Christmas is almost here and again, even though I’m 50+ years old now, I think of the toys I had growing up. There were a ton of them! I honestly don’t know how my parents pulled it off, because we were far from well off back then. And then, when my sister Michelle came along when I was five, they managed to provide for the both of us. I know there were compromises; when Legos were starting to get popular, we got Brix Blox from Sears. When everyone else got the Mattel football game, I got the Sears version. It didn’t really matter though. We got a lot and we were happy back then.
Above are just a few of the multitude of favorites I had; Mego Planet of the Apes, Big Jim’s Rescue Wagon and the Verti-Bird helicopter. I guess my love for science fiction stretches back as far as my memory will go and I was just blown away seeing the Apes movies and the short-lived CBS TV show, so when I saw the toys, pun intended, I went ape-s**t crazy! Michelle even got in on the game, getting Zira, or Lady Ape as we called her back then. I had most of the figures and accessories like the battering ram and the slave wagon. I have a vague memory of the tree-house playlet, but I don’t know if it was mine or my friend Al Stipes’s from school.
Big Jim may have been a compromise as well. Most everyone else was into G.I. Joe and I even had a few as well, but after my sister popped the head off my talking commander a few days after I got him, Jim seemed to take the lead. I had a couple of figures and the Rescue Wagon, the Camper and even Jim’s just playset at one time. Big Jim’s world was almost as large as Joe’s and to counter kung-fu grip, Jim had bulging biceps when you bent his arms.
Verti-Bird was on a tether and operated be remote control. You could only fly it in circles, but there was some skill involved in learning to make it hover and pick up the included cargo bundle with the hook attachment. I actually remember having a lot of fun with that thing!
There were so many other toys growing up too; the Even Knievel stunt cycle, the Micronauts, …heck I even had a General George Custer action figure at one point! And of course there were things like Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels, an electric train and nerf footballs and any number of cap and toy guns.
I enjoyed, and played with all the toys, but being the precocious imaginative kid that I was, I tended to always fall back to the action figures and the worlds I created in my head, much to the chagrin of my Dad at times I think. He even made a comment to me once when I had an action figure of some sort with me around some of his coworkers when Mom took him dinner on overtime at work and told me never to bring one of “those dolls” around again. Ah well…
Anyway, being the kind of quirky kid that I was, and not realizing it at the time, when Christmas time was over and all the different characters were collected around the toy chest, my Apes and Big Jim’s and Micronauts and Evel and all the others never battled or anything like that. No, we formed a caravan of accessories and vehicles and we were always on a journey to find some safe refuge after a calamity of some kind, a war or natural disaster perhaps. So basically we, the toys and I were trapped in a post-apocalyptic world and forced to work together to try and survive. Where all this came from, I have no idea because I had to have been somewhere between the ages of 7 and 12 when all this was going on. Maybe enough of my brain had registered what was going on in those Planet of the Apes movies to make that leap. There were other movies too, and I apparently had very little TV filtering administered to me. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame, was desperately trying to overcome the cancellation of that show, (which will become a blog entry unto itself one day), and so there were these made for TV movies, failed pilots really like Genesis II and Planet Earth that my young science-fiction primed mind ate up like candy. Regardless of the stimulus though, my toys were the receptacle for all this. Apes and humans worked together. Baron Karza and Force Commander towed the line towards the hope of a new tomorrow and Evel Knievel, who was about 6 inches tall, did all he could to aid Big Jim, who was a much bigger 10-11 inch figure in the quest for sanctuary.
And so tonight, on this Christmas Eve so many decades later, I look back and smile at my younger self and my naive, yet hopeful notions. Kinda wish I had them all here now and I could get my big butt down in the floor, line up the vehicles and boxes and start a quest for a place where it doesn’t matter if you’re called a doll or an action figure, whether you’re marketed as a hero or a villain or any of that; just a place where everyone, every toy is safe and at peace.
Merry Christmas all!
Above are just a few of the multitude of favorites I had; Mego Planet of the Apes, Big Jim’s Rescue Wagon and the Verti-Bird helicopter. I guess my love for science fiction stretches back as far as my memory will go and I was just blown away seeing the Apes movies and the short-lived CBS TV show, so when I saw the toys, pun intended, I went ape-s**t crazy! Michelle even got in on the game, getting Zira, or Lady Ape as we called her back then. I had most of the figures and accessories like the battering ram and the slave wagon. I have a vague memory of the tree-house playlet, but I don’t know if it was mine or my friend Al Stipes’s from school.
Big Jim may have been a compromise as well. Most everyone else was into G.I. Joe and I even had a few as well, but after my sister popped the head off my talking commander a few days after I got him, Jim seemed to take the lead. I had a couple of figures and the Rescue Wagon, the Camper and even Jim’s just playset at one time. Big Jim’s world was almost as large as Joe’s and to counter kung-fu grip, Jim had bulging biceps when you bent his arms.
Verti-Bird was on a tether and operated be remote control. You could only fly it in circles, but there was some skill involved in learning to make it hover and pick up the included cargo bundle with the hook attachment. I actually remember having a lot of fun with that thing!
There were so many other toys growing up too; the Even Knievel stunt cycle, the Micronauts, …heck I even had a General George Custer action figure at one point! And of course there were things like Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels, an electric train and nerf footballs and any number of cap and toy guns.
I enjoyed, and played with all the toys, but being the precocious imaginative kid that I was, I tended to always fall back to the action figures and the worlds I created in my head, much to the chagrin of my Dad at times I think. He even made a comment to me once when I had an action figure of some sort with me around some of his coworkers when Mom took him dinner on overtime at work and told me never to bring one of “those dolls” around again. Ah well…
Anyway, being the kind of quirky kid that I was, and not realizing it at the time, when Christmas time was over and all the different characters were collected around the toy chest, my Apes and Big Jim’s and Micronauts and Evel and all the others never battled or anything like that. No, we formed a caravan of accessories and vehicles and we were always on a journey to find some safe refuge after a calamity of some kind, a war or natural disaster perhaps. So basically we, the toys and I were trapped in a post-apocalyptic world and forced to work together to try and survive. Where all this came from, I have no idea because I had to have been somewhere between the ages of 7 and 12 when all this was going on. Maybe enough of my brain had registered what was going on in those Planet of the Apes movies to make that leap. There were other movies too, and I apparently had very little TV filtering administered to me. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame, was desperately trying to overcome the cancellation of that show, (which will become a blog entry unto itself one day), and so there were these made for TV movies, failed pilots really like Genesis II and Planet Earth that my young science-fiction primed mind ate up like candy. Regardless of the stimulus though, my toys were the receptacle for all this. Apes and humans worked together. Baron Karza and Force Commander towed the line towards the hope of a new tomorrow and Evel Knievel, who was about 6 inches tall, did all he could to aid Big Jim, who was a much bigger 10-11 inch figure in the quest for sanctuary.
And so tonight, on this Christmas Eve so many decades later, I look back and smile at my younger self and my naive, yet hopeful notions. Kinda wish I had them all here now and I could get my big butt down in the floor, line up the vehicles and boxes and start a quest for a place where it doesn’t matter if you’re called a doll or an action figure, whether you’re marketed as a hero or a villain or any of that; just a place where everyone, every toy is safe and at peace.
Merry Christmas all!
