Playing with all the toys…

I'm sure I could ask a hundred different children of the 80s and hear a hundred different ways they played with their toys growing up. My brother and I grew up with Star Wars, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers and Secret Wars all as important lines in our development. But though we owned tons of action figures (with G.I. Joe being the clear leader in numbers) rarely did they get used to tell stories of the characters from those properties.

Instead we created superheroes. 

This made for interesting days as quite often it was Cobra members that converted into our heroes. With a lot more face masks and non-military designs, they just worked so well for heroes. Of course, my brother and I made ourselves the stars of the show. I'm pretty sure I went through numerous names for my stand in character, my vampire girlfriend and the rival superteam that clashed so regularly with my brother's own.  We regularly shared the character of Czar, a godlike hero with the body of Quick Kick, the cape of Serpentor and the hammer of the Dreadnok Zanzibar. Any resemblance to Thor was of course, completely coincidental. Regular duels between our winged heroes (made by stealing the back-wings of two Raptor figures) and villain (a Captain Power Soaron) figure were featured, up until the time we decided to make the evil robot bird-man a member of a super-team. 

Yet it was that kind of play that took me out of the mindset of loving the superhero narrative without using the heroes of Marvel or DC. It would expand a hundred times over, when superhero RPGs would enter our lives... and the earliest incarnations of Lightweight would take shape...

But more on that in a future installment of this blog, but below you can check out my progression of superheroic Mary Sue heroes, because if you're ten and creating a super-team, of course you're the main character. Here's a look at my ever-changing looks and powers over my years as a kid as best as I can remember them.

All G.I. Joe images owned by Hasbro.

I started my days as a hero with the figure Law, because he's the guy that looked most like me. Early on I was a pretty typical brick -- super-tough and strong and I could leap like the Hulk. From there I became Blizzard, which I'm pretty sure was also my alter ego. I only kept the figure and his helmet, even as I gained cool ice powers. I was on a big Captain America kick by the time I got the Alley Viper toy. No idea what my alter ego became at this point at all. I do remember I kept everything but the gun and the visor from the figure. I was basically a street level variant of Cap, albeit with some super-strength and ninja agility. My ninjadom continued as I switched to Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow here, although I believe they also came with the return of my cold-based powers. Interrogator was a rather obscure figure that came with a "real working" helicopter that I got on clearance solely for the figure. He's got a pretty badass look to him and I wanted that for my hero. From then on, that was my look although beyond flight and lots of martial arts, I cannot tell you what any of my other powers would be.

Of course, as I changed identities I would re-use all the old "costumes" as new characters. Finding 3 and 3/4 female figures also became a quest for me. A Voltron Princess Allura became the main female hero on my roster, while my ninja focused brother took Jinx. On top of pretty much every female Joe character available, we added figures from Bionic Six, Masters of the Universe and MASK to make sure the gender quotient was at least closer to 50/50. I distinctly remember using an old Boussh Princess Leia to the point her paint applications were almost all gone, because she was one of the most super-heroic female toys I could find.  

(I'm curious now what our play style would have said to toymakers at the time, most of which considered female figures to be necessary tokens that often wouldn't sell. This belief became super-prevalent in the 90s when Joe dropped all female toys and Marvel / Toy Biz went for half a decade between a really awful Storm figure and a slightly better Rogue figure. Meanwhile, my brother and I scrounged toy-bins for more ladies to join the cause. 

Let me know how you played with your action figures in the comments below. I'd love to hear about others' experiences with taking characters out of their original molds.