I’m so glad I wrote that article about Hordak’s zoo, you know. For that article, I searched Google images for “Hordak’s Zoo”, and the below picture popped up:
Now, that of course caught my attention. Why the hell would there be that many Ram Men all together? I clicked on the picture, and it took me onto the he-man.org forums, from which there was a link to this BBC article. Don’t click on it yet. Just read my article first. Then you can click on the link and go to the BBC (a source I trust quite a lot) so you can see I’m not lying, because this is the sort of ridiculous thing you dream.
The BBC article (published on 16th December 2011) focuses on a gentleman called Jamie Moakes, who has a collection of 151 Ram Man figures. As far as I can tell, the collection extends only to the original 1980s Ram Man, not the new one released in 2002 or thereabouts (the article doesn’t specifically say this, but the picture quite plainly includes only the 1980s version). Jamie has spent approximately £1,500 building up this collection.
‘Well, it’s fair enough,’ I hear you say. ‘Not my cup of tea, but then, everyone has a hobby. Stop picking on poor Jamie.’ If it stopped there, of course, I’d agree with you. I collect music. My mother collects plates. People with more sense collect money. It’s fine – whatever floats your boat. If Jamie wants to collect Ram Men, then who are we to say he’s mental? (Though I would probably still have written this article, if only for a cheap snigger.)
No, what is mental about Jamie is the reason he is building up his collection. Jamie thinks that if he buys enough Ram Men, he will be able to control the international Ram Man market. He says that the only reason people collect gold is because people agree that gold is worth money. Therefore, all he needs to do is buy up every single Ram Man figure in existence and then convince people that Ram Man is a new currency.
The BBC article points out in passing one of the difficulties inherent in the first part of this plan – that there were probably something like 2 million Ram Man figures produced. Obviously, some of these will have been lost, broken, thrown away and so on, but let’s suggest that maybe 1.5 million of these figures still exist, either occupying a none-too-important position in people’s He-Man figures collection, or sitting forgotten in a box in the attic or the shed. That means that Jamie is still 1499849 Ram Man figures short of total world domination. The article doesn’t say how long Jamie has been collecting, so we’ll ignore the fact that it may take him a long time to get the whole lot. However, the figure of £1,500 for about 150 figures works quite nicely – we are able to conclude that it is likely to cost Jamie £14,998,849 to buy up all the other Ram Man figures. It goes without saying, I think, that Jamie doesn’t have nearly £15 million, and if he did, he wouldn’t need to try to make his fortune by buying Ram Man figures.
As mentioned above, Jamie’s plan also has a second part – to convince people that Ram Man is a new currency. To give Jamie his due, he is trying his best to do this. He does public performances and lectures to explain his notion. There’s a link to his website on the BBC article, which is worth a little look. At the end of each lecture, he asks people to vote on whether they agree with him. They usually do, though they’re possibly just giving the answer they think is most likely to get them out of the room alive.
Unfortunately for Jamie, he’s also got in touch with Professor Eric Smith, a professor of economics at the University of Essex. (By the way, Jamie has “no knowledge of economics at all”.) Professor Smith would appear to think Jamie’s a nutjob. He admits that Jamie is correct that people attribute a value to gold higher than its inherent qualities, but points out that gold does at least have some uses, and Ram Man doesn’t.
So there you have it – there’s a man in Colchester who is on a mission to acquire every single Ram Man figure in the world. This will cost him an awful lot of money and it is doubtful that he’ll make his fortune, or indeed get much out of it other than a hell of a lot of Ram Man figures. But I can tell you one thing for sure – I’m not selling him my Skeletor collection.