Michael Curtis rounds up some posts from around the blogosphere on some of the cool plastic toys that were made to cash in on the sci-fi/fantasy explosion of the 70s/80s. I remember the Star Wars knock-offs, and a couple of my friends had the Dragonriders of Styx playset — somehow I managed to beg, borrow, or steal one of their ogres, and he’s still in my collection, painted and based.
I’d love to find more figures from these sets some time. The orcs were pig-faced, the gargoyles/demons were kind of neat, and the ‘vikings’ would make wonderful frost giants.
There used to be great coverage of this kind of thing on the now defunct blog “Geek Orthodox.” But that one’s been mostly deleted, lost like tears in the rain… the Archive.org “Wayback Machine” is not as good at recovering blogs as it is at plain web pages, and anyway the photos were mostly hotlinked to a deleted Flickr account. Bummer.
On a somewhat related note I just read a a neat little book called Mail order mysteries (ISBN 9781608870264), which is a catalog of the junk, trinkets, and treasures offered in the old ‘full page ads’ of comic books. It explains how some of the companies that ran the ads got into the business, and the bulk of the book juxtaposes the ads with the actual items you’d get if you replied to them. The items are mostly from one ,man’s collection, and he has taken his love of these curiosities to the next level, creating his own ‘mail order mystery’ style business, selling classic pranks, gags, and magic tricks at The House of the Unusual.
There’s a store in Cleveland that caters to both tastes — retro toys and gag items — called “Big Fun,” and although I only seem to get up that way once a year, I recommend it highly. I go to the one in Cleveland Heights, which is in the “Coventry” district with an excellent book store and good restaurants.
