Do your Kenner RGB toys feel sticky?
I have been buying up loose toys on eBay and while I thought that this was a gross kid issue who just nastier up his toys, I am finding that more and more loose RGB toys that I buy have this similar “sticky” residue to them. It seems to clear up slightly with a good warm bath with soap but still kind of remains.
Anyone else notice this? Is it part of the plastic just starting to age?
None of mine are sticky, Adam. All of mine have been sitting in an open grocery box for the last 15 years, randomly removed for nostalgia. Maybe you’re buying the figures from a messy kid…or a shudder messy adult. 
Perhaps those figures had a few baths in ectoplasm.
I have been rebuying all the figures MOC. My Ray was sticky when I opened it.
Mine are sticky. A lot of them are like that. The plastic is just breaking down. My Ninja Turtles collection are doing that too. It’s on the softer vinyl plastics, which were relatively new to action figures at that time(which were usually just made of ABS plastic).
Thanks TexasBuster! I am glad that you are seeing the same thing and had a pretty good confirmation of my suspicions.
Dead on! I’ve had the same problem for years. Sadly I just had to clean up my Yak Face that’s been in a glass display dome for the last two years. Its just the plastic they used along with some of the paints.
Be glad you guys didn’t collect Palisades’ otherwise excellent Muppet Show line of figures. They’re the worst offenders as far as sticky/tacky of any toy line I’ve ever collected. And that’d quite a few. Especially towards the end, which are ironically the more scarce and therefore most expensive ones, there was something seriously wrong with the plastic and it’s like touching cold modeling clay. You instantly leave fingerprints in the paint.
One final-series figure, “Lips” (the obscure trumpet player for the Electric Mayhem) commands hundreds of dollars if you can find him. Palisades was bought by another company shortly after this series, who decided to dismantle it instead of do anything with it, so those tailenders got real expensive really fast.
For Lips, there were three variants. The white shirt variant is the worst as far as sticky problem. I got one for a real bargain, I thought. Dropped like $80 for one MOC a few years back. Sliced open the card, totally unaware of the tackiness issues, and instantly ruined the intricate paint apps on his white shirt just by touching him. It was a very sickening feeling to realize I had just made white shirt Lips figures even MORE scarce by not researching them enough, and ruining that one minutes after it arrived in the mail.
The silver shirt variant wasn’t as bad. I thought I got a great price on a brown shirt variant, but the seller didn’t realize there were variations and used a stock photo of a brown one, so I wound up with two in silver shirts. Grrrr. I never did find a brown variant.
I thought about buying another white shirt just to leave him in the package, as it’s the only way to guarantee he’d stay perfect. But instead I lucked into a hand-painted prototype of the white shirt version.
His deco is nowhere near as detailed as the production toy (seen at left), but I can pick him up and handle him without any tackiness issues, and ironically the proto was cheaper than most of the loose production figures.
Alex
my Filmation Ghostbusters Eddie is…specifically the CASAFANTASMAS Tyco figure, not the Schaper one…but yes I know exactly what you’re talking about!
Palisades was a bit of a budget company that popped up around the time of the big toy/comic crash of the early 2000’s. A lot of their toys were untested and probably won’t be holding up well. I have some of those old Special Forces figures they did(and were released again as Plan B Toys) and they’re breaking down too.
Alex, my advice is to use a slightly diluted adhesive solvent, like citrus goo gone(NOT THE PAINT THINNER PRODUCT) to keep them cleaned up. You could also apply some brush-on acrylic sealers…I recommend Valejo. You can use their satin sealer on the more glossy painted areas and their flat sealer on the other parts. Don’t use any sprays, though(enamel).
Just dilute the acrylic satin sealer with a little water so it goes on smooth and doesn’t leave brush strokes.
I have an exhausting amount of experience painting stuff like this 
Unfortunately, as soon as I left a smeared mess on him, I tried to wash off the sticky with just soap and water, and the paint apps started to fade and run. I had NEVER seen that happen with any action figure. I did a quick touch-up to the shirt’s complex pattern with acrylic paint and then hit it with a clear spray sealant, something I already had on hand, and it only worsened the sticky issue.
Sometimes I go and check on him and the clear-coat has actually extremely slowly dripped off the back hem of his shirt onto the black circular stand. You can sort of make it out in the photo above.
Alex