There is a place more terrifying than the Bermuda Triangle, more mysterious than the pyramids of Egypt, and more baffling than the crowd at a Michael Jackson memorial tribute. This place has plagued generations of toy lovers, and continues to be an ongoing, though not often explored, conundrum in all of our pasts. I’m speaking, of course, about the Portal of Lost Toys. That mystical place where so many toys have gone, never to be heard from again, leaving broken hearts all over the world.

(more…)

Little men. I can still hear my dad and mom’s voices calling my toy soldiers that in my mind. Usually it was in some derogatory sentence such as “ pick up all these damned little men”, or some really good expletive followed by “little men” when someone stepped on one in the night going to the only bathroom in the house.

Some kids were sports kids with baseballs, basketballs and footballs (who the hell ever heard of soccer in the states until the arrival of Pelé?). Some kids were into trucks with Tonka, Buddy L and Ertl vehicles (and Matchbox and, later, Hot Wheels) of various shapes and sizes to fulfill a multitude of construction or general maintenance work. A few kids were into chemistry sets and telescopes – but you didn’t hang around those kids. Me, I was a toy soldier kid.

Marx was the primary producer of toy soldiers. Oh sure, there were others. Ideal, MPC ( They made the weird ring-hand soldiers that came with weapons you put in the hands and always lost within a couple of days), Tim-Mee, Remco, Britans, Swoppet, Elastolin (if your old man was in the military and you lived in Europe) and Airfix (who had a plethora of HO scale soldiers). But, Marx was the main supplier of toy soldiers.

Depending on your whims, allowance, birthdays and holidays you could have a varied collection of figures from cavemen to spacemen. Along with a smattering of the aforementioned, I also had calvary; cowboys & indians; revolutionary rebels and British; Zorro and Mexicans and Texians; Romans; and, of course, army soldiers. All manufactured by Marx. When you tossed in the assorted collections from other manufactures it was a significant collection.

In addition to the figures, there were the accessories and the playsets . Again, the other manufacturers put out some half-hearted playsets, but Marx ruled the domain. Tin lithographed buildings, all sorts of hard plastic accessories. Cannons that actually shot tiny plastic shells/cannon balls. Animals too, Camels, cattle, dogs & cats, sheep, chickens and, of course, horses. Fort Apache was probably the most famous of all the playsets. Thank the stars that John Ford always had a wooded stockade in his westerns to authenticate Marx’s bastion of the wild west.

And as much stuff that Marx cranked out for the non-army playsets; they shined with the military equipment to support the green troops. Pillboxes, jeeps, trucks, tanks, landing craft, halftracks. Even aircraft! And if the Marx military industrial machine wasn’t enough to satisfy your lust for mobilizing your forces, the other manufacturer’s cranked out vehicles as well. Auburn made this great half-track out of hard rubber that had a machine gunner moulded into it. It actually would hold a few of your Marx soldiers. Ideal made a tracked Howitzer that was huge in comparison to the Marx vehicles, but was probably closer in real scale to the troops.

The thing I always wondered about was why the Marx tanks for US/allied forces were M-48 Pershings and not M-4 Sherman. Marx did eventually crank out both Panther and Tiger tanks for the german troops they began manufacturing in the mid-60’s. In fact, they created British, Russian, Japanese and French forces as well as the green US G.I.’s. And, they began to sell them in small packages in the 5 and Dime stores so that, for a portion of your allowance, you could have a few krauts or brits to augment your regular forces.
Then 1964 and the world of “little men” would never be the same. In February of that year, Hasbro introduced G.I. Joe, the 11 ½ inch tall “action figure” and his plethora of equipment and the proverbial handwriting was on the wall. The growing dissatisfaction with the war in Viet-Nam also contributed to the demise of the toy line. In addition to growing up, we were growing out our hair, listening to rock and roll and discovering girls. Getting a driver’s license became more important than looking through the Sears catalog.

A gaping hole in the toy soldier production was super heroes. Oh, Ideal came out with a playset that included Batman, Robin, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Joker and Riddler in 1966 as Batmania took the nation, but by and large the spandex crowd never really took off (no pun intended). You just didn’t have the opportunity to have Superman or Captain America kick the crap out of the Nazis or have Spiderman help tame the wild west with the 7th Calvary. Oh, Marx put out some oversized figures of Ironman, Spiderman, Thor, Captain America and Daredevil, but unless you were going to do the Godzilla thing and have them step on the enemy they were really useless for make believe battles.

Fast forward to the new century and WizKids began to manufacture HeroClix. Originally designed to be gaming pieces, old fart comic and toy soldier fans like me became enamored with the cool static poses and the variety of figures available. I tried to resist the siren song of these multicolored “little men and women and creatures of undetermined sex, but the combination of being super hero focused and the possibility of recreating hordes of figures became overpowering.

The one thing that drove me crazy with HeroClix was the fact that you had to buy a box and it was up for grabs as to what you got in the box. Sort of like cracker jacks, but without the popcorn and peanuts. Several decades ago, I would have traded with my friends the duplicates I had for something they might have that I wanted, but today that isn’t an option. For better or worse I don’t give a rat’s ass about the game itself. I only am interested in the figures and I simply am not going to waste a day at a game session to see if some kid wants to trade figures. Thank the heavens for ebay! Although it’s more expensive, I’ve been able to amass my DC, Marvel and Independent heroes and villains without the frustration of having six or seven mole men or mirror master figures. Considering the continuing escalation of the price of regular action figures, this may be my solution to the problem of deciding whether to pay the mortgage or buy that latest series of figures.

In case you weren’t already hip to it, I’m going to let you in on a little fact that all humans and pets should be well aware of at this point in our evolutions: Halloween is the best holiday of the year. Period. Oh, and also, for those still in the dark, Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, Adam and Eve didn’t cavort with dinosaurs, you can’t get pregnant from using the same toilet seat, and the light does indeed go off when you close the refrigerator door. But why am I telling you this on the Action Figure Insider ‘Men of Action’ blog? Well, because for me, Halloween has several significant memory triggers, and as always, they’ll come back to toys.

(more…)

Any geek worth their salt has had the same age old conversations: who’d win in a fight between Superman and Captain Marvel? Is Godzilla bad or just misguided? When is ‘Ten Speed and Brown Shoe’ going to get a DVD release? And what if the ‘Star Wars’ prequels had been any good? But the one that comes up all the time when you have your own toy company is, “Oh, you should do toys from….”, or, “Have they done action figures of…” or even better, “Oooo! You should make dolls from that movie.…”. Oh, if only it were that simple.

(more…)

I’ve always been a bit of a spend thrift.  In this economy of I find it even harder to let go of my money.  In the pursuit of our hobby along these lines, I find patience to be my best ally.  This time, it guided me to an animation buy.

(more…)

Based on this list of products on display can you guess what toy store I visited this past weekend? My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake, Littlest Petshop, and Barbie. DCUC, Brave & the Bold, Movie Masters, DC Direct. NECA’s Twilight and Harry Potter. G.I. Joe 3 3/4 and 12". Marvel Legends, Marvel Select, Amazing Spiderman. Star Wars Legacy and Clone Wars. Secret Saturdays. Street Fighter, Gears of War, Castlevania and Final Fantasy. Give up? Here’s a hint:

(more…)

The force was strong with my padawan, Johnny, when he surprised me recently with tickets to a touring show called "Star Wars in Concert". Basically this event combines the music of John Williams performed by a live orchestra and chorus with specially edited footage from the Star Wars movies played on massive screens. High society meets hard core geek. Was I to wear a shirt and tie or my Chewy is My Copilot tee shirt?

(more…)

Greetings and salutations fellow toy fans and Action Figure Insiders-

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Jason Lenzi, and I have a toy company called Bif Bang Pow! Some of you may have heard of us, but for those that haven’t, we’ve been around about four and a half years, and have produced action figures and bobble heads for various properties: ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘The Big Lebowski’, Showtime’s ‘Dexter’, ‘The Twilight Zone’, and ABC’s ‘LOST’. AFI and Daniel Pickett in particular have been big supporters of all of our activities, and when I mentioned to Daniel recently that I was thinking of doing some guest blogging here and there, he very graciously offered the ‘Men of Action’ board for me to set my soap box up on. So here I am.

I’ve been a follower of AFI and its blogs for a while now, and I enjoy them very much. I love the diversity of the subjects being tackled, but have noticed one pleasant underlying theme (while not a complete shock) is the sense of nostalgia everyone has. Whether writing about toys of the past, or the newest catch from a day’s run to Target, everyone seems to be motivated in their passion for collecting by what they loved as kids. Sure, sometimes that means junior high as well, maybe even high school. (And some folks never stopped collecting at all). But people seem to especially cling to the lines or characters they were introduced to as kids.

Which brings me to my motivation for writing on here in the first place. I’m sort of a pop culture junkie, always feeling like I’m going to run out of time before I see, hear and read all the things out there in the ether I’ve been seeing, hearing and reading so much about. I read a stack of magazines every month, cover to cover, and tend to make lists of all the new music, DVDs and books I have to seek out (whether old or new) so I can update the file cabinet I keep stored in my skull. But, similar to the point I was making earlier, if I was to make a family tree of all those interests rattling around up there in my melon, I could trace most of them back to the greatest years of my life: 1976-1984.

One of the things I thought I could bring to the blog that might be of interest to it’s readers, was my perspective as a guy who started his own toy company. We have our own Bif Bang Pow! blog that we update occasionally with new releases and announcements, but as far as I know, there’s no one out there from inside a toy company that’s giving out any inside scoop. My “day job”, as it were, in Los Angeles, is working in television production, but whenever BBP! comes up in conversation, I find that people are endlessly curious about the why, how, and where of the entire operation. And looking back, it has been a wild and fascinating ride. If I knew then what I know now…..I probably STILL would have taken the trip, but I would have brought more aspirin with me.  Now, I’m not saying this is going to read like the Watergate transcripts, or be a ‘how to’ through the toy business. No , no, no. I came here to talk about all the things I dig about toys, past and present, but there will be some juice along the way.

And it will all most likely tie into those glorious, youthful 10 years or so. Case in point: ‘Flash Gordon’. In 1977, there was a great animated series on CBS called ‘Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle”. It was about four teenagers and their talking dog, and they drove around in a van solving spooky mysteries. (No, it wasn’t, it was actually about Tarzan. I just wanted to see if you’ve stayed with me through this first column). Anyway, I loved it, watched it every week. Then, a couple of years later, fall of 1979, NBC started airing what I consider to be one of the best, if not THE best, animated series of all time, ‘Flash Gordon’. Immediately, my 9 year old eyes and ears noticed the similarities to the ‘Tarzan’ series that came before, especially because Tarzan and Flash had the same voice. (A year later, Thundarr had it too!). Since May of 1977, I had eaten, slept and drank ‘Star Wars’, so anything remotely sci fi was going to be diligently followed by me. My father had given me some Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon reprint books for a birthday that summer, to show me that yes, there WAS life before Vader, and I loved Alex Raymond’s artwork. So I was slightly primed when the animated series began to air, and was immediately hooked from the first episode. It was must see television every Saturday morning that season, and I collected the entire line of Mattel toys, the coloring books, lunch box and whatever else I could beg to get my hands on. Still have ‘em all, too.

Then, a cosmic event took place a year later that I’m still reeling from today: a big budget, live action ‘Flash Gordon’ movie was about to come out. WITH A SOUNDTRACK BY QUEEN.  (I wrongly assumed some Hollywood studio executive had singled me out for a ‘remote viewing’ project, thinking my pure Minnesota mind must have box office gold buried somewhere in it). The movie came out, and while it still wasn’t as cool as the cartoon, I saw it four times. I bought the soundtrack on vinyl, transferred it to cassette, and walked around with my tape recorder, re enacting the film and air guitaring through the house. At B Dalton’s I managed to find the official storybook, and the hardcover comic adaptation (and hey! Isn’t this the same guy who drew the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ adaptation?). I even found some puffy stickers at the local drug store. But something in the merchandise department was sorely lacking.

Toys. That’s right, zip, zilch, nada. Not a thing. I hunted high and low, from Target (a Minnesota born enterprise, so there were a lot to sift through), to Children’s Palace, Kidsville in the Maplewood Mall, Borgstrom Pharmacy, Wards and JC Penny’s. Not a thing. There must be some mistake, I thought. Every OTHER Sci Fi movie got it’s own toys, and I grabbed ‘em all. ‘The Black Hole’, ‘Star Trek the Motion Picture’, ‘Buck Rogers in the 25th Century’. But nothing for one of the coolest, loudest, most garish and freaky, rock and roll sound tracked space flicks of all? Nope.

So when I did finally decide to give this toy company thing a go, I made a list of all the properties that I’d always wanted action figures of. And right at the top of that list was 1980’s ‘Flash Gordon’. How it all eventually happened and the craziness involved with getting the license is a story for another column. But the beauty of all of it was, I found a kindred spirit through the process. Another lost soul who felt that one of the most overlooked movies of the past 100 years was also criminally short changed in the action figure aisles. That man was Alex Ross. Except he went even further than I did when he was a kid, and custom made his own Flash, Ming and Prince Barin, out of various Mego 12” figures. (And if you know Alex at all you’ll know how unsurprising that little tidbit is).  So 27 years after the film first came out, little ‘ol Bif Bang Pow! brought the world what I knew it always needed: action figures from the ‘Flash Gordon’ movie.

So there you go. Proof, conclusive I think, that it all comes full circle, and in some way that probably reflects on all of us and why we collect and come to sites like this in the first place. I look forward to posting on here, hearing your feedback and hopefully connecting with all of you in the near future. Hope you all enjoy it, and thanks in advance  for your future time. Here’s to the start of a beautiful friendship.
 

…and yes, there will be detailed blogging.

Peace,

Chip

Please forgive what is essentially a self-indulgent travelogue. Because, really, who likes looking at other people’s vacation photos? Fortunately I was able to shadow Sgt. Rock as he embarked on a solo reconnaissance mission to Arizona’s "Red Rock" country: Sedona and its environs. Here follows a photographic recap of a week scouting in one of the Earth’s most beautiful locations. Our little East Company canvassed primarily a 12 mile stretch of scenic terrain in Oak Creek Canyon.

(more…)

I’ve never really spent any time on Facebook.  You could count my "friends" there on one hand.  So imagine my surprise as to how fun it was to enter the Superman / Batman Sweepstakes there.

Superman Batman Application on Face Book 

(more…)

Other seemingly newsworthy events were overshadowed this past summer by the release and limited availability of a small blue articulated action figure representing Gleek the blue monkey. Indeed, the furor over his exclusivity caught many in the mainstream news media unawares. Allegedly available to attendees of the San Diego Comic-Con, this piece of plastic memorabilia found itself extinct half way through the show. What accounted for the unexpected popularity of this tribute to a blue monkey?

(more…)

I’m getting very curious about the upcoming lineup for the JLA.  The current team has been decimated by current events in the DCU.  And upcoming covers have shown some interesting  stuff.  One shows Mon-El, Batman (Grayson), and Donna Troy.  I’ve long been a fan of the Titans, but am unsure how I feel about them joining the JLA.

(more…)

Labor day weekend is upon us and as another summer fades into memory it makes me recall my own youth. The days before action figures and computer games. When the only theme parks in the world were Disneyland and Tivoli Gardens and I’d never been to either one. So kids had to make up their own fun. And, thanks to guns we were able to spend many a happy hour gleefully killing our best friends.

Back in the day every kid, even girls, had at least one toy gun in their possession. It might be a water gun or a cap gun, but they had one. Boys had entire arsenals of them. No matter how many you had, like the NRA members in good standing, you always wanted more of them and there was always a new one showing up on the shelves of Sears, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny’s, Woolworths, TG&Y or the host of other stores that made up “downtown.”

I honestly cannot remember the first toy gun I had. Like a baseball and toy trucks and cars, it was always there. My parents may have bought it as soon as I arrived (back in ancient times, nobody knew what the sex of a baby was until it actually was popped out of the chute).

Initially there were cap guns in the form of the old Colt peacemaker of the Hollywood Wild West era. Roy Rogers had a licensing agreement with Mattel and there were all sorts of RR cap guns. Mattel even created a cap gun version of the Winchester repeating rifle as part of the RR line along with a derringer that was in a hat.

One of my personal favorites was a Paladin two gun set with holster. Paladin was program starring Richard Boone and my guns, like his had the stylized horse-head knight figure from a chess set inlayed in the pistol grips. White knights on black handles. Paladin was a lot like an unmasked Lone Ranger who went from place to place righting wrongs by killing bad guys with those cool guns of his. His partner was a Chinese manservant in lieu of Tonto.

As for ‘army guns” there were a plethora of them. 45’s, M-1’s, Carbines Thompson Sub-machine guns, pineapple hand grenades with places to put a cap. Helmets, canteens, ammo pouches that fit onto you belt, semi-working binoculars. There were Lugers, but that was it. The Germans and Japanese were not very well represented in guns. I suppose it was deduced by the manufacturers that it would be bad for business to make foreign guns for the kids. Might cause repercussions by the retailers. Who knows? But if you were playing a German or a Japanese soldier, odds were that you were carrying the same weapons as your opponents.

There was an unwritten rule about BB guns. If you had one, you couldn’t use it with BB’s in it when playing war. All that bitching and moaning about shooting out someone’s eye by your (and Ralphie’s) mom stuck and you just didn’t do that. Now, you could use dirt clods as hand grenades and it was even better to actually hit someone with one, but you couldn’t shoot him with your BB gun. The same was true with dart guns. Because the springs inside them were not that strong it wasn’t practical anyway. Most of the darts fizzled out after only a couple of feet. Dirt clods were great hand grenades. Especially late in the summer when there hadn’t been rain in weeks and the clods were very dry. They would explode in a great puff of dust and leave a mark on your friend where it hit him. And even if it hurt you could never cry or whine about the impact. It was sissy and nobody wanted to be called a sissy.

Consequently, with the exception of dirt clod grenades, your ability to qualify as a marksman was limited as the killing of your opponent was based upon a mutual agreement as to whether or not you actually “got him.” Many a game of war was interrupted by an escalated disagreement including fisticuffs as to who shot or didn’t shoot whom. I am convinced, although I have no evidence to support this theory, that the people that invented laser tag were kids that knew they shot some cheating little turd that said they had missed.

When James Bond appeared on the silver screen followed by a host of TV spies an armada of spy guns appeared on the shelves. Mattel had a line that included a radio that converted to a rifle/machine gun. One of the coolest was the Napoleon Solo Man from U.N.C.L.E. gun with all the attachments to turn the pistol into a semi-automatic rifle. It didn’t look exactly like the one on TV, but it was as close as you could get . Unfortunately nobody ever produced a speargun like the one 007 used in Thunderball. But, of course it would have been used against siblings more frequently than opponents in a game of war.

And the cool thing was our guns looked like real guns. Well, pretty close. They were usually molded of a dark gray or black plastic or from some gunmetal colored metal. Oh there where lots of them made of camouflage colored plastic and the space/ray guns were usually some unusual color as well as design, but most army, police and cowboy guns were made to look as close as possible to the real thing as profits would allow. And, more importantly, parents didn’t care and neither did law enforcement. No requirements for them to have a red tip on the end of the barrel or made in some bizarre color to make sure they are not taken for the real thing. If any kids were ever gunned down by the cops because they pointed a toy gun at them back then it never made the evening news.

Any kid worth knowing had at least a half a dozen guns within his personal arsenal. There was unspoken respect for kids that had unusual guns. There was a kid that had a 30-cal., tripod mounted machine gun that we all drooled over. It took four D-cell batteries and made a wonderful noise when the trigger was pressed. His dad had gone TDY to Japan and he picked it up there. Lucky bastard! Another kid had two shotguns. One was a pump action and the other was a double barrel. The latter even came with fake shells for you to pop into the breech! Besides my U.N.C.L.E. gun, I had two tommy guns, a luger and 45 and at least a a half a dozen peacemakers. That was about the norm. Some kids had more some less, but every kid had at least a dozen toy guns. Nobody bothered to create any kind of storage system for them, they were simply tossed into the toybox with all the other “stuff” you had.

Even though some gun sets, especially army ones, came with knives we rarely used them in play. I suppose because we never got to the point of hand-to-hand combat (except for disputes over being shot) so knives were pointless.

Unlike today’s youth that live structured lives where every moment of their waking lives are controlled by someone, kids in my day were run out of the house and told not to come home until dinner. So, creative ways of pretending to kill one another were the highlight of the weekends and summer