Another actor for the toy stage

Good news to follow up on a previous post about 12-inch action figures: the new issue of ToyFare magazine reports that the forthcoming Indiana Jones movie will see Hasbro bring back their 12-inch action figures.

This picture suggests that the new toys will have the gripping hands rather than hinged hands.

All the parts except for the fedora and the head sculpt look like they were off-the-shelf, cobbled together from previous G.I. Joe characters. It will be easy to get an extra one of these guys and put him up in a Star Wars outfit, and bang, you have an older, more grizzled Han Solo, too.

This is great because more characters can be thrown together in the spontaneous, miniature drama that kids produce when they play. Toys are just actors in a story that kids make up as they go. They're little plastic thespians on a stage of imagination.

Can you remember making up stories like that? Adults do the same thing -- make up a story -- when they play role-playing games, either the D&D tabletop variety or video games like Oblivion or Knights of the Old Republic. Grown-ups often need a little help to invigorate our imaginations, so we have structure for our storytelling: Rules and grids on the tabletop impose some order on the chaos of tiny toys and ideas, and a story emerges.

But I can remember when I was a boy with a nimble imagination, and I didn't need any rules to come up with story on the fly with my friends. Whether it was with plastic dinosaurs in a creek, or Matchbox cars driving in roads laced around the roots of a shade tree, or a G.I. Joe about to skydive off a roof, the stories just happened. I find myself collecting toys because they tend to remind me of my childhood when the stories came easily.

When I survey a collection of action figures on the shelf, I see them as a cast of characters. They're the foot soldiers of creativity. Put a few of those characters together, and maybe they'll inspire a new plot that takes shape in the theater of my mind. That's what happened here, when I customized some Star Wars toys to suit a story idea. As long as the kid inside me is still alive and having fun, he'll keep playing with characters and stories.

Maybe one day I'll write something really important. But most of the time, these toys just seem to make up their own stories, and usually they make me laugh ...

I Say Thee Nay

Click the preview, and you can see the full-resolution comic pages in my photo gallery. With the larger view, you can read the writing.

Jango Fett toy review

Give us video game action figures

Here's an idea: More action figures based on video games.

Hasbro, are you listening? Buy the license from Electronic Arts to make "Army of Two" (seen at right) and "Call of Duty 4" 12-inch action figures on a G.I. Joe chassis. Use that highly-articulted body design you were using when you quit making the 12-inch Joes a few years ago, except for the stupid hinged hands that wouldn't' hold anything; use the Kung-Fu grip-style hands already.

Enough with the "statue" figurines that have no real articulation. Those aren't action figures! And enough with making action figures all different scales. Make the video game hero series in 1/6 scale like classic G.I. Joes to increase their play value, so kids and collectors could throw them all together into a pitched battle! The little kids who play and the big kids who collect like customization and interchangeable parts, and 1/6 scale is the way to go.

Buy the license from Ubisoft to make "Rainbow Six Vegas" 12-inch action figures the same way. And "America's Army: True Soldier" would be a given. Hasbro could have a whole series of video game heroes, and the series would continually renew itself as new games became popular. Your market is guaranteed, because you wait until the game is successful before you produce a run of toys. Price them reasonably -- say between $10 and $20 -- and they would be wildly successful.

And here's a salute to Hasbro for coming out with copies of their classic old, basic, 12-inch G.I. Joe "Action Team" figures. They're at Wal-Mart, in a little box for $9. There are land, sea and air adventure guys with the fuzzy hair and beards, just like there were when I was a kid. Now bring back some costumes for these guys, and we're in business. After all, is anybody really buying those Sigma 6 figures in earnest? They keep ending up on the clearance aisle. Better to go with a proven winner. I gave one of the retro-12-inch Joes to my nephew yesterday, and he loved it.

And while I'm on a rant, why did you quit making 1/6 scale Star Wars figures? The little Star Wars action figures are great, but who can afford $60 for those 12-inch Sideshow figures? Soon there will be Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Xbox 360, and then you can add some Star Wars figures to the video game heroes line, too!