Sunday Evening Video: The 2026 Hershey Action Figure & Toy Show

Tearle Ashby, our composer, seen a few years ago at The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo, with some of his amazing action figure creations

Above you see the technically-plagued PopCult Music Video of The 2026 Hershey Action Figure & Toy Show.

The highlight of this video is the music by Tearle Ashby.  Tearle is a creator of spectacular custom outfit sets for 12″ action figures like GI Joe, and he’s also an amazing musician and composer.  Tearle provided some great instrumental tunes for our video, ( “Mirror Mirror,” “Flashback” and “Circular Reasoning”) but you can check out his latest album with vocals at iTunes and other major streaming services.

As for the video, while it shows you just a bit of the fun, the vintage toys, the happy collectors and the sheer awesomeness of this great toy show, the video itself is not up to my usual standards, and I apologize for that.

I tried using a new (cheap) video camera for part of this shoot, and it did not play well with the flourescent lights. I also didn’t bring our famous monopods, so the footage I shot was shakier than usual because I’m out of practice these days.

Then when we got home I had various computer issues that weren’t resolved until I had to uninstall and reinstall dozens of video codecs and stuff like that, which was time-consuming.

None of that takes away that The 2026 Hershey Action Figure & Toy Show was a wonderful and extremely fun event, and we are seriously considering making a return trip next year, as part of our lucky thirteenth wedding anniversary trip.

We got to see lots of friends and actually spend time hanging out a bit and socializing instead of just running around with the cameras, and I bought way too many toys. I also finally got my first Paul Knapp custom piece, even though it broke the cardinal rule of going to a toy show…don’t buy something huge that takes up a big chunk of the rental car’s trunk on the first day of a week-long trip.  It was worth it to get a custom vehicle that was on my wantlist for years.

I didn’t know that I’d find another large-scale vehicle on my wantlist the next day at an antique mall. I’ll share photos of all this cool stuff once I find the time to unpack. Septemember has been a bit of a blur, with all the curicular activities going on.

I’ll drop one last photo from the show here, just for the heck of it…