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Did you ever follow the story-line and characters defined by the toy company?

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  • acrovader
    Career Member
    • Jan 19, 2011
    • 591

    Did you ever follow the story-line and characters defined by the toy company?

    I rarely ever did, if at all.

    My RAH GI Joes turned into a Megaforce-inspired fighting force. Micronauts, Crystar, and Tron figures intermingled with each other in in their own 'universe', where Baron Karza wasn't Baron Karza but some other tyrant of my own design. Other World, Dragon Riders of the Styx, Clash of the Titans and AD&D figures took on their own adventures that were inspired by the movies Krull and the Dark Crystal. And I gave them all different names from what the toy manufacturer named them. The Mego Black Hole and Buck Rogers good guys (all with different names of my choosing) used the Super Joe Rocket Command Center as their own base to fight off an army of robot invaders (Acroyears!) lead by their evil robot master (Shogun Warriors die cast Mazinga!)..
    I am more than machine. More than man. More than a fusion of the two.
  • Hedji
    Citizen of Gotham
    • Nov 17, 2012
    • 7246

    #2
    The mail away Flexi disc record for Super Powers really helped me know the Kirby characters like Darkseid and Steppenwolf, since I wasn't really familiar with them through the comics. So, yeah, that was my continuity guide for play.

    Comment

    • Bruce Banner
      HULK SMASH!
      • Apr 3, 2010
      • 4327

      #3
      I kept to the official names and scenarios of my figures, but crossovers were common. For instance, IG-88 engaged Maximillian in epic droid slugfests regularly, and my Draconian Guard often served in the Empire's stormtrooper ranks as a mercenary.
      PUNY HUMANS!

      Comment

      • Figuremod73
        That 80's guy
        • Jul 27, 2011
        • 3017

        #4
        My He-man, Blackstar, and MOTU knockoffs often had adventures together in whatever I could come up with. Sometimes it was Eternia based with some characters filling in for others I didn't have. Rocklords would serve under the leadership of Stonedar and Rokkan as spies. Most of my fortresses were cardboard cutouts that I drew.

        Comment

        • Earth 2 Chris
          Verbose Member
          • Mar 7, 2004
          • 32498

          #5
          I followed the storylines, but sometimes added figures from other lines. At one point toward the end of my toy-playing days, some of the GI Joe: RAH figures had joined the Super Powers as a new team of Teen Figures. I even drafted a Targetmaster Transformer as the resident robot character!

          Chris
          sigpic

          Comment

          • MIB41
            Eloquent Member
            • Sep 25, 2005
            • 15631

            #6
            For me the Mego commercials really inspired me to want those figures, but I was pretty much an "independent director" when it came to creating my own adventures. My imagination was off the wall, so they got good use. I will add I never used the company name as a tag line when discussing them as a child either. I wouldn't exactly say that was a colloquialism amongst my friends. No one thought of themselves as "collectors" so the company name served really no purpose in a conversation. It would be like calling GI Joes " Hasbros" or Big Jim's "Mattels". So, for me, the Mego label did not come into play until I was an adult and some distinction had to be made between figure lines we played with as kids. What did I call them back in the day? If they were comic characters I called them superheroes, or the primary character name. But no matter the company name, I loved the commercials for all those popular figure lines, because it sparked my own imagination for a unique adventure.

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            • acrovader
              Career Member
              • Jan 19, 2011
              • 591

              #7
              Originally posted by Figuremod73
              My He-man, Blackstar, and MOTU knockoffs often had adventures together in whatever I could come up with. Sometimes it was Eternia based with some characters filling in for others I didn't have. Rocklords would serve under the leadership of Stonedar and Rokkan as spies. Most of my fortresses were cardboard cutouts that I drew.
              It was hard for me to mix those figures you mentioned with the 3.75" figures. I tried keep them all the same sized. So I, like you, intermingled my He-Man, Blackstar, KOs (along with some Power Lords and Sectaur figures) to create my own adventures independent of the toy manufacturer story-lines. I was the director of my 'movies', per se.
              I am more than machine. More than man. More than a fusion of the two.

              Comment

              • EmergencyIan
                Museum Paramedic
                • Aug 31, 2005
                • 5470

                #8
                I never really considered it before, but I guess I did follow the storylines, for the most part.

                - Ian
                Rampart, this is Squad 51. How do you read?

                Comment

                • palitoy
                  live. laugh. lisa needs braces
                  • Jun 16, 2001
                  • 59204

                  #9
                  Definitely when it came to the superheroes, mostly because I was an avid Super Friends viewer. Same thing with Star Trek, it was like you could act out your own show.

                  Stuff like Big Jim, GI Joe, that was much more free form. I made it up as i went along, I couldn't read well at the time, so the comics they came with didn't really influence me.

                  I don't think the Micronauts comic affected my play with them at all, even though I enjoyed it regularly.
                  Places to find PlaidStallions online: https://linktr.ee/Plaidstallions

                  Buy Toy-Ventures Magazine here:
                  http://www.plaidstallions.com/reboot/shop

                  Comment

                  • sprytel
                    Talkative Member
                    • Jun 26, 2009
                    • 6539

                    #10
                    Clothes and accessories were swapped, and new characters were created. I used to love a good "knockoff", because it was like a whole new character to play with that was unencumbered by any storyline. Darkon from Super Joe became the alien captain of the Enterprise, my Metalman figure was a new hero for Star Wars and GI Joe, etc. Basically, if the toys were in scale, they were fair game to get drafted into service.

                    Comment

                    • Ninersphan1
                      Veteran Member
                      • Jul 27, 2009
                      • 314

                      #11
                      For the most part, I mean I kept the villains as the villains when playing with my Megos, with the exception of Mr Spock, my only Trek Mego, he was an alien super genius villain. The SMDM Bigfoot often found itself fighting my Mego hero's but I didn't mix and match scales to much. Micronauts did not mix with Star Wars, even though they were the same scale. Micronauts were so much different looking to me they just didn't fit in the SW universe.

                      Comment

                      • Boshek
                        Veteran Member
                        • Jun 26, 2011
                        • 415

                        #12
                        Most of the time I followed how the characters were portrayed but often made my own adventures too.

                        I would love to hear stories of how kids nowadays mix the WWE Legends with the modern figures (since both are available at retail in the same waves). Maybe a kid has The Iron Sheik and John Cena teaming up?
                        Check out my YouTube page

                        Comment

                        • TrekStar
                          Trek or Treat
                          • Jan 20, 2011
                          • 8354

                          #13
                          I remember, mixing adventures with Megos and the ahi monsters, Supes vs Franky, Batman battling Dracula,
                          Tarzan vs Wolfman and Aquaman battling CFTBL, I forget who duked it out with the Mummy? think it was Shazam.

                          Comment

                          • Falstaff13
                            Persistent Member
                            • May 28, 2008
                            • 1251

                            #14
                            My far-too-long answer has to be that I started out yes and then branched out to no. When I was first getting into a line when I was little, I did very much keep that line separate as I "learned" the storyline, etc. However, once I had the basics down, I used those storylines as the launching pad. When I first got into Masters of the Universe, for example, I followed the scenarios of the books with the figure (even before it got the story from the cartoon); as the cartoon mythos became the main ones, I adapted to those somewhat as well, creating my own versions of those adventures (in the days of rabbit ears, I actually couldn't pick up the cartoon in its first year but knew the nuts and bolts enough to inform my play). I mixed lines but not scale sizes of figures, so the 9 1/2" Legends of the West could be with the Gabriel Lone Ranger, but no MOTU with them.

                            What changed for me really was the advent of the Super Powers line. Where I'd had distinct play scenarios that separated MOTUand Empire's Legends of the West (my all time favorite line, though I did mix in the Legend of the Lone Ranger and Zorro 3 3/4" figures with them), the need to consolidate space created my most long-standing imaginative landscape. I had one play table on which I kept my figures, and though I had made the space work when shared by those two lines and a few other random figures (Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain were on opposite ends, "facing" off), when I received the SP Hall of Justice along with a few of the first wave (I had gotten Batman separately and basically played with him alone), something had to give to fit everything on one table. I worked out this elaborate-for-my-age scenario about Skeletor having seized power over Eternia (which became the setting for that table), and Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain became one side of the table and the home for all the villains, while the heroes regrouped and huddled behind the now-transported Hall of Justice. My kid logic said that Eternians were larger and stronger than humans, so I could mix the scales of 5" fantasy and 3 3/4" "other" figures. This was around the time I first saw "The Five Doctors" serial on Doctor Who, so I reasoned Skeletor was using his own version of a Time Scoop (often the base of Point Dread, since the top & the Talon Fighter were pretty firmly kept on Grayskull) to bring people to join his army to Eternia (I figured the magic was unstable and brought others as well, hence those joining He-Man in the fight). The main lines I truly collected as a child were MOTU, Super Powers, Legends of the West, and the LJN AD&D, so those scales were combined into this constant battle of good vs. evil in the Eternian wastelands (the space between the playsets). (The D&D figures made for a nice balance, with ones like Northlord used alongside the Masters and Strongheart working well beside Superman.) So long as they either were in logical scale with He-Man or smaller, they were integrated. (Even though I had the entire A-Team, it was the larger figures, so they stayed separate.) As a birthday or Christmas present got me a random figure from another line, they joined in (a Thundercat or a Starrior might be there, as were a couple from GI Joe: RAH plus Han Solo, Lobot, and a couple of droids). The Time Scoop brought in Indiana Jones, who fought alongside Wyatt Earp, while Skeletor had the Cairo Swordsman and Toht as henchmen (the Well of Souls, with the Ark removed, made for a good torture pit beneath Snake Mountain). Even if I didn't have much of a line, what I knew from the cartoons fleshed out the adventures in my head, so that Cobra and Storm Troopers and Parademons were all part of the evil army, and the various Joes were part of the resistance alongside Man-at-Arms, Batman, and Bat Masterson. Even the few Fisher-Price Adventure People I had became part of the action, alongside a "Mr. Goodwrench" set I got one birthday. I primarily used knock-off figures as villains, just to keep sides even. Even as I got older and played with them less, so long as that table was set up, I kept that storyline in my head. Since I wasn't playing with them but didn't just want random figures lying flat, I would occasionally set up little scenes, all continuations of this scenario.
                            Hugh H. Davis

                            Wanted: Legends of the West (Empire & Excel) and other western historically-based figures. Send me an offer.
                            Also interested in figures based on literary characters.

                            Comment

                            • SKotK
                              Career Member
                              • Mar 11, 2014
                              • 574

                              #15
                              I wasn't allowed any Star Trek Mego figures back in the day, but if I'd had them I would have attempted to create my own stories based roughly around the show's format.

                              When Star Wars came along, my first two figures were the Jawa and the Tusken Raider. All my subsequent adventures revolved around a world I created based on my own version of what Jawas were like. They had super-strength, and would beat the crap out of any Stormtrooper or Death Squad Commander who dared give them trouble. Later on, more Jawas were added to the family, and my main Jawa had his own house and neighborhood with a lot of droids hanging around. Down the block was a cardboard box serving as a Sentry grocery store (which was a small grocery chain we had around my area at the time), and it was run by my first actual Mego: the Black Hole Sentry robot. Get it? Anyway, a lot of the adventures involved either Stormtroopers attacking my Jawa's home, or my Jawa crash-landing his ship on some remote planet. A later spin-off was with a Hoth Han Solo and a Hoth Rebel Soldier named "Fred" and "Trevor" respectively, and they flew around in my old Space: 1999 Eagle ship (which I had repainted light blue with "battle damage" spots) and had adventures usually involving being chased by a Star Destroyer Playset. They occupied the same world as the Jawa family, and were friends with them.

                              When I got into RAH G.I. Joe a few years later, it was totally influenced by my reading the comic book first, and not at all by the cartoon which I never watched. So all G.I. Joe adventures ran very much in line with the comic's storyline, and took place in a different universe from the Star Wars one, which was still set up on the other side of the room, and another universe still from the LEGO universe which was in the other corners of the room. Since I was older at that point, G.I. Joe adventures were a bit more mature and serious, and would often carry over to live action role-playing with my brother in the fields or woods by my house, carrying plastic M-16s and pretending to be Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow during the 'Nam.

                              Next came a very brief time with the early Transformers, mostly sticking to the comic book storyline there as well, before I moved on to focusing all my resources on BMX/skateboarding, playing games on my Commodore 64, and attempting to chase girls.

                              --SKot
                              Last edited by SKotK; Mar 17, '17, 12:56 PM.
                              Look what happens when you aren't allowed to play with "dolls"...

                              WANTED: partly-unsealed or bubble-damaged carded Romulan + unbroken plant trap from Mission to Gamma VI

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