Thanks. I'm always in the background, though, just because the original Wackys will always be cool. There's a natural cycle, though, to collecting stuff from childhood it seems. When we hit our 30's, we all raid our closets & rafters for our old cards & Hotwheels, etc., as some sort of rehashing of the past. We get fanatic about the stuff when we realize that it's actually rare & valuable, and there are tons of other people the same age freaking out about them too. But then the hype wears off and the next decade of 30-somethings follows suit (like the GPK'ers in our case). Pretty soon it'll be time for the Pokemon crowd to have their heyday, right? Not sure I want to collect the original art from those.
But in Wacky's case it was more of a mega-storm of events that hit all at the same time. The 7-year itch hit (1996 to 2003 seemed like the main arc of the Wacky frenzy), AND at the same time the ANS Wackys came out (which was totally anti-climactic as we all got to see the re-packaging of our cherished 'packages' on shiny card stock with coupons and gags on the back, endless chase cards, and mylar-balloon-like wrappers... giving us the same punch in the gut we got from seeing "Star Wars 1: Phantom Menace" a couple years before--Jarjar Binks is even worse than a pink-bordered chase card), AND at the same time a lot of the cool mystery items we'd all been looking for finally started coming out... but on eBay instead of The Wrapper, and from ToppsVault at huge prices... most still incessantly available for even higher prices from Probestien, AND at the same time the general atmosphere of the hobby (and many collectors' demeanor) totally changed into something, well... different.
What's interesting is that, since then, I've dabbled in collecting a few other types of nostalgic items, and seen the forums for other collectibles, and it seems like this cycle is universal. People start out all buddy-buddy and collect-IVE in their collect-ING, and then suddenly it all gets territorial, vicious, and you start to see fakes turns up, and deals gone bad, tremendous greed, delusions of grandeur, and back-stabbing. And then the NEW wave of collectors comes in... they read all the wild posts... and are totally baffled at how something as innocuous an fun as a collecting hobby can generate such animosity. Then the old guard finally burns out and leaves, and the new generation come in an revamp everything... then start getting bitter, etc. and it starts over.
Don't worry, though... you guys can count on me turning up every few years to rant about this same subject again. Maybe it's entertaining and historical for the newbies. Broken record, yes, but never completely out of the hobby.