About Jason DeBord
Everything changed in 1977.
I was four years old when Star Wars hit theaters, and from that night forward I was no longer an ordinary kid — I was obsessed. When the Kenner action figures hit the shelves the following year, I retired my Weeble Wobble submarine in favor of that new X-Wing fighter and never looked back. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I understand it now — pop culture can be genuinely transformative. Not entertainment, not distraction, but a complete realignment of your imagination and what you carry with you. That’s what it was. The Marvel comics told stories beyond the film, which led to superhero comics and more. I could escape into my own imagination, entirely on my own terms. Collecting was the escape hatch that never failed. Every artifact became a portal into other worlds and experiences.
In the 1970s and ’80s, being deeply into toys and comics wasn’t considered cool — it was something kids generally learned to hide. Collecting action figures was categorized and stigmatized as something for nerds and geeks, back when those were purely derogatory terms. There was no cultural permission for what I was doing — no language for it, no community, no roadmap. But in my world, it was more interesting than anything the “cool” kids were doing. And I was instinctively saving everything: action figure cardbacks, Sears and JCPenney and Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogs, cassette tape recordings off the radio of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 broadcasts, VHS recordings of television shows I sensed I’d want to experience more than once — the V miniseries, Robotech, Wizards and Warriors — even recording broadcasts off the air, barely carrying a signal, coming in through a snow-filled screen — Ultraman, a pop culture ghost from Japan trying to reach me across the static. Anything that felt like it might vanish. As Ferris said, “Life moves pretty fast.” If you didn’t save it or capture it yourself, it was gone forever. There were no second chances. My pop culture experiences were not disposable.
By middle school I was dealing comics and toys at conventions and through the mail — placing ads in the Comic Buyer’s Guide (CBG) and Toy Shop, newsprint publications that were the entire marketplace before the internet existed. At 14 I flew alone from Northern California to San Diego for Comic-Con. That same year I saw my first live concert — the Run-DMC and Beastie Boys “Together Forever” tour — and once I had my driver’s license I went to as many live concerts as I could afford and within a three hour driving radius, often alone, going wherever the music was. This was the Thomas Brothers and AAA TripTik era — finding a concert venue felt more like a Christopher Columbus expedition than an evening out. Pop culture wasn’t a hobby. It was something to be experienced and lived in — a place where fantasy and reality bled into each other and transformed into personal adventures.
After studying English at CSU Sacramento, I earned an MFA in Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles — a foundation that shaped how I’ve always thought about artifacts: not as objects, but as stories with physical form.
In 2002 I got into original props and costumes from film and television — not replicas, but the actual objects from real productions. My first piece was the Shoveler’s shovel from Mystery Men. The film had bombed and the props were so inexpensive they’d be considered free by today’s standards — but I set out to build the definitive collection from it while teaching myself everything about how authentication actually works: what evidence proves use, where documentation fails, the importance of deep research and networking, and why the difference between “production made,” “production used,” “screen-used,” and “screen-matched” is never just semantic. I became the administrator of what was then the only online community for original prop collectors — years before Facebook existed — and built a reputation for honesty and rigor in a market that badly needed both.
I launched the Original Prop Blog in 2007 after someone tried to defraud me with a fake prop. I recognized it as a fake within seconds of opening the box, got my money back, and decided the real problem wasn’t that I’d been targeted — it was that most collectors had no reliable public resource for learning how authentication actually worked. I thought I’d publish a handful of articles. It became thousands — a long-running public record of authentication methodology, fraud documentation, and market analysis that helped define how the collector community understood provenance. In 2010 I launched Prop Talk, the industry-first podcast dedicated to original movie prop collecting, interviewing principal figures in the field a full decade before the format became standard practice. When the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story on a fraud operation I had helped expose, it was a validation of years of careful, documented public work. Separately, I fought an unfair defamation lawsuit — with no institutional support behind me — won on an Anti-SLAPP motion in California Superior Court, and kept publishing. I suspended new content in 2019 when I moved into professional auction work full-time, not wanting any appearance of conflict of interest. The archive remains. So does the methodology.
Founded in 2012 and running concurrently with the Original Prop Blog, I dedicated time and focus to Rock Subculture as a music photojournalism platform. What that meant in practice: earning a formal press credentialed position in the photo pit at live concert events. Working in the narrow strip of floor between the crowd barrier and the stage, literally in-between the fans and the artists, gave me the ability to capture moments of real intimacy between people and the music that shaped them. When a venue didn’t have designated photographer space, I showed up hours before doors opened and waited in line like any other fan, earning a spot against the stage the same way everyone else did. I never expected people who’d put in the work to step aside. From the biggest artists in the history of popular music to emerging acts playing their first real venues, I photographed and wrote about hundreds of live events over a decade, traveled internationally for shows, had photography exhibited in museums and at cultural events, and produced a podcast interviewing artists across genres and generations — from Dick Dale and Peter Hook to Daryl McDaniels to Redman and Method Man to Charli XCX, years before her name was widely known.
I also served as a producer on the Disney+ series Prop Culture, documenting the creative history behind films including Tron, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mary Poppins. In that role I identified and located key props, costumes, and production assets used in these and other classic films featured in the docuseries, conducted initial research and pre-interviews with the prop masters, costume designers, and cast members who later appeared in the episodes, and helped authenticate the pieces featured throughout.
I served as COO and then Executive Director of Julien’s Auctions — overseeing operations, finance, and strategic direction. On the catalog side, I was personally involved in the research, authentication, and cataloging of some of the most significant lots the auction world had seen, including pieces that set world records. I brought in thousands of consignments, managed the Hollywood category end to end, and worked directly with consignors including Mick Fleetwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Olivia Newton-John. Over the course of that chapter I researched, authenticated, and cataloged tens of thousands of Hollywood and rock artifacts.
Nostalgia Bandit is the place where all of it comes together.