A Man, His Toy Collection, And His Wife

I stumbled upon a documentary posted on You Tube about toy collector Mark Bellomo and his tens of thousands of 1980s action figures. His collection is so extensive (as is his detailed knowledge about it), that the documentary runs, amazingly, almost three hours long. It becomes tiring just watching him pull out a seemingly endless number of cardboard boxes full of toys from his storage facility, one after another, and then enthusing and extemporizing in sometimes excruciating detail about the contents of each one. ("This is a mint, boxed Jetfire. Look at that. Isn't that interesting? That's a 'Robotech' insignia on a 'Transformers' piece. I have always found it fascinating: the merging of the lines. And there's a story behind this....")

He has everything from "Voltron" to "The Simpsons" to "Strawberry Shortcake." But by two hours in, even he says to the camera, exasperated, "I am officially sick of G.I. Joe." (You and me both.) I was becoming a bit numb to it all and was about give up on it when my ears pricked up at the very beginning of part 4 (embedded below), when he says as an aside, "when I first met my wife..." What!?! Watching this, it never occurred to me that he might actually be married. He goes on to tell a brief, 30 second story about his future wife's reaction, when they first decided to move in together, to a series of super hero posters that he had framed and hanging all over his bedroom. (Perhaps not surprisingly, despite filming in his house for over an hour, his wife never appears in the documentary herself.)