Eric Prahl’s Transformers take up about half of his guest room—and that’s only some of them. A good part of the collection, which he estimates tops 1,000 Transformers, he still keeps in a closet.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When he and his wife moved in together, Prahl says, she suggested that he display more of them in different places in the house. But he doesn’t want to end up like Steve Carell’s character in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, so he has a rule: “They have one place and they don’t go outside that room.”
He has one Transformer that’s not part of his collection—it actually belongs to his four-month-old son. The rest of them are off-limits to him. “I’m going to have a hard time trying to convince him that the ones I own are collectibles, and the ones he owns are the toys, even though they may look exactly the same. I’m still trying to work on the strategy for that discussion.”
