Futures Past: Fisher Price sci fi franchise?

 

In the course of this blog, I've created quite a few "features". The common denominator is that usually, I have decided at the outset whether a feature will be a regular thing or just a few installments. This feature has been a major exception, in no small part because I had never decided just where it would go. I started it fora post on World's Fair architecture, and got in one more for a terrible 1980s comic. But most of the other things I might have considered ended up in other new and old features, most recently the Anthology Anthology. What has brought me back is an acquisition that would have been easy to cover in a toy blog. However, I felt that this time, I had something more, and this was the place to cover it. To get things going, here's the figure that started everything.

The backstory is that this is a figure from the famous/ notorious Fisher Price Adventure People line, previously sighted way back in my Dropped Pilots post. This figure was evidently made and released specifically for a vehicle called Alpha Probe, Fisher Price's 1980 Star Wars cash-in. I personally can't say for sure if I ever even saw this damn thing, but it's easy to see why many people remember it fondly. At face value, it's a space shuttle with a little more flare than average. On a deeper level, however, it has a quite unique aesthetic, especially for the knockoff-heavy environment, in many ways closer to The Black Hole than anything else. Here's links for posts on the ship at This Old Toy, Flashbak and Plaid Stallions. Also, here's a vintage ad from Flashbak.

Needless to say, I ordered this figure as an alternative to getting the ship. From my research, the ship was consistently sold with a man and a woman astronaut, in itself an intriguing dynamic for vintage action figures (see the No Girls post). The woman is known in two variants, one blonde and the other usually described as brown-haired, I would say reddish. What very quickly stood out was that this is far below my expectations. The detailing is low, and several points are strange, particularly the lower legs and the collar piece. Presumably, they were cutting corners to get the ship to the market, yet there are clearly far better FP figures from the same time. Here's the lady with Husky and the Adventure People diver, note especially the detail on the diver.

And here's Sidekick Carl while we're at it!

One more detail that only clicked after I ordered the figure is that the helmet has to be a copy of what I call the tank helmet, common to the Marx "Space Guys". It's a very odd "retro" touch that I suspect was intended to appeal to adult nostalgia. Here's a lineup to show what I mean.

Inevitably, the success of Alpha Probe led to more space toys, and things soon went downhill. The next in line were Alpha Star 1 and Alpha Recon, a sort of mini rig fighter and moon buggy that fit in with the retro-hard sci fi look established by the ship. Things stayed in the gray area with the Alpha Star buggy set (see here for one of the better posts I've found on the whole subline), despite the addition of an alien dino creature and a clunky robot. The one I can't figure out is the Alpha Interceptor, which looks like the chassis of a construction crane with the mini rig fuselage bolted on. In the process, we also got the previously sighted "second wave" astronaut figures, which I got one more of in the bargain with the lady astronauts. Here's a pic of the pair.

The very odd thing about this is the design, which looks less like a suit than a miniature space capsule. The latter interpretation would make a fair amount of sense, especially if any of the hardware in back is taken as a propulsion system. The annoying part is that these are things I would have thought of as a kid, but the designers clearly weren't looking that far ahead. Something else I quickly realized is that the figure I had featured in Dropped Pilots is in immaculate condition, a point that got driven home when I accidentally scratched one of the useless shapes in the back. Here's a detail shot.

And here's an unnecessary-detail shot...

Something I'm going back just to add is the implied dynamics for the space exploration set. The easy, fan fic-style solution is that this is a husband-and-wife team. We know even better now that this would really create at least as many problems as it would solve. But if this is a long-haul expedition, lasting years or even decades, how else would you deal with the psychological and biological stresses and needs of the crew? It's a random train of thought, yet it's the kind of question precocious kids would ask that adults still struggle to answer.

Meanwhile, things really got weird when FP tried turning out individually sold figures. These are egregiously Eighties, either psychedelic or nightmare fuel. I won't really be going far into these, because they're well-covered elsewhere. Here's some card art to give you a feel for the tone.

Then there's a couple I can't resist. First, there's Clawtron. I've joked about the origin of Sidekick Carl, whom I decided would be an unkillable cyborg because I had no other way to resolve the real hero's plight. That made me all the more amused to see this, an undisputed recolor of a biker figure with some extra robot parts slapped on. Sure, I was incredibly lazy... but Fisher Price did it first. Here's the pic, credit to the page at This Old Toy already linked to.

Second is the X-ray woman, supposedly an android. They came as both male and female, and the lady is even more freaky. It hasn't exactly been confirmed, but I'm convinced their heads are recycled from the astronauts. (Edit: From further research, it looks like both were based on a sculpt from an earlier figure, probably a common denominator with the space figures.) Here's a pic from Battlegrip.

With that to give you nightmares, I'm ready to wrap this up. In hindsight, this little line is an egregious example of a property caught in the middle, on one hand drawing on the Star Wars boom and on the other trying to revive the older toys and media that undoubtedly laid the way for it. The predictable result was an especially strange evolutionary dead end, only really comparable to Galaxy Laser Team. The darker flipside is that it marked the final slide of a groundbreaking manufacturer, from making innovative products that provided the groundwork of an industry to throwing out knockoffs of a toy line that had copied its own success. It was a sad end, but probably an inevitable one. Now, I'm calling it a day. That's all for now, more to come!