words: Jay Riggio
photos: Marc McAndrews
Walking into 31-year-old technology consultant Benson Yee’s Jersey apartment is like stepping into the dirty details of a post-baby boomer’s wet dream. Lining the parameters of Benson’s homestead are countless shelves and glass casings—each overflowing with an infinite mix of toys, relics and obscure memorabilia from the expansive Transformers universe. Collecting for over 23 years, Benson has progressed into one of the biggest Transformers collectors in the country—his stash contains roughly 7,000 pieces and clocks in at a value exceeding 20 grand. In addition to his fanatical stockpiling, Benson is a Transformers expert, and part of an elite council of specialists assembled by Hasbro known as the Transformers Advisory Panel. The group acts as consultants to every aspect of the Transformers line and are paid strictly in newly released toys.
One of the most respected names in the arena of anything Transformers, Benson’s also acted as the main advisor for The Transformers: The Movie (20th Anniversary Special Edition) DVD, has written his own comic: Transformers Timelines: Descent Into Evil, runs Ben’s World of Transformers website (bwtf.com) and is the chairman to the official annual Transformers convention, BotCon. Yeah, Yee’s legit. “Back in ’84 when the toys first came out, I came across the entire first assortment of Transformers,” says Yee. “I had never seen these things before, they just blew me away.” To this day, the man is just as psyched on the identity-switching robots as he was as a tike. “It sounds cliché, but here I am, it’s now 23 years the line’s been in existence, and I’m still hooked.”
Constantly on the stalk for that super rare Transformer, Ben’s thought process is clearly defined by his collector mindset. “In a store, you’re thinking, What condition is the packaging in? Am I gonna want a second one to keep in the package just in case it breaks? All this goes through your head in like 30 seconds as a collector,” smiles Ben. “Certain pieces I’ll want really bad, but the collector next to me could say, ‘I wouldn’t pay 20 bucks for that.’ One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
