June 1938: A Superman for the Underdog

On the newsstands in May 1938, browsers had their choice of Tarzan in Comics on Parade, Popeye in King Comics, daredevil aviator Captai...

Thursday, January 1, 2009

January 1969: Toying with Superheroes

Many a superhero has been turned into a toy, but how do you turn a toy into a superhero?

Dolls for boys were a touchy subject for American industry in the early 1960s. They were a lucrative potential market, but the idea of having boys “play with dolls” was considered dangerously effeminate at the time. 

Toy manufacturer Hasbro solved the dilemma in 1964 with a bit of deft marketing propaganda — simply replace the term “doll” with “action figure.” And so G.I. Joe was born.

In 1966, Stan Weston, the man who’d created G.I. Joe for Hasbro, came up with the superhero figure Captain Action for Ideal Toy Corp. 

Both G.I. Joe and Captain Action were dress-up dolls like Barbie, the immensely successful fashion doll launched by Mattel in 1959. 

By changing his costumes (sold separately), Captain Action could become a baker’s dozen of superheroes, including Superman, Captain America, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet and the Phantom.  Naturally, Ideal wanted to see a comic book about Captain Action to promote sales. 

You probably see the problem already. How do you write a comic book about a hero whose “power” is to become 13 other heroes, the rights to which are owned by three or four rival companies?

For the five-issue run of DC’s 1968 Captain Action comic book, writer Jim Shooter came up with a viable solution that retained something of the flavor of the toy concept. 

The story, illustrated by Wally Wood and Gil Kane, told us how archeologist Clive Arno had discovered a cache of magical coins on a dig “somewhere in the mountains of central Spain.”

So instead of changing into the costumes of various superheroes, Captain Action could mix and match the super powers of various gods.

If the comic book was short-lived, so was the toy. The Captain Action doll was phased out in 1968, the year the Batman TV show ended and the 1960s superhero craze began to die out.





4 comments:

  1. Paul Zuckerman wrote:
    My action figures, as they were, had been the little toy soldiers, cowboys and Indians that I had as a young kid. I then graduated to using a deck of playing cards or gum cards, and comic books (usually they were the vehicles since they fit four cards). I never even thought about a GI Joe or Captain Action. Later my kids had plenty of action toys, and I keep the fabulous seven of the original JLA on a book shelf of DC Archives.
    I didn't see the short-lived Capt Action series until my return to comics after 1971 but because Wood and Kane were among my favorite artists, I quickly snapped up the series, which I still have. For a toy tie-in, it was quite decent and the art was great, with Kane handling the art on the remaining four issues, with Wood inking all but one. Kane even took a hand at writing s moving tale about Capt. Action's wife. Kane's art in 1969 had exploded dynamically in this period, doing which he did Marvel's Capt. Marvel and returned for a few tour-de-force issues of Green Lantern.

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  2. Edward Bebee wrote:
    A great series if just for the art.
    Also, thanks for the background. A lot of it I didn’t know.
    I remember seeing the doll once in a K-Mart but I couldn’t have told you the year. It must’ve been 1968 because I would have been 4-5 and I can’t imagine I would have remembered it if I had been younger.

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  3. Ken Davis wrote:
    Little bit of extra info: the term "action figure" never legally took hold until 2003 in the Toy Biz vs United States court case, a dispute of tariff charges for toys.
    In this, Marvel/Toy Biz succeeded in getting the X-men character declared as "non-human" so their toy representations were no longer considered to be "dolls", and became "action figures" and thus subject to the same tariff rates.
    But one has to wonder how GI Joe, who IS mostly basic human characters ( and whom the term was coined for) fits into this classification now??

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  4. Salvatore Marlow wrote:
    So much potential in this comic.

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