JCC Debo's Attic

Do / did you have any Micronauts Debo? They may be a bit before your time.

 

I was just pointing that out as a little trivia fact. Chill.

Yes, as a matter of fact, my brother and I did have some of those Mego Buck Rogers figures. A local dime store carried them, along with Kenner SW action figures, until they closed in the early '90s.

But to be honest, they sucked. The weapons were glued in place to the figure, and they were held together with crappier screws and rubber bands than the G.I. Joe figures were, so they had a bad tendency to fall apart.

Just saying.

EDIT: Here's a good place for some nostalgia, if you grew up in the late '70s/1980s.

 

I had an original Millenium Falcon. While I was away serving my country in the U.S. Navy it was in storage and was stolen.

 

They were before my time. Though I remember having magazines that featured ads for them. I don't remember Starcom at all, however.

 

I feel my nerdism is lacking at times like this when I relize I have never owned a Transformer nor a Go-Bot. I did own Micronauts though. One of them was called Repto(glow in the dark brain, buzzaw arm and blaster arm) but he was lost in the Appalacian Mountains. There was a re-release years ago though, and I have since replaced him.

 

Even though Micronauts was a little before my time, my grandparents got me for Christmas one year a knockoff version of Micronauts. It was of a guy with a Egyptian sarcophagus, which was freaking cool to my eight-year old eyes.

 

The nook of the attic. This is a separate space, really. A secret space. It's where I keep my drugs, bondage gear, Care Bears, and all sorts of stuff that doesn't fit in an ordinary box, like, for example, a human body. You can see the Ewok camp at the back--hello, old friend--and, at the front, Slave I. Some He-Man castles and vehicles too:



I'll get to those later on, if I manage to find a way to get to the nook without breaking my neck.



That, friends, dellow felagates, is all that is left of my four A-Team figures. A headless B.A. Baracus. A toy, you could say, with a "B.A." in decapitations. Wow, what a terrible joke. I wonder if I should stop right now.

Each figure was equipped with firearms and war gear. I find it remarkable that, for the TV series, they managed to find actors that looked perfectly like these toys. Great casting there, I'm sure that helped to sell them.



Being a boy, I loved the A-Team. They visited Holland in 1984--but only three of them. One, Hannibal, lucked out somehow and stayed home; he probably drew the longest straw or something. It gave me a strange feeling, I remember. It wasn't right. Twenty years earlier, the exact same thing had happened when The Beatles visited Holland, only three of them came over. I guess nobody really wants to see us. I bet that if the Apocalypse was upon us, only three Horsemen would appear here.

A big, bloodthirsty crowd came to welcome the A-Team at the airport. It seemed like a huge event, the second coming of Christ (there, two biblical references in one post). Murdock yelled like a brain-damaged jungle creature, Face smiled and waved, and B.A. spouted confused gibberish at the unsuspecting kids:



Let's move on to more interesting stuff. Let's see if my Star Wars figures are sufficiently discolored.



I used to keep them in this fishing tackle box. Not all of them, but the main ones. I kept the box close to me, at all times, up to the point where a spying neighbor said to my mother, "Your boy must really love fishing. He's always walking around with that box." No, sir, I don't like fishing--but Kenner does: fishing for my money. Now hear this. Those crazy Ugnaughts at Kenner have mail-away promotions now. Special offers. You send in 5 action figure card fronts, and in return they ship a special bonus figure to you--like these.



Admiral Ackbar, Boba Fett, and Nien Nunb. Because of their apparent exclusivity, they seemed very special, important figures. Of course, I didn't know it was just some local, kid-unfriendly businessman who handled the orders, as far as I was aware these figures came straight from the Land of Star Wars. I remember they arrived in a thin white box, an unmarked box. Wrapped in plastic. Man, the excitement when they were delivered--you nearly threw up. Wow, Nien Nunb! There he is. The accompanying flyer said, "NIEN NUNB (™), a new Rebel ally, is co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon (™). His special talents (™) make him an important part of the exciting battle (™)." Special talents? That goofy, hiccup-y laugh? Nien Nunb wasn't that important. Healthy, heterosexual kids had Han Solo and Chewbacca piloting the Millennium Falcon.

The real prize, of course, was Boba Fett.



At one time--younger fans might not know this--Boba Fett was considered very cool. Cool as ****. Cooler than Hulk ice cream (™), even? It hurts to admit it, but yes. This was before his decidedly unfashionable exit in Return of the Jedi obviously. That silly exit effectively destroyed Boba Fett's coolness with one merciless stroke. But once, like Don Johnson, Michael Jackson, Members Only jackets, and the word "cool" itself, Boba Fett was cool. And having this action figure made YOU cool by association. Among certain people.

Apart from Boba Fett, I had all the main characters: Luke, Han, Chewbacca, Rancor Keeper, Leia, C-3PO, R2-D2, Yoda, Darth Vader, whoever. My very first figure was Chewbacca, actually. I saw it at a local market. The figure looked like a monster, I loved monsters, so then and there the deal was done. I used to think he could fly. This was before I had seen the films. I had a friend who thought the Emperor was an old woman, we were a nice duo.



Having so much Star Wars crap meant you were bound to sometimes end up with figures you didn't really like. Aunts and neighbors, friends, hearing of your Star Wars obsession, would buy you a figure for your birthday, and it would always be some unwanted one. These figures wouldn't even be last on your wishlist--they wouldn't be on it at all. I'm thinking of the Cloud Car Pilot. The Bespin Security Guard. Or Dengar, terrible, terrible Dengar, who looked like an ugly person wrapped in toilet paper. But it was Star Wars, so it was fine, really. Even the lame figures were magical. As long as they weren't as unfathomably lame as General Madine, who as far as I was concerned deserved to be paraded around town with a burning car tire around his neck.



Occasionally, inevitably, you got a figure you already owned. One neighbor gave me Chief Chirpa for my birthday--and again a year later. Those were dangerous games to play with a Star Wars-crazed kid.



There they are, the duplicates. Attack of the clones. Two Storm Troopers, that was alright though. You couldn't have enough Storm Troopers. Two Biker Scouts, fine. Still it was always a bit of a downer whenever someone got you a figure you already owned--you felt that you actually could (and should) have gotten a different one. A new one. A better one. However, I didn't feel that way about my multiple Hans.



How many Hans does a kid need? This much. I had more Hans than Storm Troopers or Ewoks. As you can see, none of the Hans looked alike. Beatle Han on the left is completely different than the Russell Crowe/Rick Astley hybrid on the right. It was as if the Ugnaughts at Kenner all had different ideas about what Harrison Ford looked like. I don't think they ever agreed. These days they seem to use Beau Bridges as the model I see, which I suppose is worth a shot.



Next up… MORE JUNK.

 

COMIC BOOK THREAD CROSSOVER WARNING

I hope you don't think I'm derailing this thread too much, but Debo's Spider-Mobile actually reflects one of my favorite bits of Spider-Man lore: that he once had and drove a dune buggy. Yes, that's (awful word warning) canon (don't say I didn't warn you). I know most nerds know about it, but there are some very bad nerds around, so it's my duty to introduce them to the glory of...



Yes, Spidey: the goddamn Spider-Mobile. The story of this super-car is appropriately hilarious, if only because no one took it any seriously: not the readers, not the writers. It was there to get a toy out of it, period, and the least they could do is point and laugh at it. Goes to show how carefree his Silver-Bronze Age adventures could get to be among all of the soap opera and dead girlfriends.

This happened in 1974, in the pages The Amazing Spider-Man #130. Even though good old Spider-Man had always used his web-shooters to move around the city, a couple of ad execs probably on acid came up with the idea that Spider-Man, a vigilante that was reviled in the Daily Bugle with the same regularity as Fox News villainizes Barack Obama, would be the perfect choice to endorse their latest product: the ultra-hip Corona Engine, the first of its kind with zero carbon emissions. Even though the executives introduced themselves as Carter and Lombardo... they kind of looked like comic book luminaries Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas. Yes, friends: this **** is going to get very meta.

Anyway, Spidey initially refused due to his thinking that the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was a bad choice to advertise a car, but he later changed his mind and accepted, mainly because his landlord was threatening to evict him from his apartment if he didn’t pay his overdue rent, because that's the kind of things that happen to Spider-Man while Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are snorting cocaine off the breasts of Japanese super-models. Oh. When he asked Carter and Lombardo for the design plans to this car, he was told he had build the car himself from scratch. Now that's some good contract you signed in there, Spidey! Admiting that his scientific genius didn't include automobile design, Spidey decided to do the logical thing and ask his friend, notorious meathead Johnny Storm a.k.a. The Human Torch, for help. Because he, like, loves tinkering with cars and stuff. That makes sense. So the results were as expected:



A fiasco indeed! As you can see, the Spider-Mobile was lame in universe. It was a dune buggy on Spider-Man colors equipped with some oversized web-shooters, a Spider-Signal (yeah, the Spider-Signal is a thing, shut up) and ejection seats because Goldfinger. The license plate even said SPIDEY because this was the 1970s and vanity plates were almost as popular as bushy beards



Things became even more hilarious when we learned, when Spider-Man first drove the buggy, that Spidey didn't know how to drive: not only he had had webshooters since high school but who can afford a car in Manhattan? Soon half of New York’s police force was chasing him for violating traffic rules. So, after some hilarious Batman references (including the expected "I have no money for a Spider-Cave" joke), Spidey "accidentally" dumped the car into the Hudson River. And decided that was the best place for it. Goodbye.

Not too long after, The Tinkerer resurrected the Spider-Mobile and turned against his creator. Kind of like Frankenstein, but with a dune buggy trying to run over a guy in spandex. After this misadventure, Spider-Man turned the car back to Carter and Lombardo, who were demanding their probably extremely expensive engine back and threatening to sue. Told you Spider-Man wasn't good at this "reading contracts" thing.



Since then, poor Spider-Mobile has become a running joke (not that it wasn't one to begin with), appearing only in "weren't the 70s wacky, bros" kind of stories.




Well, and in Debo's attic.

 

Good Lord, I had no idea.

The kid in the Fonzie shirt says it looks like Barbie's dune buggy. No way.

 

My brother and his friend did that with a couple of our GI Joes just for fun. For some reason they took Muskrat's arms and put them on someone else who I can't remember, but he was all yellow or green or something. And they also took the head and an arm from a B.A.T. and put them on a broken Joe to create some sort of human-android monstrosity.

Amazing.

 

I loved Muskrat. He had the weird bicep thing going on, plus a cross between a skateboard, bodyboard and surfboard that looked as if it fulfilled the requirements of none of these. But he had a hat, so for my young self he was my Indiana JOnes proxy until I got an Indy-esque knockoff figure.

I remember once for Christmas, I got Law & Order (I still have that German Shepherd somewhere), and my brother got the medic. It's like... I got a delicious martini and he got water.

 

Hey, the mechanic, creatively named "Doc," was pretty awesome.

EDIT:Mechanic. God, I'm sick. I meant medic of course.

 

Law was an MP who came with a sub machine gun, a helmet which confirmed his police status, a PR-24 nightstick, a spiked collar leash and a German Shepherd Dog named Order.

Doc had a medical hit and a mask.

I think we know who won here.

 

The stuff my brother did to his G.I. Joes, oh boy.....

He would take a Sharpie to them, to make scars, or just write on them. If their limbs broke off, he'd put duct tape on them to simulate bandages. For the coup de grace, he'd take a cigarette lighter to their faces to simulate burn wounds. Yeah, he was crazy.

 

Where as you, with your "beat me with a whiffle bat and call me worthless", is sane?

 

I wish I'd kept some toys. My "Growing Up Skipper" would have been worth a ton by now.

Love the thread.

 

Due to unfortunate life situations I have absolutely nothing from my childhood. RIP Barbie's Dreamhouse and Sky Dancers

 

My favorite FrankenJoe was something like this:


Mercer's legs and arms (spinal chord damaged during an unfortunate ambush by my neighbor's Cobras)


Spirit's upper body and head (legs shattered after ejection from a stolen Cobra FANG)

Spirit's hair was glued to the head but detachable, and evidently disappeared a few weeks after first playing in the wilderness with it, leaving behind a bald head with an awful vertical hole. So I glued a kickass orange mohawk to it, made out of a butane tube. He was perfect.

I named him Spunk, because you know... Spirit + Punk. Plus I didn't know English back then, so I didn't know it was an awful name for a Joe. Although I hear there's a new Joe called Hashtag; I wonder if the filecard names among his many achievements having joined the Times' Influential Tweets list and not unfollowing Donald Trump. But I digress... Spunk was Spirit's wayward cousin, sent to America's elite anti-terrorist force to be straightened out, years before I knew about the alcoholic Native American stereotype. And what the hell, he looked like one of The Warriors. Instant favorite, named after semen or not!

 

Not ashamed to say Mercer was my stand in for Stringfellow Hawke if I wanted to play Airwolf. There. I said it.

 

Ah, Debo. Be still my beating heart.

-JR

 

BUT HE LOOKED SO DIFFERENT IN THE MOVIE

you've slightly destroyed my childhood.

 

Ha! The resemblance is uncanny!

 

Compared to the "actual" ones: http://www.toymania.com/334archives/airwolf/hawke.htm

Mercer's a thousand times better

 

Who else is sad that Kenner's planned Alien toyline never got made? It would've been an awesome companion to the vintage Kenner Star Wars toy line, but I can kinda see why it never got made, being based on an R-rated movie and all.