Fallback position

Hey, Steve, here's an idea. On a day when you're busy and don't have anything cooler to post, put up a picture of one of your cats messing up a 1/6th photo shoot.

Good idea, Steve, I'll do that. Here's a picture of Banzai invading my Adventure Team headquarters set.

Oh, right Steve, I remember that. He managed to walk all through it, and not knock over a thing.

Come on, Steve, he was having an off-day. Go easy on him, dude.

Right, Steve.

Right.

Wall of interest

Nothing too exciting today. Just a little slice-of-life from here in my office at Hangar 18.

One consequence of being a writer is that you sometimes spend months at a time chained to your computer, staring at the same wall. This, is my wall.

I've just spent the last few days working in the office, and among other things, I added the two white shelves to the left (the longer white shelf above has been there since I moved in.

My major objective here, is that if I have to stare at a wall, it should at least be an interesting wall, something that will stimulate creativity. As such, there are quite a variety of odds-and-ends in the picture, many of them 1/6th related.

You can see several of my custom AT vehicles, the radio-controlled Escape Car 2 up and right, the LMUTT to the left of that, the radio-controlled H2 Hummer top and center, an AT motorcycle and scooter to the left of that. That's my repainted and modified Schwimmenwagen below the motorcycles. The purple New Bright New Beetle is a recent thrift-store find. I recently got a new remote for it (ordered directly from New Bright for $10 plus shipping) and plan to paint it white with Herbie stripes and numbers to match our 1:1 Herbie.

Also on the top shelf, you can see the 1/6th gold Cylon commander from Battlestar Galactica.

The lower white shelf has a mix of Timeless, 40th, and vintage figures and coffin boxes. The monitor for my computer is located directly under the shelf. Behind it is a vintage Estes Galactica "Viper" flying model rocket. It flies well, and has three or four flights to its record.

The smaller, brown, bookshelf has a variety of stuff: CDs, reference books, copies of some of my published work. There's also a collection of alien items on top (this is Hangar 18 after all!)

Some of the other items are connected to my published work. There are a pair of Conan action figures on the third shelf down (I wrote three Age of Conan novels, now in stores) and there are a couple of small Transformers figures above that (including Ratchet, who was featured in a story I wrote for the anthology, Transformers Legends).

Like I said, it's a wall, but at least it's not a boring wall.

Goodwill Hunting

Okay, so by the calendar, I missed a day. But given that I posted twice on each of the two previous days, I don't consider myself too off-course. Now, on to business...

I have a hard time driving past a thrift store. It's an especially good time to visit them now, with one-sixth action figures harder to find in stores, and their popularity with kids well past the last peak, it's easier to find GI Joes in Goodwill than Wal-Mart these days.

I've been finding lots lately. Mainly I find nude or partially dressed figures, CC Joes, some SA Joes, and other figures of interest like 21st Century guys and "Super-Action" body Max Steels.

It's rare to find a completely dressed figure, much less a completely equipped one, but this guy I found yesterday comes close.

I consider him one of my "best-ever" Goodwill finds. Not only is this a Joe that I wanted, and missed at retail, but he's all (or nearly all) there. Price (you can still see the tag on his chest), $2.99.

Now, to shop regularly at thrift stores is to be both a archeologist, and an anthropologist, studying among the ruins of late 20th, early 21st century western civilization. After a time, you start to notice things. Actually, I think it would be most instructive for toy designers to study thrift stores, searching for clues as to what children keep, and what they discard, how they play with toys, and how they break them.

What can we learn from studying this amazingly intact specimen?

1. It was almost undoubtedly played with by a child. Though he didn't love it to death, it also wasn't (as is sometimes found) an unwanted gift, taken from the box but otherwise hardly touched. I like to think it was loved enough to be taken care of well (thus its intact accessories), but possibly the child played with for a while and then lost interest.

In any case, this contradicts the idea that the high-end, more realistic GI Joes went only to adult collectors. I'll attest from the bits and pieces I find, the kids usually get them too.

2. The left arm joints were all twisted around backwards. I find this (or some variation of "twisted limb syndrome") on almost every dressed Joe I find at a thrift. The kids can't figure out how those hidden joints work beneath the clothing, and they get them twisted around. I remember this frustration with my own childhood Joes. It's a problem that goes back to the original body style.

Note that this doesn't happen with "super-action" Max Steels, as the joints are designed differently than Hasbro bodies, and are nearly kid-proof despite the double knee and elbow joints. Hasbro never quite got that right.

3. The oxygen tank was obviously removed and replaced. It seems like the shoulder straps may have come out of the buckles, and the child couldn't figure out how to replace them. So he strapped the tank on upside-down, hanging down the leg. This is almost logical, and kind of looks cool. I've since refixed the tank on his back, but having struggled with the buckles, I understand the kid's frustration.

4. Note the thing in the figure's left hand. I believe this is a projectile from a Spider-man figure, and this is strong evidence that the child actually played with the figure. It also shows that kids still mix-and-match their toys. What did it represent to the child? Was it a tool, a weapon, a torch, or a flashlight? We'll never know, but in these pre-fab-out-of-the-box times, any shred of young creativity I can find gladdens my heart.

How did Joe end up at Goodwill? Also impossible to know. Maybe the family moved. Maybe mom cleaned the kids room and threw out "extra" toys (don't you hate it when moms do that?). Maybe the child outgrew the toy, or even lost it somewhere.

We can't really know. All I can say, is Joe is safe now, and will be well cared for. Someday, when I'm not around any more, the toy will move on. And maybe someday, when that kid is 40 or 50, that kid will remember that long-lost toy with a nostalgia and longing.

And maybe, if he is very lucky, he can have it back.

Dinosaurs: Still fun

I happened to catch a few minutes tonight of the movie Jurassic Park as it was running on Sci-Fi channel. I was surprised at how poorly it held up. The central characters were all so annoying and stupid you wanted the dinosaurs to eat them.

Of course, that didn't matter at the time, because -- it was all about the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, they don't hold up too well either. The once state-of-the-art CGI dinosaurs now look rather unconvincing, and their designs are already far behind the scientific curve (current evidence supports that most, if not all, of the dinosaurs portrayed would have had feathers).

Of course, any attempt to keep up with science is probably doomed anyway, which may be part of why Peter Jackson has gone strictly retro with his dinosaurs in the King Kong remake. These are strictly 1939 dinosaurs done with 21st century technology.

Old, new, accurate or not, one dinosaurs make great toys, and the Jursassic Park toy line is without a doubt exceptional. Collectors pay high-prices for them on eBay. Fortunately, I got most of my large collection at thrift stores, paying pennies on the dollar.

Another interesting thing about dinosaurs is that the same body plans often get played out at different sizes in different species. So, even though a Jurrassic Park dinosaur may be far from 1/6th scale (I'd say they're closer to 1/14th or so), they can always serve as 1/6th stand-ins for their larger cousins.

The king of Jurassic Park dinos is the bull T-Rex, and I'm lucky enough to have three of them now. I used one of them as a "juvenile allosaurous" in my "Scotty Travis, Dinosaur Hunter" photo-story a while back. Still one of my favorite shots.

Scientifically accurate? Not hardly. Fun? Sure!

Bad Dog

Returning today to one of my more recent group posts, though likely seen here in greater variety and detail than you could see previously.

This "Hulk Dog" is from the second wave of "Incredible Hulk" movie theaters. In the movie, of course, the gamma-ray mutated hounds were huge, but in the case of this 6" scale figure, it turns him into a decent-sized 1/6th dog.

The front and rear legs are jointed, and the head (which turns side-to-side via a cut-joint) is rubbery, so the mouth can bite and hold onto things reasonably well. Sure, he won't pass for a "normal" dog, but in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, he's great. In this case, I figure my bad-ass kitbashed character has probably been letting his pup drink from the sludge ponds at the toxic waste dump where he hides out.

A studded leather or chain collar would finish this guy off nicely. I may have to add one at some point.

Another good example of how you shouldn't limit your 1/6th shopping to 1/6th scale characters.

The Adventure Team - basement?

Not much time today, so just a quick post to keep my "something every day" promise.

As I said, when I posted the "Adventure Team Headquarters" shots a post or two back, I've been collecting props and furniture for this for a long time. The shelf-display in this shot represents an earlier effort, and an earlier concept. The heavily kitbashed "Ferris" figure was put together with the idea of a new generation of adventurers, coming along and following in their father's footsteps.

So it really isn't an Adventure Team Headquarters. The inspiration is more "Eric Forman's Basement" from "That 70s Show." Note, however, that many of the props found their way into the later display.

A visit to Adventure Team headquarters

I mostly missed out on the GI Joe Adventure Team as a kid. It came along too late, when I was supposedly outgrowing my painthead military Joes. But I was very aware of the line, and it had a great deal of appeal to me.

Perhaps it was just that I spent so much of my life on and around military bases. That stuff was just kind of every-day for me. But the spies, explorers, and adventurers were something different and exciting, and I loved reading the old Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, with all their futuristic vehicles and gadgets (how mundane those magazines seem today, though it's gotten better in the last couple years).

But one aspect that seemed especially interesting to me was the Adventure Team Headquarters. Yes, yes, there's the vinyl, plastic, and cardboard pop-up set that was sold, but that only suggested to me what the real ATHQ might be like. I figured it had to be one-part command post, one part club-house, and one part museum. When I got back into the hobby, I immediately started collecting props to create my "ultimate headquarters." Believe it or not, I'm still not there, but every once in a while I did all my stuff out and see how come I can come. This is one of my efforts from a year or so back. Worth blowing up, as there's tons of interesting detail.













There's literally every kind of prop you can imagine in here. Knick-knacks, props from smaller-scale action figures, museum shop items, aquarium decorations, doll-house furniture, advertising items, craft-store bits, you name it. Only a few things here were actually intended as 1/6th props: the Power Team folding chair and "movie-screen" map, the Ever-Sparkle white-board and training tower used as part of the back wall, the "Mummy's Tomb" mummies, a couple GI Joe map tubes and portable computers, a few odd tables, and so on. But most of this stuff has been "repurposed" for Joe use.

Seal of approval

Or should it be "sign on the dotted sea-lion?" A while back, the Adventure Team Headquarters YahooGroup sent out TAD, the "Traveling Adventure Dude" for a trip around the country, and I hosted him for a while. He had many adventures here on the Oregon coast. This shot was taken on the waterfront in Newport, Oregon, no photo-editing involved for a change.

Days of Future Past

There were a few other notable action figures of the 60s that I consider worthy to be compared to GI Joe. One of these was Mattel's Major Matt Mason. Matt Mason was a 6" rubber astronaut figure with "bendy" joints in his otherwise hard-rubber limbs.

The figures themselves were attractive, but unremarkable. The wire inside those bendy joints was infamous for breaking, the visor on Matt's removable helmet was fragile, and for all his wonderful gear, Matt didn't even come with a life-support pack, and therefore had to hold his breath during his several-year stay on the Moon. What made Matt excel as an action figure, in some respects eclipsing GI Joe, was his amazing assortment of gear and vehicles.

The largest of is accessories was the Space Station, a huge, three-story, tree-house in space. The top was enclosed by translucent blue panels, and featured a command chair, storage shelf light-up center console, sink, and two-burner stove. (no microwave oven for 60s-centric Matt!)

Beyond that, Matt had an amazing variety of gear: several battery-operated vehicles, with treads, wheels, and legs, space-probe launchers, weapons, and two varieties of powered exoskeletal armor. This brings me to one of my favorite accessories in the line, the Supernaut Power Limbs.

You can see the original toy in the center inset of the picture at right. Matt (or one of his friends) was strapped into a large backpack that formed the center frame of the device. His feet snapped into foot rests on the inside of the jointed, telescoping, legs (shown retracted in the picture). The two arms were clearly designed for construction. The one on Matt's right, had a serrated claw, and the one on the left had a scooping bucket. The arms were designed so that a child could hold onto the levers at the top of the arm, remotely move the arms, and open and close the "hands" using push-button levers next to the handle. As a bonus, the backpack had a small crane arm and hoist with lifting hook.

Now, this was an idea just ahead of its time. In the 60s, General Electric tried to build a working exoskeleton called "Hardiman," seen at left. Unfortunately, Hardiman was never completed, other than a single arm (that could lift 600 pounds, but thanks to feedback circuits, would allow an operator to pick up an egg without crushing it). Walking, unfortunately, was more of a problem, and then there was the question of how to power it without a long extension cord.

But in the late 60s, the hope was alive, and the Supernaut Power Limbs were a pretty good model for what a real exoskeleton might be like. Now, if you think that the SPL suit looks a lot like the Power Loaders in the movie Aliens, I find it difficult to imagine this is an accident. I'll just bet if you could go back in time, you'd find young James Cameron (or one of his production designers) had a pile of Major Matt Mason toys.

Of course, if you've studied the first picture closely, you have some idea how this relates to 1/6th scale.

Back when I was first getting into the hobby, my first major custom project was to create 12" analogs of the old Major Matt Mason figures, and a few of their toys. Perhaps a few of you remember pictures of the mammoth 12"-scale version of the Space Station I was building from PVC pipe. Like GE's Hardiman,was ever a case of my reach exceeding my grasp. The station ran into more and more problems the closer if came to completion, and work on completing my 1:1 scale office took precedent. I eventually disassembled the station, packed it away, and there it remains. If I get back to the project (and I might) I anticipate I'll start most of it over from scratch.

I did create some decent 12" versions of Matt Mason, kitbashed around Lanard Ultracorps space suits. Late in the project, I found a good-sized stash of Robotix construction toys at a thrift-store. This line is ideally suited to creating sci-fi props for use with 1/6th figures, from things as mundane as shelves and tables, to -- well -- Supernaut Power Limbs.

This was actually a fairly easy project, done in an hour or two, but I think it looks pretty good. It stood about two and a half feet tall, I believe. The legs and arms in this version are fixed (If I did it again, at least the arms would move). The claws, however, were electrically operated from switches on the backpack, which also contained the batteries. One nice improvement over the original, is that the astronaut had some head and face protection in the form of a transparent shield that lowers down from above. Another nice addition is that there were two functional spotlights on either side of the astronaut's head (it's a little difficult to see them in this somewhat fuzzy flash picture).

Like the Space Station, this has since been disassembled and packed away, but with this picture, I could recreate it in just a few minutes, and I now have more Robotix parts, to do an even better job. It might even be possible to add electrical operation to the arms as well.
Impractical or not, some ideas are just too cool to let die.

Big Bird

I mean, what else would you call a big yellow C-130 Hercules? This is one of my more unusual photo edits, in that there aren't any 1/6th items in it at all.

I started wondering, how does the Adventure Team deploy all those vehicles and fuzzy-headed guys all over the world? Obviously they'd have a transport aircraft of some sort, but what would it look like? This is my attempt to answer those quesitons.

No idea where I got the base shots. I'm not even sure if it's a real plane or a model. I was relatively new at doing sophisticated photo editing when I did this, and I could doubtless do better now. The green shadows and the too-dark tail don't look quite right. (Must be flying through the shadow of a cloud. Yeah, that's the ticket.) Still, fairly cool.

But then you start to wonder, what's in the plane? I had to look around quite a bit to find this base shot of vehicles being air-dropped, and then I used an existing shot of my custom MLV (Mobile Logistics Vehicle). I think it's a little undersized, but as I recall, I had to do it this way to make the perspective work.



Finally, my favorite of this bunch of photo edited shots. It really looks like I took my custom LMUTT mini-truck and plopped it down on the ground behind a Chinook helicopter. It's difficult to tell where the grass in the base shot stops, and the grass in my front yard starts. Stretched out, this makes a pretty cool desktop.

Hmm, I suppose I could have tried to make the Chinook yellow, but that's taking "flying banana" way too literally.

So, now you know more than you wanted to about AT air-deployment. "The Adventure Team is needed..."

...well, somewhere far away.

Hang in there

It's about midnight here, and time to post another picture. Here's one more from the archives, a favorite photo edit.

The figure in the foreground is an Adventure Team dinosaur hunter I kitbashed a while back named Scotty Travis.

The location here is actually a roadside along Highway 101 just north of Newport, Oregon. The "cliff" here actually isn't rock, it's just packed, sandy, soil, cut away by road workers. The distant cliff behind the helicopter is actually only a few feet from the figure, but it gives a pretty good illusion of distance. The 21st Century Toys rescue helicopter was actually shot in my office, and added to the scene later using Paint Shop Pro.

By the way, with any of the pictures here, the small shot in the message is only a thumbnail. Just click on the picture to see it full-sized.

Welcome to my angry One-Sixth world

Greetings and welcome. This blog is my response to the generally shoddy state of the one-sixth hobby. As I look around, 12" GI Joe is history except for the GI Joe Collector's Club, and even they are having a hard time selling the 40th Anniversary sets. Beyond that, there are a few 21st Century Toys vehicles with figures showing up here and there, some cool but sometimes hard-to-find offerings from M&C Power Team, some licensed figures from Sideshow and others, K-9 Corps (and some bottom-tier military stuff) from Lanard, and that's about it. It seems grim.

Yet what is especially disappointing is the poor morale among 1/6th collectors. Everywhere I look, I see people selling collections. Posts on the various forums and the Sandbox are down. People sit around and bash Hasbro (with and without reason) and generally act like it's the end of the world.

Well now, let's look at the up side of all this. I think in many ways, there's never been a better time to be in this hobby! There's a ton of 1/6th product out there, new and used, often at fire-sale prices! And now that we aren't all spending out time chasing the latest and greatest product, we actually have time to look at some of the stuff we've been buying for years. We have time to play with stuff, kitbash, and customize. And yeah, now you can put a lot of work into a custom without the fear that Hasbro or some other manufacturer is going to come along tomorrow and put your custom work to shame.

And what's really nice is, with the big-boys moving aside, we're starting to see customizing reappearing like in the old days. It's just great seeing things like hand-made vehicles, metal weapons, and detailed leather holsters, that these talented folks are putting out.

So what are we doing here? Well, I love photos. I love sharing photos of my stuff, and I love seeing photos of other people's collections. Unfortunately, the on-line Joe community, once focused on Usenet's "Sandbox" (alt.toys.gi-joe) is now scattered all over multiple forums, many of them on Yahoo. Yahoo no longer makes it easy to share photos in large quantities, and sharing photos over Usenet (only some servers allow posting and viewing of attachments on alt.toys.gi-joe, and alt.pictures.toys.gi-joe isn't carried on many servers, and has become clogged with porno- spam of late).

So, this is a place were I'm going to share my considerable archive of 1/6th photos taken over the last several years, and of course, any new stuff I have time take. My goal (and we'll see how it goes) is to post at least one new picture every day (unless I'm away from my office). My hope is that you'll be able to come back here an any given day with the assurance of seeing something new, and possibly interesting.

Are you a Sandboxer, and having trouble posting photos so people can see them? E-mail them to me at j-steven-york@sff.net, and (within bounds of taste, I'd like to keep things PG here) I'll be glad to post them here as well.

So what's with today's picture? Well, this is a graphic I created early this year in response to the cancellation of the 12" GI Joe line. I suggested we have an "Angry Joe Day" on Feb. 1 and post pictures showing how angry Joe was about being given the 12" boot. Well, I still think it's a good idea, so I'm hosting "Angry Joe Day 2006." Send me your best Angry Joe photos (or a link) and I'll post them here. I will pick my favorites (no voting, though you are welcome to argue for your favorites by posting favorable comments). There will be prizes, to be determined. There may be some more rules, when I think of them, but your photos should include at least one 12" GI Joe in some form.

Anyway, welcome to One-Sixth. Check back tomorrow for new photos!