The 1-2-3 Kid mint on card WWF Hasbro figure is one of the most valuable figures of the entire line, coming in a close second to Dusty Rhodes in the most valuable of the series, with a value as of December 2023 of $1108. Retrofigure is able to calculate a more accurate valuation of these figures as we use actual sales data. Data that we scrape, process and use to determine the average price paid. After a 24 month period, we throw away older sales data so that we can accurately accommodate any market trends.
The green card series saw the introduction of Ludvig Borga, a re-release of Yokozuna, another re-release of Crush (known to collectors as Evil Crush or Purple Crush), Adam Bomb, Bart Gunn and Billy Gunn of the Smoking Gunns, and finally, the subject of this entire article, the 1-2-3 Kid.
The green card series is the most valuable of the entire WWF Hasbro collection, and this is partially due to waning interest in the World Wrestling Federation at the same time of its release, in or around 1994. If you compare a series from 1992 to the green cards of 1994, for example, the values tend to be more than double. Also, a series of branding issues cost the WWF brand heavily at that time, such as the infamous steroid scandal. This undoubtedly saw popularity in wrestling drop to its lowest point in more than a decade.
As for the 1-2-3 Kid figure, this toy features a mould that was originally used for both Ravishing Rick Rude and Ric Flair. Many collectors of the line argue that this body shape accurately fits 1-2-3 Kid’s frame at that time, but the choice of mould for Flair and Rude is typically very unpopular. Some might say that the mould is almost as unpopular as the “jumper” mould, used for figures such as Koko B Ware and The Rockers’ version of Shawn Michaels.
There are dozens of legendary stories about this figure, but perhaps the funniest of the bunch is that the night prior to the pre-production photo shooting with Hasbro, other members of “The Kliq” (the group of wrestlers containing Shawn Michaels, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash and 1-2-3 Kid, Sean Waltman) decided to shave off the Kid’s eyebrows while asleep. The Kid’s picture on the green card therefore has him featured with no eyebrows.
Reasons why a 1-2-3 Kid is worth almost 3-4 times more than any other green card in the series is a topic that we will cover in this piece, with the limited data that we have available.
Legendary wrestling figure collector Matt Cardona has mentioned on his own Major Wrestling Figure Podcast that as a child, he clearly remembers visiting toy stores to buy the entire green card series and the 1-2-3 Kid was the only one that the store did not have available. Repeat visits to the same toy shop followed, with no Kid for sale. A similar story can be heard from dozens of other collectors recalling their own childhood toy shop visit stories on sites such as the wrestlingfigs forum.
In Europe, what we do understand is that the green card series was an extremely limited release in the United Kingdom, with major High Street stores such as Woolworths and Argos opting not to have the series on the pegs for purchase. The green card series was often only sold on request direct to Hasbro from a toy store in Europe. This is an interesting data point, considering the whole unreleased orange series that was planned to follow the green cards was intended for United Kingdom release only.
Meanwhile, in the United States, some major vendors did carry the greens. It appears that Adam Bomb was the most commonly found of the six, and today this is the least valuable, marginally though, as both Billy and Bart Gunn are around the same price to purchase on auction sites. As both Crush and Yokozuna happened to be second releases of the exact same figure, with the same mould and just minor changes to the color scheme, these figures were therefore not popular and are therefore uncommon.
Whilst all of the aforementioned green card figures can attract very high prices on auction sites, those are still 2-3 times less valuable than the Kid.
We have scoured the internet for hours to find actual production release numbers, but no such data has been circulated to the public. One of the designers of the line, Ron Rudat, has also confirmed that only Hasbro would have access to such data. So we cannot confirm if a smaller number of 1-2-3 Kid figures were produced.
We will therefore have to make some assumptions. We believe that Hasbro understood that the line was drawing to a close, and that the WWF would soon be terminating their production agreement with the toy making company in favor of other brands, such as the JusToys Bendems manufacturer. It is our belief that the Rick Rude and Ric Flair mould had been produced in smaller quantities and remaining stock of Hasbro did not match up to the Crush mould availability, as this happened to have been more recently used by Crush’s first release, Scott Steiner, amongst other figures. The same applies to the Bart and Billy Gunn body moulds. The complexity of the action figure’s move, the headlock, also made this figure slightly trickier to produce. The Rude and Flair figures were also unpopular, and Hasbro had probably undertaken some form of market research and decided not to continue producing the mould based upon that feedback. But once the 1-2-3 Kid was chosen for series 11, there was only one body mould that match the Kid's body type.
