“We Had an Army Pete”: Lost in the Toybox

 

Lately John has alerted me to the fact that the fabled “Brick Mantooth” of collecting fame and pop culture expertise has been posting videos on YouTube. I spent much of yesterday evening watching them with fascination. Not only does he cover the subject of vintage toys (many from the sweet spot of my own Seventies childhood) in his Plaid Stallions, he also records his visits to stores, swap meets, and flea markets to find rare and interesting childhood and pop-historic objects in Toy-Ventures. In just about every video, I see some remembrance from my own childhood or cool items never even dreamed of. It prodded some early memories loose.

First on this list is Captain Action’s uniform and equipment for The Phantom, a hero familiar to us from newspaper comics. The idea of Captain Action was that he was a basic figure that could be endlessly modified using different masks and costumes into other personas like Superman, Batman, Flash Gordon, or even Steve Canyon. Possibly we wanted this kit to flesh out our G. I. Joe’s playability (for a long time we only had one basic Joe, though we later got ones with kung fu grip and bionic body parts), or maybe we just wanted the accessories. As it turned out, the costume was a shade too small for G. I. Joe and (later) a shade too big for Megos. The mask and the body stocking lasted the longest and I believe are still somewhere in the family archives. I had completely forgotten the purple cowl, however, until I found this picture. Then memories flooded in of trying it on every possible head of every toy (action figure or not) and even turning it inside out to see if we could find any use for it. We couldn’t. I have the vague idea that it finally split and we threw it away, but I couldn’t even roughly say when.

But what I particularly regret losing was the Phantom’s knife. I was always drawn to bladed weapons over guns in games of make-believe. Guns always seemed … I don’t know, ugly and wild, somehow unpredictable and undependable, prone to jamming or running out of bullets at the wrong time. Not an element that mattered in child’s play, you might say, but even then I knew that an element of reality was necessary to every fantasy. A blade, whether knife or axe, was personal and precise, and you could go on stabbing or chopping the enemy as long as your arm held out. The Phantom’s knife was realistically painted and had a skull on the pommel. I preferred it at the time to the rather dull brown Geronimo’s knife. Alas, it was more brittle and eventually snapped and the pieces thrown away.

A selection of Geronimo accessories, including his knife and his tomahawk, and even his peace pipe, which would have made an interesting (if huge) addition to my collection of action figure pipes.

And speaking of axes, there was a since-lost hatchet (the coolest piece, of course) in this collection of accessories that we had for the 1974 Kenner’s Boy Scout figure. Did we actually have the figure itself? Can’t remember and don’t care. Of main importance was the stuff, most of which we still have, except for the hatchet, of course.

That campfire also brings to mind the 1973-74 G. I. Joe set “White Tiger Hunt”, later re-issued with a different tiger figure as “Save the White Tiger”. The campfire from our set was a hollow mold and could be worn as an eccentric hat by many toys; the fire has survived until this very day. The main feature was the tiger, of course, and I have a vivid tactile memory of the pink pads and nail-pricks of that upraised claw, that if pressed in hard enough, could leave an impression on your skin. Its weak spot was its curved-at-the-tip tail, the only jointed piece on its blow-mold body, which, when it fell off, had a second career for a while as a cane. I can’t imagine what finally happened to the tiger; perhaps thrown away in one of the periodic purges.