Do you have it...? The best investment of them all.

Sometimes I like to look on ebay for rare items of great beauty.  Antique jewelry, ancient artifacts, shoes, and…pieces of glory from our youth. 

That’s how I happened to see a piece of the Aggro Crag on ebay this past summer, selling for a mere $1499.  Many may look at that price tag and say, WTF? Who would pay $1499 for someone else’s trophy?  Well, right now I’m kicking myself because I didn’t buy it.  

If you don’t know what the Aggro-Crag is and you grew up in America during the 1990s, quite frankly you should be ashamed of yourself or go punch your parents in the face for depriving you of such an important piece of American culture. Really.  However, I know not everyone is as culturally well rounded as the average 1990s child, so I’ll explain.

During the illustrious ‘90s every child wanted to get a piece of the Aggro-crag. This is a true fact.  It was the Bugati Veyron Super Sport of any and all prizes that could ever be won.  The difficulty it took to obtain a piece could not be surpassed.

First you had to go to Nickelodeon Studios—filmed live from Universal Studios in Orlando Florida—and then be lucky enough to make it on their game show Guts (only 126 episodes ever aired. Ever.)!  Then you had to perform feats of strength and skill then make it to the top of the biggest behemoth of an obstacle of all time, the Aggro Crag. That’s not all, though. You also had to make it to the top before the two other contestants did.  If you were the strongest, the bravest, and the most awesome contestant that day, you had glory beyond imagination and took home a piece of the Aggro-Crag.

Now, I’ve been lucky in life in that I’ve never really been a jealous person or covetous at all, but sometimes I wish I were one of the 126 brave souls to have taken home a piece of the Aggro-Crag. When I say sometimes, I mean every goddamned day. When I’m the boss, if a man came into my office with no resume and simply flung his piece of the Crag on my desk , I’d hire him on the spot. In fact, I’d give him my job.  The blood, sweat, and tears that went into getting a piece of that treacherous rock mean more than a half-dozen Ivy League degrees. That’s how much we all want a piece of the Aggro-Crag.

Hundreds of thousands  (probably millions) of kids who grew up during the 1990s watched Nickelodeon and watched Guts.  All of them had at least a fleeting moment when they too wanted to make it to the top of that mountain.

It was the only item unattainable by all children rich and poor.  Neither Kevin McCallister nor Richie Rich himself could have even gotten a piece for Christmas. Host Mike O’Malley filled all of our little heads with delusions of grandeur asking, “do you have it?” If only we could get on the show, we could maybe, just maybe get a piece of the Aggro Crag.  And if we couldn’t make it to the top, then at least we hoped for a chance to hold or touch a piece of it.

This brings me back to the title of this post and why I’m kicking myself now because I didn’t buy the piece of the Crag. Quite simply, it’s because it’s going to be worth about a million dollars or so in about 20 years.  As our generation ages and becomes successful with money to burn, we’re going to want to spend that money on the things from our youth that brought us joy and that we wanted really badly. 

As a side hobby, I have an antiques business, and one set of antiques worth quite a bit of money nowadays are toys from the 1950s-70s.  This is because the collectors are at the age when they have lots of money and now want to return to the innocence of their childhoods and own either the toys they had loved and lost, or the toys they wanted yet couldn’t afford.  

See, our generation is different.  All of the toys we wanted were mass-produced in Asia out of plastic so they’ll still be floating around in abundance when we’re middle aged or old and gray.  The things of longing we’re going to want to spend our hard earned money on will be those items of great rarity that all wanted, but few ever got.  

If there were thousands of pieces of the Aggro-Crag, I’d postulate the going rate for a piece to a collector in 20 or so years would be in the low thousands of dollars range following current antique prices and trends.  However, there are only 126 of them. To put this into perspective, there are a whopping 540 Stradivarious violins currently accounted for.  You have to at least expect some of those 126 pieces were lost or destroyed as all things are, too. That makes them all the more rare and all the more valuable. Far more than 126 Crag-coveters are going to be worth millions of dollars, too.

So while the rest of us are sitting around watching our 401ks grow and playing the stock market, those with a piece of the Aggro-crag will be laughing all the way to the bank, several times because everyone is going to want what they have. That is why I should have bought that piece on ebay for $1499 this past summer.