A few weeks ago, I saw an advertisement for a gentleman buying vintage toys here in Overland Park. He had set up shop at a local hotel and would greet dozens of sellers every day for a week, analyzing the condition and worth of the items they brought in to sell. Many people who hauled in large totes and boxes of items to sell appeared fairly confident that they had treasures worth a fortune, only to be turned away because their items were too common, not old enough, or in poor condition. Others left the toy show looking quite pleased with themselves.

This gentleman didn’t accept any toys produced since the mid-1980s; he seemed only interested in toys made earlier than that. I was able to take a peek at his haul and recognized some items I remember owning when I was a child; others were obviously older and in pristine condition – a Flintstones board game, a Justice League playset, a set of clothes and accessories for a Jackie Kennedy doll. All of them appeared to have been meticulously cared for and preserved over the decades.

It’s a message I wish I had gotten into my thick skull as a child, but I grew up in the era of the original “Star Wars” trilogy (I remember watching “Return of the Jedi” at the original Glenwood Theatre in Overland Park, KS, for my fifth birthday), a time during the late 1970s and early 1980s when it seemed like “Star Wars” toys were everywhere you looked. Demand for the toys was high, much like the Cabbage Patch Kid craze of the early 1980s (remember fighting over the last one with a flurry of crazed moms in a packed department store on Black Friday because your kid just HAD to have one?). Of course, like any red-blooded American boy in the ‘80s, I collected these “Star Wars” action figures and playsets with unbridled enthusiasm.

Not considering the trilogy’s staying power and the potential value of some of these “Star Wars” toys decades later, I played with them with the same zeal as … well … a kid in a toy store. I was an imaginative child, setting up elaborate “movies” in my head in which these toys starred. My universe was not gentle to them – these action figures were thrown around with reckless abandon, dirtied, decapitated, and the arms and legs pulled off. In other words, they were well loved.

When it comes to the media format wars, we all have those older items with which we simply can’t part or that we haven’t sold or thrown away yet – a CD here, a VHS tape there, here a laserdisc, there an iPod Shuffle.

Media, just like fashion, is cyclical, and although different formats fall out of favor with consumers as the years pass, you can bet that, thanks to the power of nostalgia, they’ll be back around again, maybe in our lifetime, maybe in that of our children or grandchildren.

And so it is with vinyl records. You might still have a large collection of records either boxed in your basement or displayed proudly somewhere in your home. Well, I have some great news for you: They’re cool again.

Well, they’ve seen a resurgence in popularity for a little more than 15 years now. And last year, in 2020, records finally outsold CDs for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

When I was a teacher and it came time to discuss music in my Mass Media and Society class, my students were visibly bored by my lectures on both the record player and the CD. They were the first generation raised solely on a steady digital music, much of which they didn’t have to pay for, thanks to the preponderance of streaming services and piracy software. These youngsters were amazed that anyone would actually pay for their music.

Of course, I shared with these students that music in the mid-20th century and later provided a vehicle for socializing, and that record stores, both standalone and within shopping malls, were gathering places for young people to discuss music trends, the latest albums, and more. Teenagers would stand around, don a pair of headphones, and listen to albums from their favorite musical artists. Later, in the same way that families would gather together around the TV for that week’s episode of their favorite program, groups of teens would gather at the home of a friend for a listening party. The era of records was an era of being brought together by the power of music, and now that records themselves are now popular again, it feels like that natural socialization that came with them has returned, too. Pop into any record store sometime and you’ll see what I mean.