'HUNTING NOSTALGIA' County man shares love for old toys in TV show
Nick Bartley didn't originally think of himself as a toy collector.
But since childhood, he's considered the way he treats his toys to be different. While his siblings regularly got rid of their old toys at garage sales, Bartley said he always knew “the items I had I wanted to keep forever.
“I still have the very first wrestling toy I ever had, ever: Captain Lou Albano,” he said, holding up the action figure from a box. “I knew that I wanted to try and pass it down to my kids and get them interested.”
His massive toy collection once took up the majority of his basement, and now decorates the boxes and shelves of the filming studio he is creating in his Middlesex Township home.
That studio is the filming location for “Hunting Nostalgia,” the television and YouTube show Bartley hosts on Armstrong Neighborhood Channel 100.
On “Hunting Nostalgia,” a project he began in March 2020, Bartley shows off the toys he's amassed over the years, visits retro toy stores and conventions and shares the stories of other collectors and people he meets in the process.The show's journey began three years ago as a show pitched to the History Channel called “Retro Hunters Go.” The concept went through a few different iterations, one of which was rejected because of its similarity with filming company Cineflix's other show, “American Pickers.”Bartley and his cohost, Elvira Taylor, shot many hours of footage and planned to travel across the country to visit toy stores and collectors, but the coronavirus pandemic dashed their hopes.Bartley said the original idea of the show didn't exactly fit his vision. The company had wanted him to base the show around selling toys.“Whenever you watch a show like 'American Pickers,' they'll haggle you down, and then at the end of the show you see that item sold for $500,' he said. “And that cannot make that other person on the other end feel very good.“That's why I do this, because I want people to feel good. I want people to look and say, 'Oh my goodness, I remember going to Hills Department Store and buying that wrestler with my mom.' I don't want to get, 'Oh, this made me a whole bunch of money,' because to me that's not what matters.”
When COVID-19 blocked Bartley's travel plans, he was allowed to market his concept for “Hunting Nostalgia” to other channels. He ended up signing a deal with Armstrong Neighborhood Channel.To date, “Hunting Nostalgia” has three seasons and 17 episodes, all of which can be found on Armstrong and YouTube.Creating the show on the Armstrong Neighborhood Channel, Bartley said, gave him the chance to showcase his hometown.“I'm from Mars, and I can really showcase people and places and events here, and that to me is the most important,” he said.Bartley credits his childhood friend Timothy Dyson, the show's first producer whom Bartley jokingly calls “the angry cameraman,” with helping to get things off the ground.“He worked his butt off to figure out how to produce and how to literally create 'Hunting Nostalgia,'” he said.
Bartley's most recent episode explores the history of the now-defunct Hills Department Store chain. In it, he reaches out to a couple who met while working at Hills, Jim and Kim Redlinger, and buys a number of items from their collection, including some wrestling figures.“(Jim) said, 'Nick, I wouldn't sell this to anybody but you,' and that means more to me than finding a $900 wrestling figure,” he said. “Because now, this stuff? It's worth nothing. Because I'm never selling it. People always ask what my collection is worth. My collection is worth nothing because none of it is for sale.”Finding old toys is the special part for Bartley.“Every item here came from actually finding it,” he said. “There is not a single item that came from online shopping. It's more of the hunt that is important for me than it is actually owning that piece.“I remember where I found almost every single item here,” he said.
Bartley's specialty is toys from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, but his favorite toys in his collection are his WWE wrestler items.“My love for wrestling started with the toys,” he said. “And that's how it was with everything: wrestling, comic books, it was always the toys that interested me first.”He holds up a box of his favorite action figures, and shows off one of the heels — a wrestling term for villains — which he says he bit the nose off of as a kid.“He was a jerk!” Bartley said. “He was not nice to Hulk Hogan, so I bit his nose off.”
Bartley has shared his love for old toys and wrestling with his three children, who he lets play with all of his toys.“It's hard to get kids interested in stuff from the '80s. They see it, and it's not HD,” he said. “I'm a very silly person, and you have to experience it the way a child's mind would experience it. Wrestling is a predetermined male soap opera with acrobats. Whenever I watch something with my children, or I go to an event with my children, I make it as exciting and as real as I possibly can.”One way he spreads his interest in toys is by literally giving them away. He often attends local events, such as Cranberry Community Days, to give away toys he has duplicates of for free to local children.
“I love giving away toys,” he said. “For as much as I hate selling toys, that's how much I love giving them away. It is the most amazing feeling when someone picks something up that you have just given them, and their smile: it's like giving a Christmas gift.”Bartley is finishing the studio for filming future episodes of the show in the basement of his home. In general, Bartley is optimistic about the show's future.“The story of 'Hunting Nostalgia' is just beginning,” Bartley said. “Our family is growing massively, and it is super, super exciting. I couldn't be more thrilled with how it is going and where I'm at. And I get to promote local stuff. I love my hometown, I am a very proud Mars boy.”
