Tales From Storage: Action Man
Now, this one is cheating because I don’t flippin’ have any Action Men left in my collection; they all went to friends with children years and years and years ago… or so I thought until the day before this publishing when one mucky fellow was unearthed from the bowels of who knows where. He looks filthy and I do not want it near me, but I’m grateful to not have to gank images from eBay again.
The toyline was practically inescapable during the ’90s, so it’s always odd to me hearing from folks whose home country never got the things. Action Man is a series of 12-inch poseable dolls that I believe were an off-shoot of the old-school G.I. Joe dolls; I guess where the US favoured the 3¾-inch playset-driven angle of A Real American Hero, the UK and Europe instead leaned into the gimmick-laden roleplay angle of Action Man. Why have a different dude for each specialist duty, when just one man can do everything?
What drew me to them was the range of articulation and detail on them, and even how customisable they were. A good Action Man would have rotating and pivoting shoulders, a ball-jointed neck and wrists, and rubber hands that could hold form a tight grip on whatever utensil you plugged into them.
I say a “good” Action Man because a gimmick-infused one would often sacrifice all that lovely articulation for a gimmick that with a minuscule shelf life. Swimming Action Man could indeed do a front crawl in water if you twisted his arms to rev the pull-back motor, but when he’s not in the bath you’ve got a poor sod who can’t even stand upright. Finding ways to incorporate him into adventures was a pickle, and often relied on unfortunate jokes about this poor enthusiastic soldier who refused to remain in traction.
I say customisable because only on rare occasions were their clothes sculpted on — their tiny jackets and trousers typically had velcro fasteners, meaning these lads could be stripped bollock-naked to reveal their rock-hard plastic abs. Mixing and matching accessories was half the fun, and I imagine this was part of the appeal for kids; if you can only afford one, then you can at least swap clothes with a friend’s toy and pretend he’s on a different adventure this time.
I feel like there were probably accessory kits for such purposes, but my friends, my mum and I actually just cut out fabric to make new outfits for our Action Men. They were invariably giant sleeveless fur coats of some sort, because making clothes for dolls is not a craft one takes up lightly, but it was fun decking them out in new togs and personalising them somewhat. They deserve to look their best after a mission out in the garden hedge.
It says a lot that when my brother and I played with Snoopy dolls, we portrayed them as scouting soldiers behind enemy lines, and when we played with Action Men they were never spies or secret agents or anything remotely macho, but bumbling dimwits going on camper van trips. Look, we might have faux-protested when mum bought us the Barbie set with the baby blue jeep and picnic supplies, but that was absolutely the sort of nonsense we were using our toys for, and we were extremely grateful for it. They could drink brewskis now!
I know there’s a silly taboo about boys playing with Barbie dolls, and part of me wonders if it’s because there’s so little else they can interact with. You can’t incorporate Barbie into adventures with the Ninja Turtles without accounting for why she can’t fit in the Turtle Van.
I don’t know if the US had a boys toys equivalent at that scale, but Action Man filled a happy little niche where both were somewhat compatible with each other’s accessories (even if the A-Man had to take his boots off to fit in the Barbie-mobile’s footwell), and at least in our household, there was no shame in partaking in both.
Despite its roots in G.I. Joe, I recall the marketing for Action Man was more about all-purpose adventuring, closer to a secret agent than a rootin’ tootin’ military man. It probably owes more to the campy qualities of James Bond than anything, what with its penchant for extreme sports and his larger-than-life nemesis, Dr. X. Maybe later on they’d introduce a new ally or baddie, but the toyline really was comprised of 95% Action Men and a token Dr. X, because he needed someone to kick into a stack of barrels.
I say this, when I’m really only familiar with Action Man as a brand through its commercials. It wasn’t until years later that I learnt there were tie-in video games, comics and cartoons, but if you watched CBBC or CITV at the time the ads were unmissable. The fast-paced “Action Man, the greatest hero of them all!” jingle still burrows into my head on occasion, and is the perfect thing to say to yourself when you trip over your shoes.
These are what truly sell the camp factor of the franchise to me. Its dodgy intercutting between toy footage and live-action or CGI vignettes, selling the tone of a Moore-era Bond flick in merely 30 seconds, in the silliest ways you could hope for. One could argue it epitomises the appeal of ’80s-era G.I. Joe:
It’s the villains we’re truly interested in, with their ridiculous schemes and kooky attire, and the heroes are merely means of enacting justice through stupidly contrived traps and vehicles. Why is Dr. X chewing on bars of gold, and who decided firing a missile at a highway from a single-seater gyrocopter was the best way of stopping him? I cannot capture their charms in mere words, you just have to watch them for yourself.
What I can’t find, however, is a campaign I’m assuming was around the turn of the millennium, depicting Dr. X hanging from the edge of a girder and asking kids the question: should Action Man save Dr. X?
Now, I personally believe giving young boys authority over life and death is asking for trouble (poor Jason Todd will attest), and expecting the audience to express sympathy for a villain who is every unflattering stereotype wrapped into one cyborg package might be asking a lot. He’s the last man I’m aware of who could get away with the Fu Manchu moustache, before they redesigned him to look like Stone Cold Steve Austin.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that kids voted: No. Fuck him. Kill his ass. So the follow-up commercial showed Dr. X falling into an inferno and dying badly. It’s very likely he was brought back to life in short order, but those two commercials have stuck with me all these years later. Again, one could spin it into an extremely wanky essay on the sway of advertising on impressionable minds: show kids a toy and they will beg for it, grant them the power to take a life and they will seize it.
The toy biz is a fickle one, and it seems the franchise lives on only as a retro bit of nostalgia-bait in the UK, and as something they hope will take off in America if they keep putting him in crossover comic books. It seems to be my nature to get attached to the stupidest iteration of a series, and this brand of over-the-top cornball nonsense is exactly up my alley. If Hasbro could just keep making commercials in that vein forever and ever, I’d be happy.
