that down to your core vehicles that's okay it's your collection nobody else's opinion of it matters whatever you have in your collection is fine. Some of my favorite things in my collection are like weird things that kids wrote on like I have a vamp two that says GI Joe headquarters written on the side of it and I have a RAM box that says good and bad men written on it clearly the kids stored his figures in that box you know those little weird things I love. Those have a history beyond just the toy history there's some kids history is there some kid played with that and it was important to somebody. Well I feel like I gotta make sure I focus enough on Cobra it is Cobra convergence after all. Is there a Cobra character that resonated with you the most when you were either watching the cartoon as a kid or reading the comic books or playing with the toys? Was there a Cobra that really stood out to you? So 1986 is my favorite year of the GI Joe toy line. It's kind of when I got into it I had some of the earlier figures from a neighborhood boy who kind of outgrew it and passed stuff along to me and I had seen some like the first season of the cartoon I guess but I was confused about who some of the characters were with like the early figures who were very interchangeable I had a hawk and a short fuse I thought were both Duke as a kid because they didn't come in the package. Close enough yeah. Right yeah but so in 86 the year that I first really started getting figures. I mean the Viper and the Bat are amazing. So those are two of my all-time favorite figures from the line. The cartoon, the voice for Cobra Commander is amazing and as a kid I wanted the battle helmet Cobra Commander so bad but never found. I was too young to get him as the original Malloway I didn't get the hooded Cobra Commander because he was offered for such a long period of time but he was basically Snake Eyes, version two Storm Shadow, version one and Cobra Commander with the battle helmet were on my like dream list of things to stumble upon as a flea market as a kid and I never found any of the three of them. Now you have them now right? I do I have them as an adult collector. Good, see the growing up being an adult it has its advantages. Yes. So yeah, you're a little bit younger like you said you came in at about 86 and how long did you stick with GI Joe? I'm sure you had other toys that you played with as well but how long through that line did you stick with GI Joe? So like I said, early on I had a lot of like 84 mostly 83, 84 figures that the neighbor kid gave me and then I missed a lot of 85 for some reason. I had a lot of friends that had those figures because it was right about the right age for me to get into it. But my mom was kind of anti-military toys. Luckily my dad's mother, my grandmother on my dad's side didn't know about these rules my mom had set for me and bought me army toys for Christmas. And so in 86 I started getting GI Joe's and I collected 86, 87, 88, 89 probably into 1990 where I was still asking for a lot of them. And then somewhere in there I was getting a little too old where once in a while I grabbed somebody like I got some of the street fighter guys in late elementary school. I got Ninja Force snake eyes just cause I was shocked to see a new version of snake eyes. And I think the last figure I ever got was Mace from DE or he was battle core I guess but he was supposed to be a DF figure. And I saw him at just at a grocery store. They had a real short little section of toys like cap guns and so like that. And they had a peg of GI Joe's and I was maybe in seventh grade or something like that. And I just got super nostalgic to like rip a figure out of the package and I picked him for some reason picked him. And I think that's the last one I ever got at a store. Well, Mace is happy that you picked him. I have looked at that figure, interesting figure. Actually, not a bad figure design at all. There's a lot that I like about it. But if you were actively collecting through maybe 1990-ish. It's about 90, maybe 91 a little bit, yeah. You might have missed out on some of the wackiness and the craziness from like 93, 94 but some of that seems to be like stuff that you would like. Is there anything that you discovered as an adult collector from the vintage era that you missed out on? And once you found out about it you were just really eager to get your hands off. So I used to look at the Joe's in the toy store. Like even when I was kind of in that late elementary middle school era and I wasn't buying a lot of toys. I was sort of transitioning from playing to collecting. I would still go look at the stuff. I remember being blown away that they reissued Keele Hall, that blue Keele Hall. I was like, you know, a dream figure of mine, right? The flag is a grail. They re-released him. Like that's so neat. So I knew about a lot of the stuff that came out but I couldn't appreciate all of it. Like the space star brigade and the aliens. I was like, this is so dumb. Even in college, I passed on the man mammals they put out at KB. I was like, this is so stupid. And then, you know, over time my opinion softened and I still think they're ridiculous for GI Joe but I love that they're ridiculous. And, you know, of course now have gone back and collected them. Again, wishing I had bought them, you know when they were on the pegs. Yeah, I've, I also think they're ridiculous but I've had a lot of fun with them. Yeah. There's no denying that, still a good time. Still a good time. I actually bought all three of the aliens at a Jocan in Florida, Disney World, when I was in college and cut them off the card backs in the hotel room just to look at them, left the weapons on the tree. And I'm like, now, looking back, like that was so dumb why did you cut them off? But I was a loose collector at the time. So I was like, yep, just take these right off. I, at the time they were probably 20 bucks a piece. You know, you get one to keep sealed and then one to open. I wish I had done that. That would be, you know, you'd have to drain your kid's college funds to do that. Yes. But there has been more interest I think in, I would say compared to me, younger collectors. Do you see a lot of folks now maybe in their early 30s, mid 30s who came into GI Joe later and now starting to get into collecting? Do you see like a resurgence of folks from later areas of GI Joe that are getting into it? So at one point I was focusing on GI Joe reviews a fair amount in like the previous format of the show. And I decided to focus on a lot of the 90s stuff cause I felt like there were less reviews on it. Like to sit there and do a review of Firefly who has, you know, amazing reviews done by yourself and FormBX2Y7, I just felt like, let me try and do some of the Ninja Force stuff. Let me try and do some of the Eco Warriors and things like that. And I've been amazed at how many comments I've gotten on those videos from people that were like, this was my favorite figure as a kid. And, you know, their little stories about picking it out at a certain store with their mom or whatever. So I definitely think there's that younger crowd that grew up with those that are enjoying it now. It's nice to see. And it's something that I've reminded other people that no matter how ridiculous the figure is that it is probably some kid's favorite toy. So keep that in mind. There's a sentimental attachment to each and every one of these. So we've talked about what you're working on for Cobra Convergence. We have a few more minutes here. Do you have thoughts on the future of peg warmers? Any ideas of what's coming up, you know, farther down the line in the future or goals for yourself, anything that you're collecting that you really just are hoping to get your hands on within the next year? Well, so as far as collecting goes, I collect a lot of different lines, mostly the modern stuff. Unfortunately, I feel like, and maybe it's not unfortunate, but I feel like I spend more time collecting, chasing the pre-orders for new things than trying to go buy vintage stuff. Although I think I get just as much satisfaction out of owning the vintage toys. I would really like to focus on getting all the rest of the accessories I need for my GI Joes. Like I said, I have all of the figures. I have all of the Kenner Star Wars figures, but I don't have every accessory for either one of those lines. I've been trying to make the Jo accessories a priority and I have lists I take with me to toy shows. Sometimes that gets unwieldy, trying to remember exactly what that gun or missile launcher looked like. The telling yellow missiles apart is almost impossible at times. I have it quite switched over to like downloading all the image files I need. That's the more advanced list when I get a little bit shorter. Hopefully I'll switch over to that. So there's that, there's chasing all of the like super seven ultimates from a whole bunch of toy lines I love. I'm really hoping they announced Beachhead at some point, my favorite GI Jo for ultimates. The classified line has been fantastic. I love that they switched. They kind of gave up on the Fortnite boots and everything and I've just started recreating the figures in that style. I can't decide if I like the classified look better or the ultimates look better. There's something special about them both. The ultimates figures being very cartoon accurate and the classifieds being sort of like how you envisioned the toy looking as a kid. But I like both of those and so I'm doing a lot of collecting with those. I would love to grow the channel more. I wanna try and get back to having more guests on my channel, but I used to actually film a full month in advance which made it possible to schedule things and work around people schedules much easier. Since I moved, I basically film every week. And so it's very hard to get ahead. Maybe this summer that'll finally happen and that'll help me out a little bit with trying to do more of those kinds of bigger and more special episodes. But I have a lot of different toy lines or parts of lots of different toy lines here in my basement to talk about someday. You have a collection with depth. And you could say many things about it. So whatever you do in the future, I will happily be there and I'm very much looking forward to it. So that about rounds out our time, but before we go, if you have any parting words for the audience, I think I'll turn the mic over to you and let you say anything you feel like saying. Well, if you haven't checked out Peg Warmers before, feel free to come over to my YouTube channel. Hit that subscribe button so you see our new content but also feel free to look through the old content. There is a lot of stuff on there. There are some G.I. Joe playlists to make it a little easier to find some of that content if you're a G.I. Joe specific collector. And I have to say thank you to you, Hoodie, for organizing this. Copper Convergence has been such an amazing thing. The year that we did the big Thanos spoof for Avengers, I just had so much fun. It was like the strongest connection I had had with other creators because we were chatting about what was gonna happen. We were getting the scripts. You knew what other people were gonna say and then you'd see the video clips later and you're like, oh my gosh, they did such a good job. We all had our own silly lines and the execution was fantastic at the end. That was a lot of fun. And a credit to Timmer, that was his idea and he did the follow through on that but that was a lot of fun. It's been a little while since we've done that but it is kind of a trip to work with people and to see how different creators interpret these scripts that we come up with these wacky ideas. That was a fantastic time. It would be amazing if there was somebody out there, even if they weren't a creator, if they had a writing talent to be able to come up with an idea for a concept that a lot of people could join in on, some sort of a plot, a loose plot kind of thing because that really is such a hard thing to try and put together. We've talked about it a few other times but to get that put together while everyone else is trying to churn out their own content as well as you put a lot of time into promotional videos and logos for the whole event, it's a lot of work and I appreciate it and I hope the whole fan community appreciates it. Well, thank you and thank you for your contribution which Ian should be up today. It should be up by the time you see this interview and make sure you check out the Peg Warmer's channel and subscribe. There will be a calendar of all of the presenters on my website, hcc788.com with links. So if you don't even know where to find it, if you check there, you can click on the link and it will take you directly there but that's the time we have for now. Thank you again, Kevin, for being in Cobra Convergence. Thank you for sitting and talking with me and I look forward to seeing what you do in the future. All right, we'll see you.