I set up at my buddies’ local toy and comics show yesterday. It was the first time I brought any Megos out for sale, to go with the Hallmark ornaments I’ve been selling for a friend.
Sales were light as the traffic was pretty limited due to the inclement weather. But I think this model might be workable. I had a couple of people stop by the table, and instantly smiled and fell into reminiscence about their Mego figures. One even told me that he had a few that were broken. I told them I could fix them and we exchanged numbers. Another dealer asked me, after he saw what I had out, if old, broken Megos had any value. I said, “They do to me.” He even had them with him but not on display. He got them out and we worked out a deal.
Now, this might look like a pile of junk to most people, but to me, it’s a gold mine. I mean, yes, some of it is junk. But the Captain America, Aquaman, and Conan were decent, despite Conan missing part of his leg. And let me tell you, whoever owned these toys as a kid must have been as mean as Sid Harris in Toy Story, because they weren’t broken at the knee joints like most Megos break, but they were broken below the knees, where it’s nothing but solid plastic. That takes some serious torque. But after a bit, I was able to harvest fresh vintage knee pins from each one. So, another great reason to do little shows in the area!
Another dealer was working on his own collection and had his Dukes of Hazzard Megos with him. They were in need of repair and I told him I could help him out. I said that next time, I would just bring my spares and tool boxes with me and repair stuff right at the show! I think that would be cool to do. If it becomes known that I do on-the-spot repairs at shows, people will bring business to me!
But the best bit of the day came when my good friend Bruce Nelson just suddenly appeared in front of me. Bruce is a special kind of friend. He drove all the way from Indianapolis just to see me at the show!
I met Bruce at the first C2E2 convention I did with Solution Squad, and he encouraged me to apply for the Lilly Endowment Teacher Creativity Fellowship, which I did, and received! We’ve been friends ever since.
You know, sometimes when I write about the past, people tell me that I make it sound like they are there. I take that as about the highest compliment a writer can be paid. But to me, there’s more to it than that. When I write about the past, it’s sometimes like I want to be there.
I have a vivid memory. It’s colorful. It’s full of sights and sounds and smells. And more recently, I have discovered the tactile sense of memory to be important as well. Working with and on the action figures of my youth has brought about a whole new perspective about my reminiscences. For example, when replacing a boot on a Mego Superman figure, I remember that sometimes it’s easier to get the boot completely back on the figure’s foot than others. You have to extend the foot by bending the ankle to point the toes to insert the foot. Then when the toes reach the sole of the boot, ideally, the foot bends back to flat again, the heel slides in, and the rest of the boot slides on easily over the calf. But sometimes it’s difficult. Sometimes the toes of the figure want to dig straight in the sole of the boot at a right angle and they don’t want to make that final slide. I have spent half an hour trying to get a boot on a Mego toy before, working the insertion at different angles, trying to get it to slide in just right. There’s a satisfying give when it finally happens that’s almost like flipping a switch in my brain that releases endorphins.
I think that’s a part of toy collecting that is overlooked by the people who don’t understand the hobby. When I watched the joyous faces of very serious 40-year-olds as they transformed their Optimus Primes from robot to truck and back again out of sheer rote and physical memory, that’s when I understood it. It isn’t just photos, videos, foods, and songs that take us back. It’s touch as well, and it isn’t just old people. It’s holding something in our hands that we held when we were the happiest in our lives; before we had responsibilities and our imaginations were curtailed by rules, discipline, and structure. And in my case, abuse. If you have read any of this blog at all, you know that I focus on those scant weeks of happiness in the midst of years of horror. It’s almost like there was no way I got enough of that joy during those five years of abuse, and I’m going back to get more, no matter what anyone thinks.
It’s more than that. Not only am I surrounding myself with many of the toys I never had (and was not allowed to play with even if I did have them), but I’m fixing broken toys so that more people can experience the same joy I do. It’s a similar feeling to when I was teaching. I tried, successfully at times, to be the teacher I needed when I was that age. Now that I don’t have that, I’m finding it another way.
Nothing is too mundane for me to write about in this blog. And today, I’d like to write about ketchup. Now, you might think that it’s a topic that is relatively meaningless in the world, and you might be right. But in my long and storied life, even ketchup has played its part in the drama.
When my mom was young, she was not what anyone would consider a great cook, by any stretch of the imagination. That’s not to say that it was always the case. Over the seven years she was married to my dad, my Grandma McClain took her under her wing and brought her right along, and Grandma McClain was a farmhouse cook. She could put on a spread. But in the early days of my life, my mom didn’t cook a whole lot. What she could cook, though, was fried potatoes. She would get them sliced really thin, and fry them in a pan with butter and onions, and it was just about one of my favorite things to eat as a kid…with ketchup, of course, as she taught me. Naturally, I ate ketchup on other things, like hot dogs and hamburgers and such, but my primary use of the condiment was on Mom’s fried potatoes. There just wasn’t much better than that.
If we fast-forward a couple of years, though, it gets ugly. Everything does. By then, Mom was with Steve, the father of her newest child, and my dad was in the rear-view mirror, married to Steve’s ex-wife. One of the things Mom did best to make me happy was to make her fried potatoes. We had a pattern in our meals during those years. On Saturday, Mom made pancakes on the electric griddle, and on Sunday before church, she made eggs and fried potatoes. And the very first time Mom made the fried potatoes, I was so excited that I just reached for the bottle of ketchup that was already on the table. I never saw the backhand coming that caught me under the eye. I should have sensed it, but I was temporarily distracted by the prospect of fried potatoes. When my vision cleared, I tearfully asked what I had done wrong. “You didn’t even try the food your mother worked so hard to prepare before you were going to smother it in ketchup,” he nearly hissed. I looked desperately at my mother, whose potatoes were already covered, and she gave me a look that said, just take it. He had taken everything else away from me, and he took that too.
A few years later, Steve took a job in another county, staying with my Grandma B in her spare attic room, while we stayed in Hastings, left to our own devices, and I have to say that it was one of the happier times of my life with him. Mom let us watch TV while we ate, which was unheard of when Steve was around, and more nights than not, she made us fried potatoes for dinner, and I was allowed to put as much ketchup on them as I wanted. As I have said before, my mom did her best to keep us from being completely destroyed at Steve’s hands, and that memory remains strong in my mind as an example of that.
Years again later, when I went to live with my dad, the chains were definitely off. I was often left to myself for most of the day and many nights, and I was expected to feed myself. It was at that point that ketchup became its own food group in my diet. My diet consisted of TV dinners (yay, Salisbury Steak!), pot pies, and hot dogs or macaroni and cheese. Side dishes often included corn chips and cottage cheese. Everything was easy for me to prepare, but the lack of variety produced a need to experiment. It was at this time that I started putting ketchup on macaroni and cheese. As I have writtenbefore, we didn’t get the good Kraft dinners; we bought the cheaper store brand. It needed something. And what do you know, it wasn’t bad! Then I remembered hearing that Richard Nixon liked to put ketchup on cottage cheese, so I tried that. It was great! I couldn’t really stand cottage cheese otherwise, so I started eating it that way all the time.
We just had macaroni and cheese for dinner, and even though it was the fancy Kraft dinner kind, I still had to put ketchup on mine, for old time’s sake. Think I might fry up some potatoes tomorrow!
I finally got it. After three and a half years, I caught COVID-19. Not sure where or when, but the test was positive and of that there could be no doubt. So, five days of isolation were ordered, and I could think of no better time to jump into Ted Lasso.
Several of my friends recommended this show; so many, in fact, that I found it difficult to believe the hype. But right from the get-go, this was my kind of show. An quick barrage of dad jokes and pop culture references made me feel right at home, but I was not prepared for the uplifting message behind it all. If you haven’t seen the show, Ted Lasso is an American division 2 football coach who is recruited to coach soccer in London. No, he has no experience with soccer. He doesn’t even know the rules. Why has he been hired? Well, the owner’s motive is right out of Major League. She wants the team to fail. It seems A.F.C. Richmond was her philandering ex-husband’s pride and joy, she got the team in the divorce, and her plan is to run it into the ground. That’s where the similarities end, though. There is no cynicism in this show. It’s simply not done. Every character has motives that are consistent with who they are. They react out of love, jealousy, anger, fear, and pain, and Ted Lasso is usually there to explore their motives and to persuade them to be the best version of themselves. He just brings it out in people.
I watched all three seasons over the course of a few days, and I have to tell you that after being immersed in this world, I’m going to make a few changes in myself. First, I’m going to try to be more curious and less judgmental. Second, I’m going to try to make the folks around me know how much I care about them and appreciate them. And third, I’m going to start saying, “Oi!” a lot more.
I have always loved both characters, Batman and Superman. When I was first able to walk and talk, the Batman TV show inspired me in myriad ways, starting in January 1966. Later in the same year, in the fall, the New Adventures of Superman cartoon was on CBS on Saturday mornings, and I loved that, too, especially the eight-minute Superboy sequences parked between two eight-minute Superman shorts. There have been times in my life where I have swung like a pendulum from one side to the other. As a small child, I couldn’t help but be swayed by Batmania. It was in full effect, like it was made for me. I had Batman slippers, Batman pajamas, Batman dinnerware. If Batman action figures (besides the Captain Action outift) had existed then, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without one. As it was, I had a plastic cake decoration that served the same purpose.
1966 Batman cake topper by Wilton
But as I got older and Batmania started to fade from the national consciousness, I started to learn that Superman had an older and deeper public presence. He’d had a radio show from 1940-1949, a series of animated movie shorts from 1941-1943, and a television show from 1952-1958. When the 1966 cartoon show came on, I didn’t have the first clue that it used three of the voice actors from the radio show (as did the animated shorts in the 40s) because I didn’t know there had been one!
As far as I knew, the New Adventures of Superman were the first adventures of Superman. When I found out that Superman had had a radio program, I was eating breakfast in 1976, reading the back of a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes:
By that time, I had been introduced to War of the Worlds and the Lone Ranger, but I had no inkling that there had been a radio show featuring Superman. I thought for about a second about asking for it, but I might as well have asked for the moon because I was still living with my stepfather, who had burned all of my comic books and forbade any such stuff in his house. Oh yes, I have them now, all four volumes. Of course I do. But I don’t really need them, because we live in a time of wonders. Back in the early 1990s, a company called Radio Spirits really got into cleaning up and preserving old radio broadcasts, including Superman. At first they released them on cassette, then compact disc, and among their popular releases was Superman. I was an early adopter, buying both cassettes for the car and my vintage-appearing radio/cassette player, and later, CDs, and then finally switching to USB drives, I can listen to Superman for pennies per episode. And I do. I listen to it every day on my way to and from work. I guess you could say that I’m swinging back toward the Superman side of my fandom right now. I’ve even gone to the point where I have a reproduction box of Kellogg’s Pep, which was the sponsor for the show, as well as one of the comic buttons that they advertised twice an episode.
Superman had his own sort of Batmania in the late 1970s with the December 1978 release of Superman The Movie. Double-album movie scores, trading cards, t-shirts everywhere, oversized comics celebrating the character’s past and present, movie tie-in novels, quiz books, there was no shortage of Superman.
One of my favorite products of that line of Supermania was (and is) the novel, Superman: Last Son of Krypton, by Elliot S. Maggin. Elliot was one of the prominent Superman writers of the period, and I thought he wrote a wonderful novel. Despite the fact that there were photos from Superman The Movie included in the book, the novel did not share its ice-planet vision of Krypton. It pulled strictly from the mythos of the comics, and their wonderful and sometimes absurd situations, even sometimes adding to them by suggesting that Jor-El sent a telepathic probe to seek out Earth’s greatest mind in order to have someone fitting receive baby Kal-El’s rocket as it arrived. Instead, the anonymous scientific genius, whose not-so-subtle nom-de-voyage was Calvin Eisner, arranged for the elderly Kents to be the first to find the rocket under the illusion that they were at a certain location to buy a used tractor at a good price. “Eisner” had wisely chosen not to raise the child himself, but instead chose the salt-of-the-earth Kents after meeting with Smallville’s Chief Parker and getting the lay of the land, if you will.
Maggin additionally added layers to Lex Luthor, who actually merits some sympathy due to his upbringing in this story, as well as its 1981 sequel, Miracle Monday. Both books really dig into what it was like for Clark Kent to grow up, perhaps implausibly, in the same hometown as the boy genius who would grow up to be his archenemy. A lot of time is spent in both books, especially the second, exploring what it would be like to grow up with superpowers, and even just to have superpowers. That kind of expanded storytelling appealed to me in a more adult way than comics ever could, and did what so few kinds of entertainment of the day did: It made me think. As a kid living in the country without the virtues of streaming entertainment or even cable television, I had pleny of time to think during the day, letting my mind wander into the clouds where Superman could dwell. The memory of the day I met Elliot and shook his hand, telling him what his stories meant to me, will remain with me forever.
Elliot Maggin and me. Of course I was wearing a BATMAN shirt when I met him!
The Superman movie that Elliot’s book supposedly tied into was quite different. It was a very interesting period piece, honestly. The Metropolis of 1978 was supposed to reflect the Manhattan of the time. Now, I visited Manhattan in 2004, and I thought Times Square was incredible. Shops everywhere, a three-story Toys R Us, so much fun! It was a far cry from the downtown of 1978. “Funky” would be the nice word to use. It’s been the setting of many movies that feature the filth and the grit of the area, like Midnight Cowboy, for example. And Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane seems to fit right in with her harsh and cynical no-nonsense attitude.
Right about that time, a book called Superman: Serial to Cereal was published, and went into some detail about the screen history of Superman, including the Fleischer cartoons, the movie serials starring Kirk Alyn, and the Adventures of Superman TV show, starring George Reeves. The Adventures of Superman came back to TV in my area thanks to syndication, and I rushed home to watch it every day after school. I even checked off the episodes that I saw in the checklist in the back of the book.
This was a connection that my dad had with me. This show had started when he was nine years old, and he had watched it faithfully. This, more than even comic books, is where his impression of Superman came from. I find it funny now that he thought Christopher Reeve was too scrawny to be Superman, compared to the obviously padded suit that George Reeves wore.
Yes, I still have the original book!
It was in this same book that I learned of the existence of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons, but it would be a few years before I ever saw one. I saw the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons at my very first comic book convention in 1984. Someone was playing a VHS tape on a tiny portable TV. Since then, I’ve bought them on VHS, DVD, and now on Blu-Ray. As I said above, the connections to the radio show were strong, as they used the voice actors for the radio program when making the cartoons. The Fleischer design of Superman is generally the visual image I use when participating in “the theater of the mind” of the radio show. The Superman of the animated shorts and the radio show is sometimes quite different from that of the comics.
There have been various homages to those incredible pieces of animation history. Some of them are direct, and some of them are more subtle. Such is the modern world where everything is available at our fingertips. I was once one of the very few who appreciated the cartoons. Now, they’re ubiquitous. It’s a great time to be a fan!
Emerging from obscurity: The 1940s Superman cartoons’ influence today
When seventh grade was finally over and summer vacation began, I couldn’t wait to play baseball. The year before, I had played Little League in Tustin with my dad as an assistant coach, and there was no question that I was one of the stars on the team. But in Mesick, that pecking order had already been established, and I was more like in interloper coming in to disrupt things. Still, I had made friends over the course of the year thanks to my size and being recruited to play basketball, and I was one of the guys now. So, naturally, I wanted to play baseball, which was a sport I was actually good at and had experience playing.
To say that we were dominant as a baseball team would be an understatement. We crushed everyone in our path. These guys had been playing together practically since birth, and their roles were were established. Everyone knew who the pitchers were, who the catcher was, and who played each position. I, who had been used to playing first base, was cast aside in favor of two left-handed players. I was relegated instead to right field. Not because I had a good arm for that long throw to third, but because fewer balls were hit there than the other two fields. I had fielded fly balls for years on the playground, but playing organized outfield was different. I did have a good arm, far better than average, and I loved to unload from the outfield. I was pretty accurate, too. I was happy as long as I was playing.
Can you picture the movie, The Sandlot? Just kids playing in blue jeans and t-shirts? That’s who we were. Kastl Well Drilling was our sponsor, and it was written in black on the front of our orange t-shirts with our numbers on the backs. The head coach our team was Jerry McNitt, the local gas man who also had a trout farm. His son, Eric, was our best pitcher and one of the lefty first basemen I mentioned. Floyd Carpenter was his assistant. Floyd was married to Vonceille, who was the lady in town who cut everyone’s hair. No, I mean it. She was the only stylist in town as far as we boys went. Unless you wanted to drive 20-25 miles to Cadillac or Traverse City, Vonceille was the only game in town. She was also Monty Geiger’s mom, and he was one of my classmates and teammates. They lived right across from the ballfield, so it was convenient!
As the summer went on, I looked forward to Little League every day. There was nothing I loved more than playing baseball, even from a young age. It was one of the few things that I did that my abusive stepfather actually approved of. I still remember the thrill of getting my first baseball glove (from a garage sale) and playing catch with myself by bouncing a hard rubber ball off of the propane tank in our back yard. The cylindrical nature of the tank provided for fly balls, ground balls, and line drives, depending on the angle at which the ball hit the tank. Eventually, I received one of the best gifts ever, a Pitch-Back.
With the Pitch-Back, I could use an actual baseball, another wonderful Christmas gift. I was always amused that my Christmas gifts were usually things that I couldn’t use for months while we waited for good weather, but my dreams were filled with visions of using them, and that sure beat nightmares any time.
One thing I had never dealt with before in baseball but encountered for the first time in Mesick, was a curveball. For those of you who don’t deal in sports very much, a curveball is thrown with an angled spin that makes the ball change course in the air. It is NOT an optical illusion. The raised seams of the baseball provide resistance against the air in the direction of the spin, while the spin accelerates on the downward side. Bernoulli’s principle is at work here. For a right-handed pitcher throwing to a right-handed batter, you literally aim the ball at their lead shoulder, and the ideal pitch will break down and to the left, across the plate for a strike. That means to the batter, for a split-second, the ball looks like it is going to hit you. You have about half a second to determine if it’s a curveball or not, and whether to swing. You determine that by picking up the spin out of the pitcher’s hand as soon as possible. As a kid who had been hit a lot, I was not one to stay still in the box and find out. I flinched almost every single time. Throwing a curve ball puts a lot of tension on the elbow, so it’s generally not something you see until 12 or 13 years old. That added a whole new element to baseball for which I was unprepared.
Still, our team dominated every area team, going undefeated for the entire summer. We beat one team in Grawn 38-0. By the end, we were all batting opposite handed so as not to run up the score even more. When victorious, our coaches would take us to the Dari-Pit for ice cream.
The Dari-Pit, a few years before I was in Little League, but it looked pretty much just like this
This, of course, was the same place my grandma used to take my brother Jeff and me for ice cream, and I knew I loved those banana boats. When it was my turn to order, I ordered the banana boat. The other players jumped on me immediately. Banana splits were for players who hit a home run. Everyone else just got a vanilla or chocolate cone. I was devastated to have committed such a faux pas with my new team. I overreacted and refused any ice cream at all, because I had been conditioned to prepare for punishment for making such a mistake. The coaches wouldn’t hear of it, though, and were great. They just told me gently to check with them next time. This, like so many other instances growing up in Mesick, was a kindness that I would never forget. It was the polar opposite of what I was used to, and how I was used to being treated. Teachers and now coaches were proving to be positive models for adult behavior which I would emuate in my own adult years.
“Kellog’s PEP! P-E-P. That super-delicious cereal presents…The Adventures of Superman! Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!”
Now, if you don’t remember Kellogg’s Pep, that’s okay. I don’t, either. It was discontinued some time in the 1970s. From what I understand they tasted a bit like Wheaties. Pep was one of the first vitamin-fortified cereals, but I know it because of its close association with the Superman radio show, which ran from 1940 until 1949. I listen to the old-time radio show every single day on my way to and from work, and in fact, whenever I’m driving the car anywhere. Some time ago, I bought a 5-CD set that has literally hundreds of episodes of the show on it, and I just let it play and play. For most of its run, The Adventures of Superman was comprised of 15-minute episodes that played every afternoon, the time of day depending on locale. As a serialized story, there was a lot of repetition to keep kids who may have missed an episode up to speed. But the stories move pretty quickly, for the most part. I have a couple of the CD sets released by Radio Spirits almost 20 years ago, as well as a big cassette set featuring Superman along with Batman & Robin, who often guest-starred with the Man of Steel.
As I’ve mentioned before, much of the Superman mythos first appeared on radio. It can’t be understated how much the radio program contributed to Superman’s popularity. But I think my favorite part of the show’s portrayal of Superman is what a complete character he is. He’s no musclebound lunkhead, as he’s sometimes stereotyped to be from the comics. He’s an investigative reporter with as sharp an intellect as Batman’s. Even moreso on this show, because there are times when he makes Batman look simple by comparison. Well, I mean, it’s Superman’s show. He’s the star, right? But the number of times he nearly gives himself away when talking about himself while he’s in his Clark Kent disguise (more on that in a minute) is high. Very high.
It’s a more modern contrivance, thinking of Superman as really being Clark Kent’s disguise. This started in the 80s when John Byrne rebooted Superman. Gone was his past as Superbaby, or even Superboy. Superman simply became the public persona of the adult super-powered farmboy who didn’t even know where he came from. But back in the 1940s, Superman was his true persona, and Clark Kent was the disguise. In fact, it was in the second episode of the radio show when Superman, soon after arriving on Earth as an adult, and after rescuing a professor and his son from a runaway trolley car in Indiana, asks for their help in coming up with a human name for him to use as his disguise: “How about Clark Kent? That’s ordinary enough.” It’s also their idea for him to become a newspaper reporter, at “a great metropolitan.” That way he can learn quickly about where he’s needed.
As the radio program progresses, Superman’s cast of supporting characters solidifies. We have Lois Lane right away, of course, and “grey-haired editor, Perry White.” But when cub reporter Jimmy Olsen comes along, it was a whole new ballgame. Jimmy Olsen was just as important a character, if not moreso than Lois Lane. Jimmy didn’t just get into trouble. Jimmy provided the everyman’s perspective for Superman. He was our window into Superman’s world. He traveled the world with Clark Kent, despite being 14 years old and allegedly living with his mother. At one point I was considering compiling a list of skills that Jimmy picked up on their adventures, but it would be a towering list, only exceeding his injuries by a small margin. That kid would have been the poster child for CTE by the time he was an adult, and he’d have more scar tissue than an Alex Ross image of Batman. He was shot, stabbed, shocked, poisoned, and nearly drowned more times than I can count. He probably developed immunity to a dozen diseases, too. He was like a modern-day Rasputin.
Just like the show, I have to interrupt this blog post to talk about Kellogg’s Pep. When the show began without a sponsor in February 1940, they made dummy commercials to demonstrate what the show could be. “Brought to you by Blankareens!” But it wasn’t long before Kellogg’s Pep became the show’s sponsor for years. Kellogg’s provided premiums with their cereal, including cardboard warplanes, and mail-away walkie talkies that “look like the real thing and really work.” They came with 50 feet of cord so you could talk “clear across the playground.” There was plenty of air given to buying war bonds during World War II was well. But perhaps the best Pep prizes were the comic buttons.
Our pal Dan McCullough was constantly talking to us about our collection of 18 comic buttons that come in Kellogg’s Pep. He’d always start his pitch with, “Hey, gang!” and then he’d launch into how these comic buttons would look swell pinned to our “jacket, or dress, or cap,” and “what a thrill it was to swap duplicates with our pals. Why, they look so real, you expect them to come to life! And you don’t send any money in, not even a boxtop. And you can’t buy them anywhere. Just ask your mom to get you a package of P-E-P, Kellogg’s Pep!” Seriously, that was off the top of my head because I have heard the pitch so often!
Well, Dan had never heard of EBay, because guess what I got in the mail today. Why, Superman himself!
I have to be honest, after all these years of listening to Dan tell the gang how true-to-life these comic buttons were, I was a little disappointed that they were smaller than a nickel.
But hey, I finally have one of those swell prizes from Kellogg’s of Battle Creek!
I guess I kind of REALLY fell down the rabbit hole I described a month ago. I do that sometimes. I get hyperfocused on the new thing in front of me, and I go all the way in, leaving everything else behind. I started repairing, repainting and reselling vintage Mego action figures, and wow! It is so incredibly satisfying. I found myself in over my head before I knew it. Since I last posted about them on August 30th, I went from this:
To this:
And that’s not counting the ones I’ve sold. That Planet of the Apes Ursus I posted about on August 30th? I sold it for $129.99. The risk that I was worried about paid off big time! I used the profit from that sale to do something better with my photography. I really didn’t care for the sunburst background I used. So, I went to Amazon and found a miniature 16″ x 16″ photo studio. Self-lit with a ring of LED lights and a number of plastic backdrops, it did the trick! The next figure I put up was a vintage Scotty figure from the 1974 Star Trek line.
Scotty in the studio
I used a diorama created by my friend Mike Sutter of the Guardian of Forever from the classic episode City on the Edge of Forever to frame my photo. Check out the result!
It really classes up the toy, doesn’t it? I put this Scotty figure together with parts. I got a head and uniform in one lot, the weapons in another, and the type-2 body in a third. I sold it after three weeks for $79.99. But before that, I was able to sell the Lt. Leslie custom figure I had made for $59.99! I couldn’t believe it! I used a printed background on a normal piece of computer paper and a riser that Mike made.
Then a type-1 Spock for $59.99. I was selling the figures just about as fast as I could pull in replacement figures and parts.
I even sold a French Spider-Man figure for which I fixed a broken leg! I bought it for $42.75, and ten days later, I sold it for $79.99. It may have taken me 10 minutes to fix his leg.
Encouraged, I started buying figures and parts like crazy. Then, as I realized I had too many figures on my shelf (as you can see above), I decided to put together a nice set out of reconditioned figures that I had repaired, repainted, and outfitted with reproduction weapons. And last night, after just a few hours, I sold it, my biggest sale yet!
I sold this batch for $180! That’s more than my pristine set cost me a few years ago with vintage weapons and their foil stickers still intact.
The only one that came to me whole was Uhura. I just added a reproduction tricorder to make her complete.
I have to take a step back now, and just be impressed with myself. I am selling my figures for far more than they’re worth. It’s just a pleasant surprise every time one sells, because every single time, I think I’ve overpriced them. But wow, it sure is rewarding.
As a relatively new player and a wannabe gamemaster for the roleplaying game Star Trek Adventures, published by Modiphius, I read the rules, watched a few videos, but nothing ever teaches me a game quite like being a player. I pay attention to how a game works from more experienced players, and I really pay attention to a gamemaster who is patient and takes the time to explain everything that we players are doing and can do. ‘Nathan Burgoine is the guy who runs the game I play in, and he’s exceptional. He always offers alternatives and is aware of the talents that our characters have and points out our individual options.
Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook, by Modiphius
The economy aspect of Star Trek Adventures is something I really didn’t get a feel for while reading the rules. There’s an ebb and flow of momentum and threat. If you’re not familiar with these game terms, momentum are units that you earn that you can spend to increase your likelihood of success in rolling dice, or use to gain more information when you have rolled very successfully. Threat is a unit that you can provide the gamemaster so that he or she or they can do the same thing for the opposition. There is a constant flow of both momentum and threat going on throughout a game session. For this post, I am going to focus on momentum.
One of the key uses of momentum is to increase the likelihood of success when a player rolls the dice to resolve a task. In the Modiphius 2D20 system, a player rolls a base of 2D20 to determine success. They have a target number to meet or roll below, based on two of their combined stats to determine success or failure, and the GM must tell them how many successes on the dice they will need to be successful at the task.
Example: Captain Chamberlain takes over at the helm to make the starship Challenger engage in a fairly tricky approach to the damaged starship Pageant, which is leaking deuterium. The gamemaster declares that the task of flying Challenger in without contacting the deuterium is difficulty two. Chamberlain’s Control score is 11 and his Conn score is 4, so by adding those together, it is determined that he must roll 15 or less on each D20 to earn a success. Since the difficulty is two, he must roll successes on both dice to succeed at the task. Since his chance of success on each die is 3/4, his chance to succeed on both die rolls is 3/4 x 3/4, or 9/16. Yikes, that’s just over 56%. It’s a good thing there’s momentum. In Star Trek Adventures, a player can spend one point of momentum to gain an extra die to add to the chance to succeed. The player can spend an additional two points to gain a second die. A third extra die can be obtained by spending three more momentum, for a total of six momentum, which is the most a player group can bank at any one time. So, basically, you can spend:
1 momentum = +1D20
3 momentum = +2D20
6 momentum = +3D20
For our purpose today, I’m only going to talk about the first momentum spend. Additional spends have diminishing returns that make them debatable. So, in the example above, if Captain Chamberlain spends one momentum to gain an extra D20, his chances of success increase from 56% to a whopping 84% (I’m rounding to the nearest whole percent here, I’m not Spock or Data). Furthermore, he has a 42% chance of getting three successes and gaining that momentum spend right back again. The bottom line is that either he’ll get the momentum back again or he needed it to be successful in the first place, because there was a 44% chance that at least one of his first two dice were going to fail. That means that the chance of Captain Chamberlain failing his roll was nearly the same with 2D20 than the chance that he would get his momentum spend right back again with 3D20, and that makes it a good bet. Now, does this always hold up? Pretty much.
Let’s say your combined scores give you a success number of 12. You have a 40% chance to fail, and a 36% chance to get your momentum back with three successes. Still definitely worth it to me, so my philosophy is always spend one momentum on a task if you have one.
People ask me how, since I’m retired and don’t make comics anymore, do I keep my brain from rotting due to disuse. Well, I have a new hobby. As you may have read here or here, Mego action figures were among my very favorite toys when I was a kid. I just wasn’t allowed to play with them at home. I had written an entire Solution Squad story about eight-inch action figures, and one of my buddies had customized a Radical figure for me, which appears on the cover.
I tried my very best to emulate the blister card from the World’s Greatest Superheroes line that Mego produced in the 1970s, right down to the circles featuring other characters with their names encircling their head shots. It wasn’t easy! Radical’s head was made from a repainted Shaggy (from Scooby Doo) with some scupted hair and beard add-ons. His costume was printed! So cool.
My very favorite Mego was the first one I received for Christmas in 1972, Superman, which you can see young Radical playing with here, in a flashback.
As fun as it was, the Mego Superman’s cape was far too easily frayed. I don’t know whatever happened to my old Mego figure. It probably got tossed during one of our many moves. But I do know that he was well loved and well used, and his cape showed it. A few years ago, I acquired one that was in near-mint condition, and I bought a cool diorama from a buddy who sculpts them out of foam to display him permanently.
The next one I got as a kid, in 1974, was a Captain Kirk figure from Star Trek. When my brother got Spock, we had many adventures together. Both of those figures stayed with my brother when I moved away. But the one thing I always wanted was the USS Enterprise playset. I yearned for it, but it was not meant to be. Well, last summer, I found both. I bought a set of the first series of Star Trek figures released in 1974. Uhura was added in 1975, but was still considered in the first series. They can cost quite a bit in good condition, and these were pristine. They had all their weapons, delta insignias, their hair paint was unmarred, they were just perfect. With one exception; Captain Kirk’s leg was broken at the knee.
Now, I am not a handy person. My grandpa and dad did their best to make sure I was at least competent with tools, and when I was younger, I used to make things in my grandpa’s garage. But I never built models, or worked with glue very much. I always preferred drawing. But, I thought, for the price I’m getting this set ($120), I can at least attempt to repair a Mego leg. I would have never considered it when I was a kid, but then again, we didn’t have YouTube back then. Sure enough, I found a video explaining how to replace a knee pin, which is what was missing from Kirk’s leg.
I replaced the pin from a bag of cadaver Megos I had gotten alongside the Superman a few years before, and ironically, a Superman corpse gave up his knee pin so that Kirk could stand again!
In the end, it really wasn’t complicated at all. But I felt accomplishment, nonetheless. Paying only $20 each for mint (-1) Star Trek figures was really cool. And then when the Enterprise playset popped up for less than $100, I knew I had to have it, finally, after all these years! My shelf looked like a Christmas catalog item from 1974!
In the box for the Enterprise was also an extra Captain’s chair and black stool. I didn’t think too much about them, and just tossed them in a box with my cadavers. We’ll get back to them, though.
I thought that would be the end of the hobby of collecting Megos. But then I found out that Mego was back in business after decades of companies trying to do what they did. I had seen some of the newer figures with their fancy correctly-painted weapons and stuff, I dismissed it. Bah! New things! But then I discovered that they had finally produced Sulu and Chekov figures with their original-looking blue phasers and communicators!
The bridge crew would be complete! And what’s this? The impossible-to-find Romulan figure was being re-released with its red weapons set! I couldn’t have a Klingon on the bridge without a Romulan!
By then, I was in my new office, and had a much better display space for my beloved Enterprise set.
And, I thought, if they re-released the Romulan from the Aliens set from series two, maybe they did the Gorn, too! The Gorn figure, if you are not aware, was perhaps the worst and cheapest figure that Mego produced. There was nothing original about it. It utilized a repainted head from Marvel’s Lizard figure, the body from a Planet of the Apes Soldier, and a Klingon uniform. Parts is parts, right?
But the new Mego did not spare the detail! They made a real Gorn that looked like the one in the show!
Naturally, I had to have one. But where was I going to put it? I ran into my diorama-building friend Mike Sutter at a toy show, and put to him an idea. Could he make Vasquez Rocks for me? You know Vasquez Rocks. It’s a park in California where everything has been filmed, including the episode where Kirk battles the Gorn, Arena.
Well, Mike knocked it out of the park. I even got the new version of Kirk for the diorama.
When I discovered that the new shelves in my office were too narrow for the full diorama, I asked Mike if he could trim them down to nine inches wide. He agreed, and asked what I wanted done with the rest. I asked if he could use them to make another diorama, the Guardian of Forever from the episode, City on the Edge of Forever. And again, he crushed it.
But I didn’t want to move my wonderful Kirk and Spock from the bridge set, so off to EBay I went to buy the cheapest Kirk and Spock I could find. I got the pair for $40, but they didn’t come with weapons. I thought, well, that was hardly relevant to this display, so I didn’t worry about it. But it made me think, how hard would it be to just get a set of weapons? Apparently, much harder than I thought! A vintage weapons belt with the blue phaser, communicator, and tricorder can set you back $50! But I wasn’t done with this piece, yet. I needed another Dr. McCoy figure, and I didn’t want to pay a lot for it. I had just found another Kirk and Spock online for even less than I paid for the first pair, just $25, and I had replaced the new Kirk with the Gorn with the classic Kirk. The Spock figure had problems, though, He had a Type-1 body, and his legs were splaying out like crazy. You guessed it, I found a YouTube video. I ordered some 2 mm elastic cord and bought a crochet hook at Walmart. After two attempts, I had completely restrung the figure, making it as good as new. However, I didn’t need a Spock figure at the moment, so he sacrificed his uniform to go with a Type-2 McCoy body I had in my cadaver box. One of the things Mego saw in the Star Trek line was cheap production. The only difference between a McCoy figure and a Spock figure was the head! The McCoy figure had been a gift from my friend Tracy Edmunds, whose father-in-law had bought it in the 1970s to use as a driver in his model race cars. His head was completely messed up from having helmets glued to it, but his body was in perfect shape. I found a McCoy head on EBay for ten bucks and boom! Instant Dr, McCoy figure. Still no weapons, but the good doctor had lost his phaser in 1930s New York in that episode anyway. And now I have a Type-1 Spock figure in my spare Mego box. When another blue uniform comes along, he’ll be dressed again and I’ll have another nearly complete figure.
While that really wasn’t true customization, just a parts swap, I kind of wanted to try my hand at it. My first attempt was to make my Star Trek Adventures captain, by modifying a new Kirk uniform with fabric paint. It was a disaster. I thought I had better stick to what I could handle and not modify the clothes too much. If I try it again, I’m going to try gluing fabric over the existing fabric. I just need a couple of black panels, not a complete dye job.
I thought I would start my journey more successfuly by making a redshirt. If you don’t know that term, it refers to one of Star Trek’s many casualties, who often wore red shirts for security, and often didn’t even have names. But there was one who not only had a name, but he appeared in 57 episodes, more than even Sulu or Chekov! His name was Leslie…most of the time.
Lt. Leslie, played by Eddie Paskey
One of Mego’s new lines was Married With Children, and I had read that they were trying to go cheap on sculpts again. They were pulling old sculpts from everywhere, and they chose one that someone had made of Eddie Paskey, who played Lieutenant Leslie on Star Trek, to make Al Bundy’s head. This was supported when I got a look of the side view of Al’s profile.
I’m pretty sure Al Bundy never had those Starfleet sideburns! So, I thought, let me try making a custom Mr. Leslie figure. I took that now-shirtless Kirk figure, and popped off his head, and replaced it with the head of Al Bundy. I found a Scotty uniform shirt online for a fairly low price, and ordered it. Scotty was the only figure Mego produced in the old days who wore red. Leslie most often wore red for engineering or security. But I had also read that you could simply repaint Mego figures with the same paint you use for D&D figures, and I had some. So, I got to work repainting the head with a color more suitable for Leslie while I waited for the Scotty uniform to be shipped. When it arrived, I used an X-Acto knife to cut away one of the rank braids (Scotty was a lieutenant commander while Leslie was just a lieutenant), and put it all together. I borrowed one of my classic figure’s weapons belts to complete the look.
My first successful custom Mego: Lt. Leslie
Since I’m not worried about vintage weapons for this figure (the only part of him that’s vintage is his shirt), I looked for reproduction Star Trek weapons. And wouldn’t you know it, Dr. Mego has some! Instead of $50, I can get a full belt for eight bucks. And I have plenty of other figures that don’t need vintage weapons, but would display better with weapons than without. That site has replacement parts for everything we need to restore our 50-year-old figures and make them look new again! Okay, now I had a taste for customizing as well as repair.
There’s been a movement not just to sculpt Mego heads but to print Mego heads made of resin. And one that came up in my wanderings was one that I really want to make: Luke Skywalker.
It’s well known that Mego passed on the Star Wars license in 1977 and that decision factored into the company’s eventual demise. Kenner took up the toy license and instead of making expensive eight-inch figures, they focused simply on molded and painted 3.75″ figures that were far cheaper to manufacture and much more flexible in the types of figures that could be offered. It was a trend that even Mego adopted afterward, when they tried to keep up with their Star Trek license for Star Trek The Motion Picture. But I often wonder what it would have been like if Mego had made the Star Wars figures. So, I’m going to try to make one. I painted Luke’s head (so out of practice) and attached it to an extra Type-2 body I had. I noticed that the foot was broken, and yep, right to YouTube, learned how to pop out the ankle pin and replace it with a donor part.
Appropriate that he’s in front of a Star Wars game, right?
I’ve ordered a black bodysuit, and a pair of replacement boots for CHiPs figures to make a start on Jedi Luke. Yes, CHiPs boots are correct.
While I was in reconstruction mode, I dug back into my box of parts, where I found a Planet of the Apes figure. I honestly did not have any interest in these figures when they came out in 1974, so I didn’t even know the character’s name.
A trip to the Mego Museum page, and it was revealed! His name was General Ursus…or General Urko. It depended on when you bought him! That page is really a nice resource, because you can find out what parts a particular figure came with to be complete. This figure did not have his rifle or his scabbard and short sword, and like Star Trek weapons, they can be really hard to come by. But, because of his condition (really nice), I decided to complete him. It took a couple of weeks to find the parts, but I did. So, I spent $55 to complete a $150 figure. Pretty cool.
The Completed General Ursus/Urko
Here is where the new hobby is satisfying. I took parts from three incomplete figures and made a whole one. There’s just something right about that. It feels good. So I took a good look at my parts box and started making notes. Remember that extra captain’s chair from the Enterprise box? I sure don’t need it, but someone evidently does!
Just like there’s a market for Mego weapons, there is a market for any spare parts, even heads! I have an extra General Ursus head, and I don’t need that either.
So, to answer the question from the first paragraph, how am I keeping my brain from rotting? I’m doing math. I’m looking for parts lots that complement what I already have, and selling what I don’t need. Here’s the pièce de résistance:
I have a Klingon figure. Its head was in good shape, as was the uniform, and one of his two boots. His knee, though, had been replaced not with a plastic pin, but with a bolt and nut! I can’t even fix it because more damage was done to the leg when someone did their best knee replacement without YouTube.
Metal knee replacement before its time
So, I took a spare Type-2 body from a Robin figure with a messed up head, and did a transplant. Now I just needed a weapons belt and a boot replacement. Vintage boots are $20 a pair. Or, if you want a single boot, the price is…$20. The whole figure is only worth about $40. I was not about to pay $20 for boots. So, instead, I found a whole Klingon. Wait, what? Well, yes, the Klingon figure is whole, but…his head is messed up and the uniform pants have a few minute problems. That reduces the value. So, I paid $35 for this whole (messed up) figure, and I will take the boot and the weapons belt, to make a whole, good, sellable-condition vintage Klingon figure, and I could sell the remaining parts. Sounds crazy, but I could get $20 for the good boot, and $15 for the Type-2 body, and–are you following this? I could get $35–what I paid for the whole figure–for the leftover parts of this figure that are undamaged. I’m not going to, though, because I’m going to keep gathering an inventory of spare parts to complete more figures later on. I will probably ditch the defective pants, though. I think I might experiment more and repaint the head, too, since its paint defects make it not as valuable.
So, no, my brain isn’t going to rot. I’m on a constant watch now to find parts that go with my parts. It just becomes important now to keep track of what I have on-hand.
Everyone, take a bow! Your time will come. You will be complete again!
