Points of Articulation: My Life With Toys
Part 1: The Primal Age
These young toy collectors today don’t know how much money they’re saving on gas. At the height of my toy hunting days, in Southern California, my friends and I would drive to three Targets, two Walmarts, and a Kmart in a scant three to four hours, looking for the latest action figures. (The Kmart in Brea was open 24 hours, so that helped our tight “after work/before closing time” window.) I was looking for Justice League Unlimited and the new Masters of the Universe figures, and my buddy was more interested in Star Wars stuff. If either of us found something we hadn’t seen on the pegs before, it was a good night.
Time was of the essence. Action figures were released in finite numbers, distributed to stores in certain ratios, and in waves. If my neighborhood Target only received five JLU Blue Devil figures, and I was the sixth guy there to buy one, I was out of luck — unless I raced to another nearby Target. Sometimes, we knew when new shipments arrived, and we’d find ourselves in a stand-off with our dorky doppelgangers from the other side of town, in a mad race to see who might snatch Mekaneck first.
Of course, the elephant in the toy aisle is that those toys were made for children. Kids were the collector’s biggest competition. I can vividly remember a time or two when I took the last of a certain figure and watched a hopeful kid’s face fall. By then, I had trained myself: feel nothing. It’s all about the hunt. What was that kid going to do, PLAY with those toys?! How dare he deny my shelf a complete set of Skeletor’s perfectly posed henchmen!
Nowadays, that’s not a problem. Funko, Matty Collector, Super 7, and other specialty toy producers now cater to the “adult collector,” avoiding any confusion about what is and isn’t for the kids. And everything is available everywhere, all the time. Why race to five Walmarts on a single Saturday afternoon when unopened boxes of entire action figure waves can be purchased from Amazon? We cried when Toys “R” Us closed, wiping our eyes with one hand while sniping eBay auctions with the other.
In time, my drive to find figures as soon as they were released waned. Eventually, I sought figures on the second hand market, at thrift stores and toy shows, which has a different but still satisfying sense of fulfillment. I think the sense of exclusivity and the pressure of collectors’ competition during “the hunt” began to overwhelm the joy these toys are meant to bring.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a golden age for toy collecting. I’ve been talking about availability, but what about today’s sheer variety? If a character had two seconds of screen time in The Last Jedi, you know he has his own action figure. I can type “Welcome Back, Kotter Funko Pops” and you’d believe it. Not only is everything available everywhere, but it’s only a matter of time before everything is available, period.
And here’s where our story really begins. A few weeks ago, I saw an article online for Funko’s “DC Primal Age” action figures. I don’t care how else they try to market them: these figures are DC He-Man guys, plain and simple. They’re basically DC superheroes with a cavemen aesthetic, but they blend right in with the classic Mattel muscle man sculpt. My inner child never knew he wanted a He-Man compatible Justice League!
Normally, I wouldn’t fall for such nostalgia porn, but the concept sparked my imagination. What if young Prince Adam had a friend named Bruce, whose royal parents were suddenly murdered? What if Bruce disappeared to train with Eternia’s best warriors, scientists, and mystics, to return a few years later as a Bat-man against the kingdom’s worst crime? How would He-Man react to a vigilante that doesn’t share his friends’ idealist concepts of hope and heroism? What a high potential for new action figure fights!
So, I told myself, I’ll just get the DC Primal Age Batman. The other characters looked a little ridiculous, but I had a rational fan-fiction to justify Batman’s existence among my other Eternian action figures. I would’ve ordered it online, but I heard the figures were appearing on Target shelves, and I prefer to see the paint application before I buy the figure, if I can help it. I went to my local Target and found only “the creatures” — the Ace the Bathound and Joker Beast vehicles reminiscent of He-Man’s own Battle Cat. Seeing them confirmed that the Primal Age line was out, but my local Target either hadn’t fully stocked its shelves yet, were already sold out of the figures, or received a partial inventory because of the line’s niche appeal. As I resolved to run to another nearby Target, I realized: this was like the old days. I was on the hunt.
The feelings from all those years of toy hunting came rushing back to me. I had caught “the scent,” so I knew the toys I wanted were out. Now, I couldn’t rest until I had that Batman figure. I did indeed race to another Target, and found nothing. I even scoured the price tags on the empty pegs, to see if any of them were labeled for the line. The old instincts were kicking in.
I found Primal Age Batman at Target #3. That Target had four Primal Age figures, all Batman, so I was able to pick the best one of the quartet. As I triumphantly held the figure in my hands, I wonder now if the look in my eyes then matched a lion’s steely gaze at a zebra, when he’s hunting in those grassy African plains. Ripping open the package, and hearing the pops when I moved those points of articulation for the first time — is that how the predator feels when it sinks its teeth into its prey?
I thought I was out. Funko dragged me back in. If they can get me with a He-Man-shaped Batman, what’s next? Raph-eteer, the teenage mutant jet pack-wearing turtle? How about Lethal Weapon action figures in the same scale as Galoob’s classic A-Team toys, so I can play Riggs and Murtaugh on the trail of Los Angeles’ most notorious fugitives? If I just thought of it, it’s already on a production line, people!
