Well, I'm off on another cerebral safari ...

It's been a really busy ten days and I haven't had time to sit down and do much more than sketch out some ideas and do a little bit of thinking.  I was at the end of my wick, basically, and just needed some time to veg.  A week ago Friday I did manage to stop by my local hobby shop on my way home and finally picked up my AMT Leif Ericson Galactic Cruiser model kit.  I won't go into a lot about this kit because what I could say has been said before and maybe said better by others.

The Leif Ericson had a very interesting history including its relative failure as a new line of model kit for AMT way back in the late 1960's.  Fast forward to the mid-'70's when the LE was re-issued not as the LE but as a "Interplanetary U.F.O. Mystery Ship" which looked a lot less like anything traditionally associated with UFOs and more like something from the Gerry Anderson TV Series "UFO".  In fact, I've often thought that the LE had a lot in common with the SHADO SkyDiver ... and that if you put the LE in an ocean it would have fit in a universe pretty much like the one that brought us the SHADO SkyDiver and of course Irwin Allen's "Seaview" submarine from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea."

 

Anyway, way back in 1978 the first time that I had this kit (or knew of it) was as a 9 year old newly anointed sci-fi fanatic and the LE was given to me in its second format ... the AMT glow-in-the-dark "Interplanetary UFO Mystery Ship" (because UFOs and Bigfoot and ESP were all big / hot topics in the 1970's).  I received this kit along with the AMT "K-7 Space Station" model kit as a Christmas gift at a Christmas party at my dad's place of work (then First Magnolia Federal Bank where he was VP).  

 The original kits I received at that Christmas party oh so long ago ...

I'm really glad that these kits have been reintroduced and are affordable because with no real canon background (and a rather limited background as it is), a kit like this is just waiting to be fleshed out.  There's a lot of talk over on the Starship Modeler discussion forums about this kit but most if not all of that is simply about the LE itself.  Some of the discussion was interesting but when it was decided by group to have the evil alien race in the LE "universe" to be called the "Zork Empire" I had to throw my hands up and walk away.

That was years ago and my interest in the LE was put on the back burner amid other projects (like writing about 1200 pages of the adventures of my life).  Fast forward a few years and Round 2 has bought up the molds from AMT and re-released a cherished childhood memory.  The Leif Ericson is now available in two flavors; Original and Extra Crispy (or LE and Ghost Ship).

 

Original recipe (with original artwork, lighting kit, ooolala!) 

 Extra crispy recipe (missing a few pieces that the original LE kit contains)

Isn't life grand?

Anyway, lately I'd started thinking about the Leif Ericson / IUFOMS again and decided to finally do something about it.  I had some spare time one night so I sat down and just started typing out a history of the LE universe, real stream of consciousness type stuff.  Three glasses of sweet tea and one hour later I had basically almost 30 pages of history, notes, things I wanted to do with the model, technology, political and social movements, etc. and of course a worthy protagonist for the LE ... and it damn sure isn't the Zork Empire.

Zork?

Gah.


In fact, I've pretty much thrown out everything about the Leif Ericson and the Strategic Space Command other than the name of the ship and the design of the ship as well.  Two of the things that I threw out first were the scale debate and the duck-looking scoutship.  If you sand off the lightly pressed portholes in the ship you can make it any scale you want and I'm thinking that it's more of the 1/600 scale rather than the 1/500 that everyone is so happy with.  As for the mini scout ship ...

Quack-Quack!  Now with Doric style landing gear!

Starting from scratch has been the best thing about this project because it gives me a chance to combine a lot of scratch-building and intellectual projects that I've been meaning to get to together under one focus.

So, with the new re-release of the LE (and my probable purchase of at least two more examples of this kit) work begins on a new intellectual diversion and cerebral safari for me.  Look for updates on the Gray Stuff part of my webplace.  Here's a hint ... I'm building the bad guys first and I'm building them from scratch just because no one else has been building the bad guys.  


Why?  


I like to do stuff that other people aren't doing and I like to do it first so that others can follow in my footsteps but then that's just me.

Marx military playsets

Growing up in the early 1970’s was a really fun time.  It was a time of military toys and my Christmas wish lists would have been the stuff of any bleeding heart liberal parents’ nightmares.  I grew up playing with war toys and toys which represented not only violence but organized violence and mass destruction on a scale which had boundaries only limited by my young imagination.  I grew up building plastic models of bombers, fighter planes, naval warships and armored vehicles (Monogram rocked hard during this time and Sheppard Paine was my modeling hero).


I grew up checking out library books on World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, and anything that had weapons or combat in it.  I grew up playing with cap guns, dart guns, tracer disc guns, BB guns and fireworks and burning stuff with gasoline or any other flammable incendiary liquid that I could get my hands on.  I grew up pretending to kill my friends in games of "guns", using my imagination to gun them down in vacant lots, half-built houses and the woods down the street.  We built forts in the woods and turned tree houses into fortresses.  It was run and gun, jumping ditches, hiding in culverts, playing in the woods, vacant lots and half-built houses of my still unfinished neighborhood.  When my friends couldn’t come out to play or it was raining, I turned to some of the greatest toys ever created … “army men” made by a lot of different companies but the greatest "army men" of all time were those made by the Marx Toy Company.

I remember 1973 to 1977 being my really big green army men days when I had buckets and tubs full of Marx military playsets and figures.  I had played a lot with the MPC / Timmee bagged sets of military soldiers (the Vietnam era green figures with the M16s, Bazooka, Flamethrower and mortar) and generic 1960’s era tanks but then my parents bought me a present for my 6^th birthday that was one of the greatest presents ever … the Marx Battleground Playset.  It was freaking huge!  The box I could barely hold and it included more pieces than I could count!

 Happy happy joy joy!

There was a tank, a small towed cannon, a big 155mm howitzer, a 88mm Flak gun, a half track, a jeep, a landing craft with drop down ramp and twin MG turret, a raft, a two piece pontoon bridge, twin flag poles … there was barb wire fences, rolled barb wire, trees, ruins, a damaged pillbox, sandbag emplacements, a recoilless rifle on a tripod, lots of crates, a table with a radio … more soldiers than you could carry in both of your arms held tight and, sweet mother of plastic there were accessory weapons … not exactly to scale but who cared!  You had spare tommy guns, hand grenades, BARs, grease guns, M3 carbines, and Colt .45 pistols … all manner of battlefield accessories you could pull off of a sprue and give to your soldiers to pretend to carry or to place around the battlefield and have your soldiers capture.

Basically, the Marx Battlefield Playset was countless hours of solitary fun in a box and it was worth every single penny that my parents paid for it.  I’d lose myself in the den playing on a battlefield of deep shag carpet or across the great divide that separated my two single beds in my room.  A seasonal visit to my cousins in Virginia netted me my first experience with Airfix military figures … these were far more detailed than the Marx figures (and a good bit more expensive) but I went home with some World War II British desert soldiers and some Russian soldiers, marveling at their weapons and equipment.

I lived for those little green army men during those early years of my life and my imagination ran wild, creating battlefields in my parents’ den (we had shag carpet), across the Great Divide that was the space between my oppositely opposed single beds and outside in the sand box (where you could make some really cool beach assaults and hand-built fortifications).

All of that ceaseless warfare began to wane in late 1976 and early 1977 as my interest in science fiction began to grow.  Little did I know that in May of 1977 George Lucas’ “Star Wars” would become a veritable science fiction supernova in my life, catching me totally by surprise and unleashing the boundaries of my imagination in ways that the poor Marx company never had before.  

But in the fall of 1976 that was still months away and not even on my radar yet and I was still playing with my green army men.  My last big hurrah with the Marx military playsets was the granddaddy of them all … the Navarone Playset which I received as a gift on Christmas, 1976.  

I’d watched “The Guns of Navarone” with Gregory Peck a few years before and now I had a playset of that!  Well, there wasn’t Gregory Peck or any of the other commandos but the Navarone Playset had a lot more than I’d ever had before … including German figures and wounded Germans … and I had a huge mountain with two giant cannons to assault.  As far as figures and vehicles went, it was more of the same from the older Battlefield Playset only without a lot of the accessories like the extra weapons and landscape items.  The German figures, again, were new to me and a welcome addition to my battles.

Strangely enough, the Christmas that I got the Marx Navarone Playset I also received another coveted childhood toy … the Mattel Space 1999 Eagle Transporter with its three tiny Alphan figures (a prelude to what was to come from Kenner later with their Star Wars line).  

I guess if you’re going to transition from green army men and Marx military playsets to science fiction, the Mattel Space 1999: Eagle 1 Transporter was about as good a toy as any to carry you there.

Heritage USA’s “Paint ‘N’ Play” sets

The late 1970’s really hold some great memories for me in regards to toys and hobbies and just generally having a hell of a good time as a child.  That was a time of “Star Wars”, dirt bikes, Dungeons and Dragons, the Terran Trade Authority handbooks, skateboards that were half the size of skateboards today and … Heritage USA’s "Dungeon Dwellers" series and "Galacta" series “Paint ‘n’ Play” sets.

(click image to follow link to story)

 

The Cosmic Liquidator

The Cosmic Liquidator ... late '70's ... $4.99 at Kmart in Hattiesburg, MS. The first pressurized water gun on the market, a space-type pistol fed by a clear tube connecting it to the "power pack" you wore on your belt. The tiny switch at the front of the pistol set it for either stream or pulse fire and you charged the water gun by pumping air into the liquid tank (much like a garden sprayer). I say "liquid tank" because one afternoon Alan Speed and I decided to fill the "liquid" tank with gasoline from his dad's gas can in the garage.

I pumped the tank up until it was literally bulging, we marched across the street to a vacant lot, he held the Bic lighter at a safe distance and I pulled the trigger sending a stream of high pressure gasoline from the nozzle of the Cosmic Liquidator through the lighter's flame and ...

... and it was nothing short of glorious ... 

It was everything that we had hoped and thought it would be and for a few short minutes two nine year old boys had a working flamethrower which devastated large ant hills and anything else we spewed that flaming stream of gasoline on. We even tried to write our names in burning liquid on the back side of a neighbor's fence.

... and then we noticed that in our gleeful abandon we had been maybe a bit ambitious in our pyromania and there was more fire than we could stamp out, believe me, we tried. There was more foot stomping than "River Dance - The Musical" and more cussing than a Richard Pryor concert. Knowing that we had only one chance to avoid what could only be trouble of Old Testament proportions, we ran back across the street, grabbed about a hundred feet of coiled up garden hose, turned it all the way on and spent the next ten minutes doing our best to keep a vacant lot in Hattiesburg, MS (and probably the neighbor's fence and several houses around that lot) from burning to the ground.

We were successful in our fire fighting efforts and we learned a valuable lesson that day ... gasoline and plastic are not friends. Yes, our brief adventure with the Cosmic Liquidator using gasoline as a projected medium of entertainment had melted the air pump and most of the internals of the gun rendering it useless ... but while it had worked and before things had gotten out of hand it had been nothing short of awesome to hold a pistol like that in your hand and be able to stream liquid fire out to ten or twelve feet.

If you want to read all the glorious details, step on over to "Tales from the Driver's Seat".

Today, all these years later, I'm amazed that I ever survived my childhood but what memories I have and I wouldn't trade them for anything.

The Milton Bradley Star Bird

Everything about toys changed in 1977 when “Star Wars” hit the big screen … just as “Star Wars” changed the way we thought about science fiction and movies in general, George Lucas’ epic space fantasy also changed the way that we thought about and bought toys.  Everyone wanted to cash in on a piece of the tasty marketing pie that Lucas had served up steaming hot and fresh in May of ‘77, even an old family game maker Milton Bradley.

Suddenly science fiction was cool … and extremely profitable … but what could a board game maker like Milton Bradley bring to a table that was already getting crowded by everyone and their mother trying to cash in on the sci-fi craze?

Plenty and it all revolved around that oh so ‘70’s buzzword … electronic.

Nothing sounds like electronic Star Bird.  

Nothing.

Ever.

Period.

Enter Milton Bradley’s bid for their slice of the science fiction super nova … Star Bird: The Space Transport with electronic circuitry – one of the first of many such toys in the late 1970’s and one which I was lucky enough to own (and still own).

Milton Bradley’s Star Bird was a really cool toy and simple to operate (if not just a bit annoying to your parents or other adults in the play area).  A single 9volt battery went into a compartment just behind the front laser guns and in front of the massive speaker while a simple on/off switch turned Star Bird to active or inactive duty.  As soon as you flipped that little black toggle switch, the whole toy emitted a deep throbbing hum and depending on whether you tilted the nose of the Star Bird up or down, that throbbing hum would either increase in pitch to an ear crying whine or decrease in pitch to an even deeper throbbing hum.  Once you had the pitch that you desired, you could level the Star Bird off and it would maintain that sound for as long as you held it steady.  If, during your cruising of the galaxy, a hostile element appear in your path then a big gray button on the neck of the hull, right behind the cockpit, triggered the front mounted twin LED laser cannons which would pulse / flash red and emit high pitched laser-like sounds.

If those electronic strengths weren’t enough, Star Bird was full of other play features.  

The front cockpit and the rear main engine could both be pulled off and fitted together to form a type of smaller, arrowhead shaped fighter with all the sound FX.  Slide the front cockpit cover off to expose the main laser / battery compartment / speaker assembly and you had yet another sub-fighter array / play configuration … this one with a cockpit canopy which was little more than a flat sticker.  

The wing tips of the main body were actually small space fighters labeled “Interceptor-1” and “Interceptor-2” that could be removed for either escort duty or to add their attack capacity to whatever cosmic foe Star Bird was valiantly facing at the time.  

World War 2 made gun turrets sexy and during the 1940’s and 1950’s the gun turret was a staple of most large military aircraft … waxing to nostalgia during the 1960’s and 1970’s but “Star Wars” made the gun turret sexy again.  Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon with its dual pom-pom laser turrets made it a requirement for any self-respecting sci-fi space ship to have at least one gun turret (or two) and so the last play feature in the design was a double barreled laser gun mounted on top of a ball turret on top of the main body.  Looking at the arc of fire of the turret, it would probably be a very good idea to launch the wing mounted Interceptors before ever opening fire with the double barreled laser guns on the turret otherwise you were going to have some collateral damage / friendly fire to explain to the head brass back at the Command Base.  Also, it should be noted that the design of the ball turret was more than a little similar in appearance to the Imperial Death Star.  The ball turret could also be removed and used as an escape pod … another piece of hardware made famous by “Star Wars.”

Star Bird was billed as a “transport”, albeit a pretty well armed one with its dual wing mounted Interceptors, twin laser gun turret and those big flashing laser pulse cannons up front.  You had to begin to wonder just what it was that Star Bird transported and what would need so much firepower to protect.  In fact, looking at the overall design, I guess it didn’t have very much room to carry stuff so as a child I always thought of the Star Bird more as a Pony Express than say, an 18 wheeler.  Remembering a line from “Star Wars” in 1977, I thought of the Star Bird as a “councilor’s ship”, a diplomatic transport, high speed and heavily armed … designed to get VIPs into and out of bad situations.  In that regard, at least in my mind, Star Bird was very much like Princess Leia’s own Tantive IV Corellian Corvette (i.e. the hammerheaded “blockade runner”).  I even spent a couple of days one summer tracing the outline of the Star Bird and its parts and drawing out the interior … deck by deck, and created a kind of “Star Bird Owners Manual” complete with facts and statistics on the imaginary capabilities of the toy.  It was a whimsical exercise in imagination for a 9 year old and garnered the admiration and praise from my close group of friends but sadly that spiral bound notebook and those drawings are long since lost to the passage of time.

Pity.

Maybe I’ll do them again one day, improving upon the design as the Star Bird is one ship that would definitely make a good project for blueprints.

Like any good spaceship, Star Bird needed to operate from a staging area and Milton Bradley was kind enough to provide just such an accessory with the Star Bird Command Base … a somewhat weakly built cardboard construct which didn’t fare well to heavy play or the passage of the years but while you had it, the Star Bird Command Base was king.  As stated, it was the action control center for electronic Star Bird … however the Command Base itself had no electronics of its own.

The Command Base was another vast canvas for your imagination to roam and play on, sized to the Star Bird itself and loaded with Star Bird support features; the Command Base resembled something right out of a Chris Foss or Peter Elson painting.  Sit it on the sand of a beach with the waves crashing in the background or in a shady patch of lichen covered ground in your backyard and the Command Base could have been built on just about any alien planet your imagination could come up with.

Features of the Command Base included a transport vehicle designed to act as a dolly to carry the removable engine core of the Star Bird, an Interceptor landing deck with two marked slots to slide the removable wing-tip mounted Interceptors into, a working winch which could be used to lift the engine (and engine cradle) from the transport vehicle up into the open service bay, dual high mounted anti-invasion laser guns (which were simply much larger versions of the turret mounted double barrel laser guns on the Star Bird) and last of all four “scaled” space figures (all in the same “howdy” pose) though it was obvious that these “scaled” space figures would never be able to fit inside either the ball turret of the Star Bird or the cockpits of the wing-mounted Interceptors so what Milton Bradley meant when they used the term “scaled” I’m not sure of.

Later offerings from Uncle Milton included a revamped version of the Star Bird packaged and sold as the Star Bird Avenger.  The Avenger had different decals, darker windows on the front and upgraded electronics which could send and receive infra-red signals (like those found in a television remote).  Kids could now fire their Avenger’s pulse laser cannons at a special (included) target and register a “hit” against the target. 

Shortly thereafter, Star Bird got its first real adversary in the addition of the Star Bird Intruder to the toy lineup.  Shamelessly, the Intruder was a lackluster (but rare) toy thrown together with little or no imagination from existing parts and molds of the Star Bird line.  The Intruder was simply the front part of the Star Bird / Avenger toy with a much shorter rear section and it was painted black with alien type decals.  Possessing the same electronic upgrades as the Avenger, the Intruder and the Avenger could dogfight in a fashion that was a precursor to laser-tag in that if a “hit” was scored on the other toy it would signal that hit through its electronic suite and by making a different sound.  After the Intruder was introduced, the Star Bird line faded into the pages of toy history, its chapter having run from 1979 to 1981 and it had been a good run.

A damn good run.

Today, my Star Bird (original) and Command Base sit on a shelf, in their original (tattered) boxes, like somewhat tarnished trophies from my youth.  Every few years I get the Star Bird down, unbox it, connect a 9volt battery and flip the on/off switch to bring the old spaceship back to life.  For a few wonderful minutes I relive a cherished memory from my childhood.  Invariably, the electronic sound of the Star Bird’s warbling engine along with its pulsating LED laser cannons brings my curious daughters running to daddy’s study to see what I have resurrected and soon I’m watching the ancient Star Bird disappearing down the hall in the hands of my two girls, riding the waves of their imaginations.  

Seeing my two daughters run around my house with my Star Bird whining it’s engines at full load, pulse lasers flashing and screaming, girls giggling and taking turns with the toy spaceship makes me realize that some toys really are timeless … some toys have the power to cross generations and make the children of tomorrow, the children of yesterday’s children, smile … and Milton Bradley’s Star Bird was just such a toy.

**UPDATE** 

During the Summer of 2013, I took my vintage Starbird and Command Base from my study at home and put them on display in my office at work.  I even put a 9 volt battery in the Starbird and let her howl and blast her lasers for a bit.  Here's a picture of my classic toys ... the boxes are stored in the cabinets below.  I also seem to be missing one of the 'arms' for the crane and a spaceman.  Time to mount a safari on Ebay for replacement parts.  One of my modeling projects is to redo the Command Base entirely in foam board, update it a little and have a modern take on the old toy.  One of the main parts of the redesign is to make it where the angles get right ... i.e. you can see all of the base from one angle.

 

And if you never saw the original television commercials for Starbird ... here's some retro toy goodness.  Vintage 1980 Milton Bradley Starbird toy commercial

Quench yourself, fool.

In the late 1980's I started something of a personal tradition ... the carrying of an Aladdin insulated mug with sweet tea in it.  The first mug was purchased at a local Junior Food Mart convenience store and I believe that it was the 32 ounce model ... white or bone white/gray with a red top and red "Jr. Food Mart Mega Mug" logo on the side along with the displacement call out ... something to brag about like the "5.0" or the "SS" or the "Tuned Port Injection" logo on your muscle car.  You purchased the mug and the cost included the initial filling of the mug with one of the many flavors from the self-serve soda fountain (I had to settle for Coke and Coke products (yech) since JFM didn't carry Pepsi but one store in particular carried Coke that was more syrup than soda and it was actually pretty good since it didn't have that annoying Coke "bite" to it when you drank it).  Refills cost considerably less than the initial purchase price of the mug and over the long run you could amortize the cost of the mug into basically nothing.

See ... I graduated college with a degree in business administration so I'm always looking at not only the bottom line but ways to maximize profit, especially if it's my own personal profit.

Later, in 1990 to 1991, when I worked for Puckett Labs as a medical courier, I upgraded the 32 ounce model to the new and improved 44 ounce model ... woo-hoo!  It was almost fifty percent more beverage!  I found that I could go to the Sonic drive-in on 4th Street and get a Route 44 sweet tea, dump it all into the 44 ounce Mega Mug and be set for about half of my trip.  There was a Sonic on the other end of my route which I would grab lunch at and refill my Mega Mug with sweet tea for the return trip.

And then came the big one ... the 52 ounce Mega Mug. 

So big that if you spilled it inside your car chances were that you would drown before you could ever get out of your seat belt and open out of the door ... rescue and EMT personnel would just find your lifeless body floating in a car filled to the roof with Coke or Coke product and they'd probably have to get the Straws of Life out to open up your vehicle.  That 52 ounce Mega Mug was just truly ridiculous in its volumetric capacity but its ability to carry a favorite beverage flavor and keep it cool for most of the day was legendary. Over the course of the 1990's, I kept one mug faithfully, so much that people came to associate me with the mug and if they ever saw the mug sitting around somewhere they knew I wasn't far away.  If I went to hang out with my friends, when they answered the door I was always standing there to greet them with my 52 ounce Mega Mug in hand.

- The Gang in Bay St. Louis - circa Fall 1993 -
At a friend's beach house with Eric, Cindy, Mel,
Bill and me with my trusty JFM Mega Mug

My Mega Mug and I were inseparable and we remained that way until the mid to late '90's.  It became something of a running joke that I wasn't ready to go until I had my Mega Mug in hand and it was full.  At 52 ounces of capacity, people also joked that not only did the Mega Mug have its own tidal forces acting upon it but that it took almost as long to fill it up at a convenience store fountain as it did to fill up gas in the car we were in. 

During the late '90's I began to purchase a large stock of these mugs and store them away in case ... I don't know ... Just in case.  I think that by the time the year 2000 rolled around I was still using my original 52 ounce mug (the lesser mugs had gone ... somewhere ... and been forgotten) but I had four more, unopened, still in their shrink wrap, held in reserve.  

And then something happened ... my original mug vanished.

It was like losing a cherished pet or a breaking up with your girlfriend. 

To his day I still do not know the fate of my beloved 52 ounce Junior Food Mart Mega Mug only that it was gone and it was sorely missed.  I went to my reserve stock and tore another 52 ounce Mega Mug out of its shrink wrap.  Months later, that mug vanished as well, fate unknown.  This happened over the course of two years, the early 2000's, and every Mega Mug that I had disappeared.  I went to the Junior Food Mart where I had originally purchased the Mega Mugs ... and they had none!

I couldn't find a Mega Mug anywhere!

Sadness set in for the long haul as I began to search for a replacement.  Bubba Keg?  Nope, it just wasn't the same.  Other insulated mugs from various companies ... not the same.  Finally, a few years ago, my wife got me a Tervis Tumbler for my birthday, a practical birthday present, and while it served me faithfully and admirably it still wasn't an Aladdin Mega Mug and so I made do with what I had for a few years more.

One day, bored, I got on Ebay and looked for a "Junior Food Mart Mega Mug" with no results found.  I saved the search and then made a new search called "Aladdin mug" and saved that as well.  A few weeks later, my search notified me of several Aladdin mug offerings and what did I find?  

Mega Mugs!

Well, not Mega Mugs since I guess that is a trademark name of JFM not used by Aladdin on their products but it was the same tankard devoid of commercial logos.  I did a search on Aladdin and discovered that the company had been bought out by another company and that Aladdin had closed its Tennessee based manufacturing location ... thus no more Mega Mugs.  A seller on Ebay had gone to the closeout of the TN manufacturing location and had purchased a large quantity of these high capacity insulated mugs for sale at a later date and over about two months I purchased five from him, four white with blue lids and no logos and one white with a blue lid and a Chevron "Cold Front" logo.

Ahhh!  Sated bliss!  More fluid storage capacity than a double humped camel!  This is the Quench-Essential Thirst Prevention Tool and next to the Moon Landing it may be the greatest technological achievement known to Man.

There was great cause for celebration!  My best container friend was back and I had spares!  

Again!  

Happy happy joy joy!

Holding this mug in my hand now is like seeing an old friend that you lost track of and even though it isn't technically a "Mega Mug" that is what it will always be to me.  If you're looking for one of the best insulated beverage cups on the planet, get on Ebay and buy yourself an old Aladdin insulated mug in the 32, 44 or if you've got the balls (and the bladder capacity), the almighty 52 ounce size and quench yourself, fool.

Word.

The Ideal “JAWS” Game and Kenner’s ALIEN figure

As a lifelong fan of toys (at 43 years of age I still walk through the toy departments of stores) I often get time to sit back and reminisce on toys from my youth both those that I had and those that I did not.  Two toys that I did not have were the “JAWS” game by Ideal and the ALIEN figure by Kenner though I remember seeing both for sale in the stores at the time that they were available for purchase and I think that I played the Jaws game a time or two at some point in my youth.

Toys taken from movies that no kid was ever supposed to go see.

You have to wonder about the mindset of toy marketing execs … here you have two toys designed from the core creatures of (at the time) rated R splatterfests that were terrorizing adults in theaters.  Think about it, toys for children taken from the core creatures featured in movies that children aren’t allowed to see … that’s a leap of faith there, folks.  I can imagine a parent giving a child one of these toys and when the child looks up with questioning eyes the parent merely says 

“Here’s a toy representing an unstoppable biological death machine that tears people limb from limb while repainting the entire area with the blood of its victims and decorating said space with the entrails from the dead bodies.  Have fun, kiddo!”

In the mid 1970’s, the movie “JAWS” was responsible for putting a real fear of open water and the beach in a lot of people.  ALIEN couldn’t really do that, since it took place in space and, despite what we’d been told as kids since the 1950’s, even by 1979 families just weren’t taking their vacations in space.  The beach, however, was a different matter.  I’d question the values of any parent that took a child to see either “JAWS” or “ALIEN” but I can’t since while I didn’t see “JAWS”, my father did take me to see “ALIEN” in 1979 and, suffice to say, it scared the weasel piss out of me (I was 9 at the time).  Today, ALIEN and ALIENS are two of my favorite movies but back then, to a kid who was all into Star Wars and for who aliens were cute or cuddly things, seeing ALIEN was a real mind-fuck.

As such, who were the marketing executives who looked at “JAWS” and “ALIEN” and said “You know, I bet we can make some toys for kids from those movies!”  I don’t know who those people were, but the toys were actually made and marketed with mixed results.

The “JAWS” game was sold by IDEAL (previously known for their Evel Knieval series of toys) and kids had to wonder about the background to this game.  It was pretty simple, along the lines of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” game theory, in that there was this big plastic shark that you loaded his hinged jaw with items (including a human skull and a femur bone) and you used a hook on a pole to “fish” the items out, one at a time.  I’m assuming that the items all weighed different amounts and that certain combinations would lead to shorter or longer games but that’s something for Rainman to figure out (“Definitely the skull.  The skull.  Definitely the skull.”).   

The short of it is that the “game” was over when someone removed an item that took enough weight off the rest of the items to cause the jaw of the shark to either slowly close on the fishing hook or to rapidly shut on the hook (scattering the other parts of the game and probably making a few lesser skilled children wet themselves).  Even though the game was harmless, for the most part (I’ve never met anyone who had to have therapy for playing it in their youth) the decision to market a toy based on an R-rated horror movie proved that the dollar will always win over common sense.

Fast forward a few years to the edge of the Star Wars marketing supernova, a retail marketing chain reaction set off by the blockbuster movie and George Lucas’ foresight to retain marketing rights for merchandise from the movie itself.  Kenner rode a treasure train to unheard of profit in the late 1970’s with their line of toys from the Star Wars movie.  In fact, Star Wars and Kenner’s success was such that a string of copy-cat movies and toys soon appeared.  If it dealt with space, aliens, spaceships and laser guns chances were better than good that someone in Hollywood was going to throw some money your way and that a toy company was going to want to do some toy based off of your movie.

And so it was with Ridley Scott’s blockbuster sci-fi horror masterpiece, “ALIEN” which came onto the scene a full two years after Lucas’ “Star Wars.”  Where Star Wars was a fairytale of good triumphing over evil, ALIEN was a much narrower and smaller story.  Star Wars was grandiose space opera at its finest, the best of the old Buster Crabbe / Flash Gordon / Erol Flynn movies in vibrant eye melting color and accompanied by a soundtrack the likes of which could be compared to the all time great composers.  ALIEN, on the other hand, was biological, xenomorphic death in dark tunnels, dimly lit rooms and a splatterfest in space.  It was a meat grinder in close quarters, a crew of a commercial ship (no military training, equipment or weapons) is forced by a company protocol to answer a mysterious distress signal and they inadvertently discover an alien life form, an incredibly strong, hostile and violent life form, bring it back onboard their ship and then proceed to die one by one in the most horrible fashion imaginable.

The cantina scene in Star Wars, ALIEN ain’t.

So, Kenner, in their infinite wisdom and riding high on the pride of their super well selling Star Wars toy line, looks at Ridley Scott’s new movie and thinks “I bet we can market a toy based on that new ALIEN movie and sell it to kids … why, let’s market the ALIEN creature itself!”  And do you know what?  They did!  In 1979, Kenner introduced “THE ALIEN” and because it was a rush to market, it was a somewhat poorly made toy that not only came apart under the duress of hard play but also didn’t hold up in storage over the many years that followed.  Expensive, quirky, ill-made and with a sales flow matching that of a constipated snail, the Kenner ALIEN figure was not only a surprise bitch slap in the face to toy maker giant Kenner, it was a good swift kick in their now oversized and proudly displayed dangling tenders as well.

 

Here is a link to the 1979 Kenner “ALIEN” toy commercial.  When it comes to being scared, I don’t think those kids were acting.  In fact, they were probably rushed from the commercial set and put straight into therapy where they spent the formative years of their teenage lives.

Another problem with the ALIEN figure / toy itself was its large size … think about it.  This toy was huge and at a foot and a half of evil, dark colored plastic ugliness you couldn’t use it with your three and three quarter inch Star Wars action figures because they would look like Fay Wray to King Kong.  Since Kenner didn’t market any of the rest of the crew of the ill-fated commercial towing vessel “Nostromo” in scale to accompany the ALIEN creature, about the only thing this toy was good for was bridging the imagination gap over to the then aging 12” line of Hasbro’s Adventure Team and scaring the ever living crap out of your full size G.I. Joe with Kung-Fu Grip™, especially since there was still a pretty good size difference in the ALIEN figure’s favor.  No wonder Eagle Eyed Joe was constantly looking left and right … you’d be eye sliding like crazy as well if you knew that the Kenner ALIEN figure was in the same room as you, especially with that glow in the dark brain under that clear chitin upper carapace and that inner set of jaws which slid in and out faster than a discount whore’s set of dentures.

Today, both the IDEAL “JAWS” game and the Kenner ALIEN toy figure are high priced relics of bad toy maker decision processes, mistakes in hindsight that didn’t seem like mistakes at the time and which have now found their rightful home in the possession of collectors and toy aficionados.  If you’re looking for one of these items, Ebay is probably your best bet but be prepared to pay through the nose for either of these long out of production toys, especially the Kenner ALIEN figure (when you can find it all in one piece or in pristine condition).

If anesthesia is its own religion then suffering must be its pilgrimage. 

My first root canal ... at 42 years old I consider it something of a rite of passage ... like my first gray hair several years ago.

Seven days of agony, held at arm's reach by a steady diet of pain killers and abject stoicism.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best ... "All undeserved suffering is redemptive."

I am a pious astronaut cast adrift.

 

Amid the eerie ambient sounds of the Stars of the Lid "Dust Breeding (1.316)+ playing on my Ipod I find myself marooned in a comfortable nebula, illuminated by a warm, far distant supernova so bright that even my closed eyelids can't dampen its searing brilliance.  My internal gyro is useless as I slowly spin on my central axis and do slow backwards flips in the dental chair.  I am suspended upon a mixture of gas and chemicals which deaden all pain and expand my consciousness, putting me straight into a mindset to fully understand the lyrics to Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."  

Just a little pin prick and there'll be no more "Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghh."

 

Zero signal.

Faithless.

I am lost.

Katrice

Twenty years ago tonight these exact words were said to me:

"You will always be blue-collar, Christopher Shields.  Always."

It was Friday night,  March 13, 1992, my senior year in college and these were the very last words ever spoken to me by Katrice, a graduate student that I almost married, as she stepped out of my '88 Corvette and walked away forever.  Like most of the things that Katrice had told me or promised me while we were dating this bit from her would also never come to pass.

The truth is that I had been stupid for ever dating her but then any stupidity that you can walk away from isn’t really stupidity, rather it’s a learning experience and Katrice was definitely a learning experience.

 

(click image above for story) 

Long hair, screamin' guitars and burning rubber

KIX - "Laying Rubber"

 

Kings of the Sun - "Road to Nowhere"

 

A pair of songs from a pair of underrated ‘80’s bands … Kix and Kings of the Sun. I've been listening to Kings of the Sun since I bought their first self-titled album at Camelot Music in the Metrocenter in Jackson, MS way back in the spring of '88. If anyone is local, they'll know that's a long time ago.

Both songs remind me of my well spent youth, particularly the years of 1984 to 1992 which were my teenage to early adult-hood proving grounds. Fast cars, fast women, shallow relationships, sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, abject hooliganism and a time when cruising was still an acknowledged and accepted rite of passage for red blooded American males. Today, American males have been neutered by the media and society at large … metrosexuals or baggy pants, backwards cap wearing retards group in flocks at the mall to collectively pose and try to figure out what to do with a member of the opposite sex while the only thump most cars have today is from a pair of subs in the trunk, not from any cubes under the hood.

As for the bands … if you like power metal, maybe proto-metal, then here’s two tickets to light you up. Enjoy and listen to it loud while you're frying the tires, winding the clocks and pinning the needles.

Knock knock knocking on Heaven's door ...

Hectic and non-stop. 

That about sums up life for the last three months ... oh, and there was that dance with Death called Cellulitis.

It started out in my right nostril and quickly spread across my face within a period of hours. I went to the ER twice in two days and on the second visit I was hospitalized and given so many bags of IV antibiotics that I lost count. My doctor friend who treated me told me that I might not have been at Death's door ... but I was in her neighborhood, on the block where she lived and I had her number on speed dial. He also said that when I stumbled into the ER with half my vision going, fever and slurred speech that I was one step away from a helicopter ride out of there. He also mentioned something about emergency surgery, a big needle up my nose and mentioned something about Cavernous Sinus Thrombosis. Needless to say after 12 years of working in the ER I knew just enough about all of that terminology to know that I was heading downhill fast in a serious way.

As it turned out, everything worked out fine but I was down and out for the better part of ten days straight from start to finish. That was a few weeks ago, I'm better now but for a while there it was definitely touch and go.

Personal Philosophy - Misanthropy

The trouble with being me is that I prefer to be alone; I am a jaded misanthrope and an irrepressible cynic. However, my wit, humor and charm usually lead me to spontaneously form small, close-knit groups of like-minded people who tend to really like me for who and what I am. It never fails and it’s rather frustrating sometimes, given my disdain for the human race and human nature as a whole. However this ongoing experience has taught me one thing and that is that the human race is surprisingly tolerable, in very small doses from time to time. In other words, it’s hard to be a misanthrope when you have a rather large fan club.

Musing

Mystery Toy from the early '70's

Update - 09/13/2019

Mystery solved after eight long years!

Thanks to some diligence, I found the name of the toy that I'd long to find out the details on: it is the Schaper U-Fly-It Aircraft Carrier Play Set which was different than the Airfix Flight Deck toy (see far below) in that the Schaper kit includes a massive model / flight deck of the USS Enterprise (then America's greatest / most powerful nuclear-powered aircraft carrier), circa 1974.

I was 5 years old when I saw this toy, I never saw it ever again and the memory of it has haunted my brain for 45 years now.  There were times that I honestly believed that I had somehow imagined this toy and that it only existed as some unfortunate high-speed memory collision of two or three dissimilar childhood memories but no!

Here it is!

It existed!

It actually existed!

Schaper was the company that brought kids such great toys as "Cooties" (snap together multi-color bugs), "Ants in your Pants!" (a game where you pressed down on plastic ant pieces and the "ants" snapped into the air to (occasionally) land in a bucket that looked like a set of overalls and the awesome STOMPER 4x4s!

More pics of this amazing long-forgotten toy.

Update 10/23/2020 - Found this video of this toy as appearing on the Johnny Carson show!

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Original post - 2011

I remember a toy from a long time ago ... I don't know who made it but it was available sometime in the early 1970's and if I had to narrow it down I'd say that I remember it from 1973 to 1974. As toys go it was an awesome toy and my next door neighbor had one (though I never did). I'll tell you what I know (or rather remember) about it ... (and this is from a memory drawn on almost 4 decades ago). The toy in question was an aircraft carrier, a huge one, made out of pressed foam or Styrofoam or some similar material. I remember it being a modern (at that time) aircraft carrier and somewhat detailed. It may have been the USS Enterprise since that nuclear powered carrier was a big media queen back then. It didn't hurt that the Vietnam War was still going strong so there was a big market for military toys.

The toy I remember was a giant aircraft carrier, maybe four to five feet in length and it had a single F4 Phantom jet which you controlled to fly off the carrier deck on a guide / control line and return to land on the deck via the same line. The end of the lines were secured either to the ground with stakes or maybe some kind of tower you set up. I've searched the Internet for years to find any information on this and I've not been able to. Maybe it was made by Ideal ... or Mattel but I can't find any info on toys by those companies that match and no, it wasn't the Mattel "Flying Aces" aircraft carrier either.

So, if you know what this toy was called, who made it, if you've got pics of it or you once had it then drop me a line and let me know. It's worth nothing more than a shared memory and maybe some email correspondence from someone else old enough to remember when toys were powered by imagination rather than disposable batteries.

Update - 4/15/2012 - a clue and a lead ...

Hi

On your blog entry (about the mystery toy) could it be the Airfix Flight Deck, http://www.stuffwelove.co.uk/flightdeck.htm that you are thinking of?  I wasn't old enough to see one myself but saw it on James May's Top Toys (UK tv programme).

from David

Thanks for the lead, David.  That could be the toy I was thinking about but I swear that it took off and landed on a three to five foot long styrofoam aircraft carrier ... maybe that was an American version of the toy ... at least I'm closer to finding an answer with a new direction to explore.

Rayline Tracer Guns

Like I said in my previous post, I'm going to use this blog to talk about things that matter (or mattered) to me. I've got several series of posts lined up in the old thought cache but one I've been meaning to kick off for a while now is a look back at the toys I remember the most from my misspent youth. I thought I'd post a new series ... Childhood Revisited or things that I remember from a long time ago that once made me smile. So much has changed since my childhood and not necessarily for the better. However, ignoring that, I'm going to look back on several instances of my childhood ... mostly toys that I had or wanted (but never got) and share my memories and thoughts on those items.

For those who might be wondering, I had a happy childhood. No, scratch that, I had one hell of an effing great childhood and here's a glimpse into it.

-Rayline Tracer Guns-

One of the best memories of my young childhood was playing a game that we simply called “guns.” The battlefield was the whole suburban neighborhood … every yard, half-built new house, vacant lot and wooded lot … and we’d play for hours at a time. Liberals and other peace nits are going to send me hate mail now. Yes, I grew up playing with toy guns, pretending to “kill” my friends and … surprise! I’ve never shot or killed anyone in real life, I’ve never robbed a liquor store with a toy gun and I don’t have the urge to wail and cry my heart out over a tree that’s just been cut down so I believe that I grew up (reasonably) normal.

Chiggers, grass stains, dirty clothes, sweat, the occasional broken toy, the occasional scraped knee or skinned elbow, a bruise or two and maybe a few salty tears were all childhood occupational hazards and just part of the price that we willingly paid to wage war on each other and have hours of fun and friendship.

Now, when it came time to play guns one of my favorite weapons of choice was the Tracer Gun series of toy gun from Rayline (Ray Plastics) of Winchendon Springs, MA. I’m not sure of the whole history of this toy weapon series but I do know that it was offered in both pistol and rifle form, in several colors (each) and that it was sold as both a Star Trek (the original television series) tie-in as well as a stand-alone product.

I never had any of the Star Trek licensed editions of the Tracer Guns (and these guns never appeared in the original television series). Except for maybe some basic coloration changes the Star Trek edition Tracer Guns seemed to be identical to the non-Star Trek licensed editions.

I personally remember having both a blue and a gold edition of the pistol (both black grips) and a white with blue grips edition of the rifle which I think I got as a birthday present in ’77 or ‘78.

This toy gun, in either pistol or rifle format, was simply … awesome … and whoever designed this particular toy gun series deserves a multitude of thanks from an entire generation of kids who were lucky enough to grow up playing with these wonderful toys.

The Tracer Gun was a simple though novel idea, load a toy gun with twenty flat aerodynamic plastic discs, squeeze the trigger and a spring loaded flicker arm (kind of like a clay pigeon thrower) would be pulled back to a certain point and then released with a violence all of its own. This flicker arm would be flung forward striking the first plastic aerodynamic disc off the top of the spring loaded 20 disc magazine. When the spring arm made contact with the aerodynamic disc, it would send it spinning down the flat tracks inside the round barrel. The aerodynamic disc was basically an air foil and would leave the barrel like a Frisbee, buzzing towards your intended target and floating through the air at a speed that was, generally, a little faster than any but the fastest kids could outrun or dodge. Fat kids went down without a hitch and you didn’t have to lead them as much as you did the quicker, more agile skinny kids.

With 20 or so discs per load, you could afford to be … liberal … in firing at your target but you had to be careful outside because attrition among discs was high if you didn’t stop to pick up the discs that you just fired and generally, as a rule, you often went home a few discs shy of what you brought with you but that was okay. I’m pretty sure that losing discs was part of the design of this toy gun because the company used to sell boxes of spare discs as well. Remember, kids; product attrition due to customer use is tantamount to corporate profit.

I remember the trigger was a little hard to pull but you never forgot the sound that this toy made when it fired … a solid plastic click, distinct and easily recognized by anyone who ever had one of these toys. The fling arm snapped forward with such force that you felt sure that if you could somehow get your finger into the chamber and pull the trigger that it would pinch you good.

The tracer gun wasn’t very accurate under rapid fire due to the short barrel (the slotted barrel was only an inch, maybe two inches long) and because the simple act of pulling the trigger often amounted to a very real case of “Buck Fever” resulting in a wide cone of fire. As for being harmful, you could hardly feel the discs if they actually did hit you but you definitely saw them coming … at least if you were being shot at from the front.

You could dual wield the pistol (I had two) but the excessive trigger pull worked hard to make the off-hand pistol even more inaccurate. Dual wielding a set of Tracer Gun pistols really saturated the air around your target with discs but trying to pick up forty colored discs after emptying both magazines took a real chunk out of the fun factor … especially when knew that you had fired forty jet discs, you counted up your discs and you could only find thirty-six. Like I said, it was a really good thing that the company sold extra packs of jet discs.

The rifle version, strangely called a “Jet Disc Tracer Scope” or something like that, had an advantage over the pistol version in that it had a larger magazine (though it still only held the same number of discs as the pistol, IIRC) and the size of the magazine lent the magazine itself to be used as a handy foregrip / handgrip for the rifle thus adding to the stability, the accuracy and the ability to fire faster. The trigger pull was just as harsh as the pistol version (and just as loud) but using the rifle’s magazine as a handgrip, you could really squeeze out some volleys with the rifle, literally filling the air with flying jet discs. The large see-through thread spool sized scope on top was there only for decoration and served very little, if any function thus the name of the toy rifle was somewhat misleading.

All in all, the Rayline Tracer Guns are toys that have many cherished memories from my childhood and I long for those carefree days of my youth when the summer lasted three full months and seemed just as endless as the imaginary suburban battlefield.

And to close on a bit of weirdness ... I found this picture one night on one of the artsy sites that I frequent. Look at the little boy in the foreground ... yep, he's walking the streets of New York City with a Rayline Jet Disc Tracer Scope rifle.