Mystery Monday: Sidekick Carl and the Tonka camper van

 

After taking it slow for a while, I decided it was time to get back to this feature. In the course of that decision, I thought of several perfectly obscure items in my collections, but I decided the one I wanted to cover was something that outwardly barely qualifies as a mystery. My underlying reasoning was that there are different levels of mystery. The obvious ones, which this feature has been dedicated to so far, are the strange yet nondescript, haphazardly marked toys that a kid would pick up without knowing or necessarily caring what they were and where they came from. But there are also more subtle puzzles and problems that only an adult hashing things out long after the fact would think of, the questions of when, why and how long. On more careful consideration, there is one seemingly familiar brand that poses more of this kind of question than any other: the Tonka trucks, and the accessories and figures that sometimes accompanied them.

The first part of our mystery lies in the nature of the toys. Tonka trucks have been made for well over half a century, invariably in varying or entirely hazy sizes and scales. By the 1980s in particular, this was contributing to a crisis of branding, as most of the vehicles didn't work well with action figures and other related toys. That, in turn, left the brand at a competitive disadvantage, too big for the Hot Wheels/ Matchbox niche and usually (though as we shall see not always) too small to hold Star Wars and GI Joe figures. Judging from my own recollections, there was a further disconnect between adults and kids about how the brand was perceived. For ungrateful Eighties kids like me, Tonka trucks quickly faded into background noise. I certainly got them, for a very long time, but very few made enough of an impression for me to remember how I received them. When I played with them, it was usually because I needed something, and it didn't really matter if it "fit" with anything else. Here's a few pics of the Tonka toys I encountered more often than any other, the pickup truck and/ or trailer.

These left a minor mystery in themselves because I absolutely remembered that the black truck came with a boat that I could find no trace of. I'm also sure that somewhere there was a bit of text that read "Miami Nice", a terrible pun/ reference I barely recognized. What got disconcerting was that it turned out Tonka had released a number of boats, none of which matched the boat as I remembered it. I did finally find some pics of boats I was satisfied came from the same molds, but still no exact matches. I may cover that little side quest in more detail in another post, but for now, I'm ready to move on to the next part of the mystery, the Tonka action figures, which I last covered in the Dropped Pilots post. Here's some pics of my only available specimen from that line, Sidekick Carl, in a line up with Bossk, the Adventure People diver, and the very first to appear in this feature, the Voltron red guy.

Since I first mentioned this now-obscure line, I have done quite a bit more research, which mostly served to convince me that this was a mystery worth coming back to. What's clear is that by the early to mid-1970s, Tonka started including posable figures with their largest vehicles, particularly the Mighty Ambulance and Mighty Winnebago. (Yes, you read that right.) The first of these were more like dolls than action figures, notably having actual fabric clothing that may have been removable. In 1978, Tonka started including all-plastic action figures referred to as Play People, confusingly in both nominal 3.75" (maybe closer to 3.5" judging from these pics) and 5" size. I haven't quite unraveled the mystery of why or how extensively the larger scale figures were used, though the depressingly obvious explanation is that they were made for the Winnebago and certain older vehicles that hadn't yet been retired or retooled. The smaller size was the one that saw further production, including sale on card. The line has been dated 1979-1981, as per Figure Realm, which may be accurate for figures sold separately from Tonka vehicles. According to Mighty Tonka, a site strikingly critical of the Play People line and concept, the Play People were retired entirely by 1982.

To get a full sense of the line's pros and cons, I finally broke out yet another item I had lying around, a Tonka van/ camper trailer set that may have been one of the first to include the figures. (See the Battlegrip page on the line, already linked to when I first introduced Carl.) I have just enough memories of this thing to recall that I found it different from the trucks, and I just barely remember an already weathered figure that I believed came with it. That figure ended up consuming a lot of my attention, because I thought of it at the time as a woman; however, the only female figure I can find record of with the orange/ peach-colored jumpsuit I remember was in 5-inch scale. From further research, the set normally had a man and a woman, with the former sometimes in orange and the latter typically being blonde with a white or blue outfit. It also came with a dog and some other accessories I certainly have no memory of. I did finally fish out the van and trailer about a week before starting this post. Here's a few pics, with Carl and the Truckstop Queen for reference.

After preliminary inspection, it was clear that the set was a semi-realistic van and an accurate approximation of a "popup" trailer, something I don't think I ever fully understood as a kid. This brought me to one more "minor" mystery: In almost all pictures I have found, there are stickers for detail on the table and the foldout bunk. As a kid, I hated this practice so much that I routinely peeled or scraped the stickers off, to the point that I can usually find my own handiwork and reconstruct a toy accordingly. Here, however, the absence of evidence is much more complete than my usual efforts can account for. What that suggests to me is that this is variant that cut corners even on the stickers, which I personally find mindboggling.

In any event, what interested me most was whether Carl could really fit in here. On this point, I had up until recently assumed Tonka vehicles weren't meant to be accessible enough to put an action figure inside, regardless of whether there was enough apace inside, and I don't believe I ever tested anything bigger than a Playmobil figure. However, I quickly confirmed that Carl would fit well enough in both the trailer and the van. Here's a few more pics.

This experiment gave me a different perspective on the cancellation of the Play People line. It would seem "obvious" that once Tonka had both figures and vehicles designed and sized to take them, they would have either continued the Play People line or retired the vehicles has well. On careful consideration, however, this was not an either/ or choice. There were certainly kids who would use Tonka trucks with other toys, if only because they had both. As long as Tonka had vehicles that were roughly compatible with standardized action figures, they could always use that as an explicit or implied selling point, a route that was already being taken by many lower profile manufacturers (egregiously Arco!). Just how many trucks continued to accommodate action figures, and how long, is something I'm already investigating, but for now I'm holding off for another day.

One more mystery continues to be how I ended up with Carl in my possession. I long believed that he would have come with a race car, known in full as the AJ Foyt racing set, but I am now satisfied that figures from that set would have had different markings, particularly on the back.  I concluded in the process that Carl must have originally been marked Team Tonka; I also confirmed he's marked with the year 1979. I am now leaning toward the possibility that Carl was one of the figures sold on card, perhaps as a 2-pack shown on Figure Realm, almost certainly well before I would have been old enough to play with him. What has been of more interest is that I've found pictures of many variations of the figure, indicating that it probably came with any number of vehicles and sets over a significant period of time. I'm not yet satisfied whether 1982 was the end of the line, but again, that will take further investigation.

Having gotten more familiar with the line, I have both a better sense of why it failed and a lot more frustration at the lack of information and general interest. Obviously, they don't compare well with Star Wars or even the Adventure People. Their whole look makes them feel even smaller, cheaper and blander than they were in reality, with plenty of unpleasant surprises left for anyone who handles one. But on the other side, they are still well-made, detailed figures (see especially Carl's back), with a startling number of variations that would surely have been minutely documented in a more successful or notorious line. More importantly, their realism and diversity was move valuable than the manufacturer could ever have intended in a landscape that would soon flooded with soldiers, robots and aliens. Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of nuance kids would only have appreciated when a story required more civilian and/ or female characters than a single Princess Leia figure could portray. If it comes to that, I suppose that's the reason I ended up with the Truckstop Queen as model/ mascot for this blog; at a certain point, you need "normal" as your reference point.

That's all for now, more to come!