"Major Matt Mason: Mattel's Man in Space!"

Carter: "You don't have to worry, Major. I played with dolls when I was a kid."
Kawalsky: "G.I. Joe?"
Carter: "No, Major Matt Mason."
Kawalsky: "Oh. Who?"
Ferretti: "Major Matt Mason. Astronaut doll. Did you have that cool little backpack that made him fly?"

- Children of the Gods, Stargate SG-1

Q: What was your favorite toy as a kid?
A: Major Matt Mason. He was a great astronaut: a full-on, lifelike astronaut, made with rubber and wire, kind of like Gumby. He was bendable and poseable, and I went through a few of them because after a while the wires get all twisted.

- Tom Hanks, Disney Adventures magazine interview

Christmas Day, once again. The lessons of charity and goodwill that are associated with Christmas can very often be lost in a flurry of merchandising and money, but even so it's difficult to be too judgemental about the simple pleasures of children and toys. It's a magical time of year for kids, and as such this posting is dedicated to Christmas Past and wonderful gifts.

As I've mentioned in my introduction to the site, I've been a fan of science fiction and fantasy since before I can remember. I was an advanced reader, and as such started reading selections out of my mother's library of fantasy and SF before I'd gotten to double digits in age. However, man does not live by bread alone, and I had all the usual childhood interests in toys, with an understandable influence from my reading choices.

However, keep in mind that I was born in 1961, and when I turned ten in 1971, there was nothing like the selection of science fiction toys that there is on the market today. We were well before the late 70's science fiction marketing boom from Star Wars*, and even then, the marketplace was quite different. Now there's an "action figure" for everything - if you think I'm kidding, go into a specialty comics shop and look around - but in the early 70's, it was either TV merchandising or GI Joe dolls, and sadly, TV had very little to offer the young science fiction afficionado at that point in time.

Ah, but there were certain unexpected advantages to growing up without much money in a rural environment. There was a store called Economy Fair in the nearest town, which, as its name suggested, dealt in lower-end merchandise. In retrospect, I suspect that a lot of their stock probably came from remainders and liquidations, and as such their toy section was a bit out of date and somewhat idiosyncratic, but certainly more affordable than ordering from the Eatons catalogue** would have been.

Regardless, it was out of this uncertain and weedy garden that my mother plucked the rose of my childhood Christmas gifts: Major Matt Mason, "Mattel's Man in Space".

As Tom Hanks says, these were great astronauts. Originally introduced in 1966, they were about six inches tall, and molded out of rubber over a wire and plastic armature, with accordion joints at knees, hips, shoulders and elbows which worked well with the spacesuit look of the figures. The wire frame combined with the accordion joints made the figures very flexible and posable, although over time the wires inside the rubber eventually broke, as might be expected of any piece of wire that a child bends several thousand times.

The basic figures came with a removable spacesuit helmet with a movable yellow visor, but as with any toy like this, there was a whole catalogue of separate accessories, vehicles and buildings available. I had some of them - there was a sort of yellow exo-skeletal power suit, with extendable arms and legs, and I seem to recall some kind of exploration outfit that had tools that you could operate with a combination of tubes and a little plastic bellows system. I also had a space glider, which was a thin plastic shell with a molded pocket at the front for the pilot. I think the only reason I had that particular toy was because the transparent cockpit cover was missing, and it had been marked down as a result, but an elastic band would hold the astronaut in just fine and the damn thing was a pretty good glider if memory serves.

I loved those things, they were the perfect toy as far as I was concerned. I remember that I owned the Major himself, and his alien companion Callisto from Jupiter. I may have had one other figure, maybe Sergeant Storm or possibly another Major, but the accordion joint for his right arm had given up the struggle and torn through, and my childhood imagination couldn't come to terms with a one-armed astronaut. (Although I did recycle one of his feet for Callisto, in spite of the fact that they didn't match at all.)

I made my own accessories, guns and swords (the Major Matt Mason line was surprisingly free of that sort of militaristic baggage) and even produced my own alien race, using tennis balls as bodies and salvaged lengths of wire for arms and legs, with two-prong plugs from dead appliances as heads. Frankly, mine lasted a hell of a lot longer than the Mattel toys, I was certainly using a better grade of wire.

Of course, as children do, I moved on. Eventually the figures fell apart completely, or were consigned to a box somewhere, and I abandoned that part of my childhood. I was saddened to discover that a figure in good shape from the Major Matt Mason line costs hundreds of dollars now, as you might expect from a collectable 40-year old line of science fiction toys. How unfortunate - it's too much money to spend on something like that, even if it would be great to have the Major up on the shelf over my computer, beside my Starcraft Terran Marine, my Japanese VOTOMS battle armour, and the Dalek toy that my friend Alan gave me...okay, maybe I haven't moved on all that far.

- Sid

* Although, coincidentally this is the year that George Lucas' THX 1138 was released.

** The Eatons catalogue was an enormous source of angst in my childhood, the equivalent of supplying someone on a bread and water diet with well-illustrated menus from four star restaurants. The Winter edition with the Christmas offerings used to arrive in September, a few weeks before my birthday, and I would slowly go through the toy section and covet the unattainable therein.

How can I describe it?

My family didn't have much money when I was a kid, and as a result we didn't do a lot of the things that most families did. We never went anywhere on vacation (in fact, I don't recall my father ever taking a week off), I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothing from my three older brothers, and so forth. We lived about 23 miles from the nearest real town, and that, combined with our lack of spare cash, meant that going to the movies certainly wasn't on the list of family activities. 

However, time went on, and as I got older, went into high school and got a part time job, the combination of a little extra money and the guaranteed ride into town on the school bus meant that a slightly larger world opened up to me. However, not having had access to a lot of the finer things in life as a child left me a little cautious, if not nervous, about taking advantage of some of the new options available to me. 

When I was 15, I decided that I would take the proverbial bull by the horns and go to a movie, the very first movie that I would ever see on a big screen. We did have a battered old TV at home, and our makeshift antenna allowed us to get two TV stations, so I had seen movies, albeit marred by poor reception and static, but never at the theatre. As luck would have it, that summer there was a lot of buzz about this new science fiction film that was being released - unhampered by worries of spoilers I had already purchased the novelization and was eager to see the real thing. 

Because it was the summer, the option of using the school bus to cover that 23 mile gap wasn't available, but even at the age of fifteen I was a fairly accomplished hitchhiker. (I figured out once that I hitchhiked something over 20,000 miles altogether before I gave it up, including a trip from Ontario to British Columbia.) So I hitched into town, had a banquet burger at Rombo's, and made my way to the theatre. Paid my money (I have no memory of what the movie cost) but didn't get popcorn, you have to go into these things one step at a time. Found a seat, and waited. 

The lights went down... ...and another new world opened up, as a desperate little spacecraft fled across the screen in a hail of laser bolts, followed by a gigantic pursuer - what seemed like miles of its underside ponderously filling the view. 

It is impossible to describe what it was like to see Star Wars that very first time. I have no idea what other people thought of it, people who had the experience cushioned by years of moviegoing - for me, it was as if the entire movie had been made expressly for my 15-year old science-fiction fan wishes, like some benevolent genie had chosen that moment to fulfill a need that I didn't even know existed. It was an epiphany of teenage experience, and I left that theatre feeling like a different person. 

In the thirty years since, a lot has changed: my view of the world is a little less limited, and to a certain extent I've become jaded by repeated exposure to the media's visions of the future. My honest opinion is that as George Lucas has made his way through the series, each movie has been a little worse than the one before. 

I stand in awe of the breadth of the vision behind the entire story, but it's not a perfect vision - much has been written about the flaws in the various Star Wars movies that I won't bother repeating here.  Star Wars is now an entire industry of action figures, toys, movies, games, TV shows, comics, novels and web sites, far removed from the beginnings of the phenomenon. 

And all that means nothing to that memory from thirty years ago. Nothing will ever change the magic of that first viewing in the dark of the Parkview Cinema, that first view of a galaxy far, far away. Thank you, Mr. Lucas - nothing else has ever been better.

- Sid