Guys and Dolls

At Primary School back at the end of the 1960’s the one thing in the classroom that fascinated and attracted me the most was its collection of dolls houses.

They were Victorian dolls houses, which is unsurprising because Northcote Road Primary School in Walton, Liverpool, was itself a Victorian institution; one of those rather dour-looking dark red brick buildings that at the time seemed to be making no concession to their aesthetic appeal but in retrospect appear to hold up pretty well aesthetically against many of the concrete, metal and glass edifices built since to accommodate later generations of schoolchildren. Many of the toys to be found there seemed to be survivors from that period. The main entrance hall in the school, for example, was home to what seemed to me a huge old slightly threadbare stuffed bear toy; and what made the bear interesting was that it had a wooden ring on a length of string, pulling and releasing which made the animal give a low growl. In the months or weeks before my starting at the school this bear was made one of its major selling points. Siblings and parents described the wonders of this growling bear, and long before I took my place at the school I had a vague idea in my mind of a place where teachers and pupils would all sit together in this room not doing very much, with occasionally someone remembering that the bear was there and pulling on the ring to make it growl. A day of making the bear growl and not much else, and then home.

Those dolls houses though were something else. Being Victorian, they aimed to represent the large and ornately furnished residences of the contemporary middle class, which meant they were quite lavishly equipped compared to the dingy little terraced house on the other side of Rice Lane where I lived in relative squalor. I envied those dolls, I loved their great houses and when playtime came I wanted to do nothing more than play with them and imagine that I was living the life I gave to them. But alas, this was fifty years ago and boys playing with dolls houses was a taboo, much as girls playing with the boys’ toys, and all I could do was gaze and sigh. I suspect also that I wasn’t the only boy who wanted to have a go at those dolls and their houses, and that there was a simmering if inchoate resentment at the imposition of these gender boundaries on both sides of the line.

But by the 1960’s there were socially sanctioned dolls with which boys were playing, although they were of course never ever referred to as such. I refer to the phenomenon that was Action Man. The foot-tall warrior started life as Hasbro’s G.I. Joe in the US before invading Britain in the mid-60’s under the Palitoy brand. There, as Action Man, he met his first rival, the short-lived (and hence eminently collectable) Tommy Gunn, manufactured by Pedigree Toys. I have never seen an actual Tommy Gunn figure in the flesh but by all accounts he was much better constructed than the Yankee newcomer. Whereas it was always a pain to get Action Man to even stand up straight unsupported, let alone hold any of his weapons in anything approaching a realistic position, Tommy Gunn would grip his machine gun firmly while standing, sitting or stooping. What with that and the fact that Tommy, as his name suggests, was all-British, wearing British uniforms and carrying British equipment as opposed to Action Man with his American kit, you’d have thought that simple patriotism might have enabled him to see off his inferior American cousin. But it was not to be, and by the end of the 1960’s Tommy Gunn was no more and Action Man’s victory was complete. Maybe the fact that Pedigree also produced the popular Sindy doll line (‘The doll you love to dress!’) might have made its products suspect on the grounds of potential gender-blur, but this is perhaps overthinking things, and it was probably just that the Hasbro/Palitoy empire had enough resources and clever enough marketing strategies to edge it over their rival.

The rivals : Tommy Gunn...

...and Action Man

Action Man saw a number of minor revisions during his long tenure as unchallenged chief of the UK action figures market. His problems with grip was addressed by the new ‘gripping hands’ made of softer but firmer plastic. That said, the gripping hands Action Man was the one I grew up with and to me it still seemed impossible to actually get him to stand up and aim his damn gun like a proper soldier. He always seemed to have to hold it loosely pointing to one side in a way that seemed to me a bit unconvincing, like the vaunted Action Man was really just hedging his bets and was going to run away once the shooting started. Later on came the ‘real’ hair as opposed to the painted head, so that Action Man’s scalp felt like a new tennis ball; then from the mid 1970’s the moving eyes controlled by a lever at the back of the head, for which I never saw much need – the psychopathic effect of the fixed stare and the ubiquitous scar on the cheek worked pretty well for me and the ‘eagle eyes’ just made him look shifty. But the basic shape and look stayed the same.

Those eyes. Shifty.

After Tommy Gunn left Action Man became British, but there soon developed a whole range of uniforms from various nations for him to wear. Action Man accessories became one of the many things I used to admire in catalogues in the sad knowledge that I would never possess them – while my best friend Carl accumulated figures and uniforms, the armoured personnel carrier and the Scorpion Tank, the horse guards uniform and horse with real horsehair tail, I found myself rather taken by the espionage set with the inflatable dinghy and the little bundle of dynamite sticks. I had dreamed up a cunning plan. Action Man toys operated a ‘star’ scheme where every figure or kit you bought had a number of stars on the box, and by cutting out and collecting them you could buy more kits; I planned to start buying the smallest kits possible and gradually accumulate enough stars to buy myself a figure to wear and use them. For reasons I can’t remember the plan was never put into effect.

That espionage set...sigh

There actually was another action figure manufacturer whose products in some ways had Action Man all beat. This was Louis Marx, whose toy company had been the biggest in the world in the days before G.I. Joe was even thought of. One Christmas in the 1970’s, the same Christmas Carl got his Action Man horse guards kit, I was given a Marx figure as a present. It was a knight in a full set of silver armour, and I mean full. Cuirass, couters, spaulders, Pauldrons, greaves, all the components of medieval plate armour (and yes, I just now looked those up on Wikipedia); he came with a set of helmets representing the standard headgear worn at various times in the middle ages, and his weaponry included sword, flail, mace, Morningstar, halberd and crossbow with separate fireable bolts. Not only that but his horse was armoured too. It might not have had Action Man’s fancy horsehair tail (its tail was moulded grey plastic I recall) but it had a kickass set of armour from nose to rump that complemented the rider beautifully, and I would have bet on him to obliterate Action Man horseguard any day of the week. It really was a thing of beauty. I later found out that there were identical figures in gold and in black armour, and I always thought that to have the three would have been absolutely awesome. Later on there were red and blue knights too, but they atruck me as being as needless as Action Man’s eagle eyes. The figures had names – I think the Silver Knight might have been Sir Cedric and the Gold one Sir Gordon, and at some point a couple of Vikings called Eric and something else Norse was, perhaps rather anachronistically, added to the range, but if we were aware of the names we never used them.

The silver and gold knights from Louis Marx

The joints on the Marx figures were simpler than those on Action Man – I think that elbow, hip and knee joints were just backwards and forwards whereas Action Man had the more elaborate ball joints that made him so hard to stand up properly. But they were quite gloriously appointed. As well as the knights there was a General Custer and a Cherokee Indian, the latter of which in particular sported that same generous and well-rendered range of implements, weapons and clothing that we saw in the knights.

Cherokee Indian and General Custer from Louis Marx

A new wrinkle came along in the 1970’s when Denys Fisher brought out the Cyborg, Muton and Android trio of figures. Slightly smaller than Action Man or the Marx figures – allegedly due to a sharp rise in the price of plastic resulting from the Oil Crisis – these figures caught the mood of a generation of British kids becoming more interested in science fiction, taking advantage of the runaway popularity of shows such as Space:1999. The emphasis was on interchangability – each figure had detachable forearms and feet that could be replaced with a range of weapons and vehicles, some of which came with the figures and some in separate add-ons. The artwork on the boxes, as well as the look of the figures themselves, was clearly modelled on that of the contemporary Japanese Micromen toys made in the same scale by Takara which shortly afterwards spawned the Transformers sub-range; and the origins story of the characters was obligingly summarised on the boxes in case the kids were tempted to think of their own stories when playing with the figures.

Cyborg and Muton in an oddly affectionate pose from a British catalog

It always struck me that the weakness of the action figures was that you could never really collect enough of them to make up an army. One Action Man is fine, but who is he fighting against? Similarly, General Custer is all very well, but without any cavalrymen he’s very definitely a case of too many chiefs and not enough Indians, as it were. With Cyborg and Muton this didn’t matter so much because they were each other’s arch enemy, as were, presumably, the knights of Louis Marx. But then like most kids we used to play mash up games where none of the characters were who their boxes claimed them to be. An oddly enduring game we used to play, myself, Carl and my older brother Mike, involved each of us having one of Cyborg, Muton and Cherokee Indian, and the idea was that one would have to be the last man standing having killed off the other two. Games were quick and chaotic and tended to start with, say, Cherokee Indian knocking on Muton’s front door after breakfast and despatching him with a tomahawk as soon as he opened the door. The rules were simple.

An obscure coda in my memories to this early age of action figures in the UK were the Matchbox Fighting Furies that were released about the same time as Cyborg and friends, and instead of being soldiers or space aliens they were picking up on that ever present enthusiasm for the theme of, er, pirates. I recall that they had two angles designed to make them interesting for kids. Firstly, they had a switch on their backs which when pressed made their right arm swing downwards holding its weapon, so you could have kind of realistic fights between them. And secondly there was a hidden macguffin somewhere on the person of each. I may actually be making the last bit up, but I do remember that Captain Pegleg at least had a treasure map hidden in his prosthetic leg.

Matchbox's Fighting Furies figures

Nowadays of course there is a vast choice of action figures from the very simple to the extremely sophisticated right up to the works of art they put on the shelves of Forbidden Planet – statues of Swamp Thing that will cost you hundreds and which you would never ever dream of using as a toy even if they were flexible enough and came with detachable weapons. Meanwhile, amidst all the hoohah of Transformers and the cartoon-spawned figure ranges of the 1980s, the ThunderCats and the Masters of the Universe and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Palitoy closed in 1984 and the original Action Man dynasty came to a quiet end. Hasbro reused the name subsequently in a different format and later still brought out anniversary editions of the old shifty bescarred psychopath. In fact in 2016, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of England winning the World Cup, a limited edition of 1,966 Action Man Bobby Moore figures were launched, and yes, before you ask, even Bobby Moore has that scar on his right cheek.