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Has spent the last 30 years tracking down and reuniting lost toys from around the world for use in his show
Has just released a book called ‘Tommy the Dancing Teddy Bear’
Has brought in a new team of experts to help him reunite these toys, from educational toys to popular board games
Has recently brought a toy collection of around 20,000 pieces back to Florida from the Czech Republic
Has 7,000 hours of tapes and books, including audio-recordings, to back up his claims
The show began in 1985, and is based in a room above a Taco Bell
Tommy Boggess has uncovered lost toys like never before in the years since the show began.His show has evolved from a one-man show to a reality show, but he’s always the man behind the mask.He’s best known as a former professional boxer and as the host of ‘Unleashed With Tommy Boggess,’ a reality show that has just finished its ninth season. “When I came to Los Angeles to meet his agents, the first question they had to ask me is, ‘Can you get a monkey?,’ and so I did get a monkey, and I’ve been around, uh, animals ever since,” Boggess said.It wasn’t just any monkey either. It was one named Tommy the Dancing Teddy Bear.Boggess remembers his first meeting with the monkey and his name is still the same to this day. “I trained my monkey, he got to be a fightin’ monkey, He beat the doors at night,” he laughed.However, it wasn’t until Tommy the Dancing Teddy Bear left that Boggess began to investigate the mystical world of vintage toys. “First I did a little bit of research and got to know what he was, to understand what his unique abilities were,” Boggess said.Little did he know, one of the greatest toys from around the world was already hiding in plain sight in his own home.”If I take something out of the toy box, he’s got the ability to cast all these spells,” Boggess said.The silent magician’s theories on Toys, more than anything, is a wonderland of secrets.Some of his theories on what made these toys magical in the first place will throw you for a loop. “He said, ‘Your toys in my imagination are basically coming from a common language,’ and so all the toys in the show are now speaking the same language.” “If you try to understand a hobby like a toy, the first thing you hear in my studio is, ‘I can only believe in magic,’” Boggess said.It’s one thing to believe in magic, but for Boggess, it’s quite another to imagine that all his toys were created from the same alchemy.”When I think about toy theory, I think that all these toys, the human elements of it, are controlled by a mystical entity, the spirit of a toy,” Boggess said.We all think, ‘I’ll just clean it up and I’m ready to go.’ These toys that existed in those days, and that sense of separation was gone because they were so powerful,” Boggess said.Other than Tommy the Dancing Teddy Bear, Boggess had a surprising number of toys which became sentient.”In my 80s, I began to feel that the world was just amazing and I mean, the whole world was, but there was still a void in my life and I began to look into these toys, and I saw a world that was finally able to communicate. They could talk to me,” Boggess said.Tommy’s encyclopedic knowledge of toys is one of the things that will keep viewers glued to their TVs as he travels to find lost toys that have been lost forever. Watch “Unleashed With Tommy Boggess” Sundays, 9 p.m. on E!