The Undiscovered Playthings

Welcome to Bootleg Toys: The Undiscovered Playthings!
This site was launched back in 1998. It was inspired by the original Bootleg Toys Site: Chris Doyle’s Island of Bootleg Toys. After visiting the Island, I looked at my own collection of bootleg toys and figured what the heck! How about I post pics of my own bootleg toys? So I started up my own bootleg toy site. It was actually launched on the web space that was provided to me by my local ISP. But I quickly decided that I had to get my own URL for the site. Hence, the creation of Bootlegactionfigures.com.

So what is a bootleg toy? Well, it’s a counterfeit of a real toy. There are also toys that are considered knock-offs. Those toys feature characters that look like a known character but with packaging that is nowhere near the same as a real toy. For this site’s purposes, bootleg toys and knock-offs are considered to be the same thing.

You don’t want to buy a bootleg toy. While they cost less than the real toy, you get what you pay for. Bootleg toys are inferior in quality. The toys will fall apart easily. The quality of the paint jobs and detail in the figures usually leaves something to be desired. The materials the bootleg toys are made of could be hazardous to your health. You certainly don’t want your children to play with them. I rarely take the bootleg toys out of their package simply because I don’t want to handle them.

Bootleg toys usually don’t have a large production run. Once the production run is stopped and the toys are all sold out, you won’t find any new ones with that particular packaging ever again. You may find the same figures produced over and over, but the bootleggers will change the packaging. So in some ways bootleg toys could be considered a collectible. If you want or have to include bootleg toys in your collection, then you are probably one serious collector.
Still, remember that bootleg toys are an illegal product. The toys are not produced by your local Mom and Pop. If the toys are made in America (and yes, the labels could read still “made in china’), they are more than likely produced by people or organizations that aren’t so nice.

So with all that said, I’m going to give you a peek at the bootleg toys I’ve managed to find. I hope you find these things as quirky and bizarre as I do. I’ll be starting off in the next day or two with a couple of oldies but goodies that are favorites of mine.
Heh, I also reserve the right to go back from time to time and provide a new look at some of the bootleg toys that have been previously posted on the old site. I really did some over compression on a ton of those pics.

Be sure to tell your family, friends, enemies and co-workers about this site.

Cheers!