Few days ago my pal Paul came over visiting and we were cooking a vegan casserole with tofu-bolognaise and homemade bechamel sauce. I made a (burnt) cake while Paul was doing some little photoshop fun with my picture that I had taken of my HASBRO 3 3/4″ Stormtrooper.
Looks just like in the movies, doesn’t it? ^^
I went on those last summer days several times outside and found myself all of a sudden in the deep woods of Maridun where the Amani head hunters reside. One of them is the bounty hunter among Jabba’s entourage, simply known as AMANAMAN.
Amanaman is one of the most obscure characters in Return of the Jedi.
When I was a kid, I watched the movie over and over again, countless times, especially the first part that is set at Jabba’s palace, which I watched on slow motion/single frame to find this guy. The Amanaman action figure, which was originally released as demanded by fans in the Power of the Force line, was available in West Germany as part of the Return of the Jedi franchise. So this was my only hint as a kid, when I got this awesome, but also very strange STAR WARS figure. The action figure came with a kind of spear or fork, that was “decorated” with creepy shrink heads and a rotten humanoid hand.
I was nearly about to flip when I finally recognized Amanaman in the background of Jabba’s entourage, maybe just about a second on the screen.
This is what I really like about the Kenner STAR WARS line: No matter how obscure (and unimportant for storytelling) the character was, they nearly covered them all. That wide range of diversity in non-human characters in the STAR WARS movies is what provides the awesomeness!
Here are some pictures of my Dad’s original 1966 CORGI Batmobile. It’s an awesome toy!
The body is diecast and inside are two little plastic Batman and Robin figures, very detailed and hand-painted. It’s got some cool extras: A button on the hood releases a hacksaw through the vehicle grill and when your driving, a little red plastic flame starts flickering out of the exhaust. The three silver “chimneys” on its back are rocket launchers, or Stalinorgel, as they were called in the household of my grandfather were my Dad’s Batmobile was permanently parked. So it was like on TV! Only at that time I had just seen the feature film with Adam West as a rerun on TV, but never the actual show (I wonder if my Dad did?).
There was no toy like this when I was a kid. I’m still amazed by its details: You can take out the little plastic figurines, the button of the (metal!) hacksaw and the little gear-wheel for firing the rockets (I mostly used matches. Sometimes lighted ones…) are still operating. The wheels are also still functioning. They have real rubber tires and bat-sign wheel caps. When you turn the Batmobile around there’s a full Batman frozen in metal on the car’s belly.
Here’s my tribute to two generations of Batman-fandom, passed along from father to son. (The Batman of my childhood was mainly still the 70’s Batman due to weird publication policies back in those days in West Germany)
Several Days ago, I took my G.I. JOE Beach Head 1986 version out to my favourite place in the woods on a mission.
We see him on a lookout and preparing an ambush. He is armed with a submachine gun, a pistol, some knives and different grenades, a small crossbow and his backpack is actually a jetpack. YEAH! Smell the awesomeness:
In fact it’s a not an original 1986 Hasbro version but an authorized european version by british company Palitoy who were the official distributers of the G.I. Joe franchise under the name Action Man. In the early eighties they went on to follow the success of Kenner’s 3 3/4″ Star Wars figures by putting up a new line called Action Force. After a takeover of Palitoy by Hasbro in the middle of the eighties, Hasbro marketed their own 3 3/4″ G.I. Joe line as Action Force in Europe, introducing their multi-jointed action figures of that size.
So the stuff hit Germany by the end of the eighties, early 90s when I was in school and outside a racist mob applauded when Neo-Nazis went on burning and murdering refugees and (mostly turkish) immigrants in the reunited Gross-Deutschland. The situation these days is very similar before the outbreak of violence and pogroms, so maybe that’s why I took that old figure from the shelf.
I’d like to think of him more of a partisan guerilla-fighter, a lone-wolf like one-man-army, taking down Nazis. Something like an antifascist version of blending Rambo with the Punisher. My kind of “hooded hero” of the violent nineties.
In fact it’s not originally “my” Beach Head: I traded him with a friend at school those days. He glued him into an art-project and I think after that he wanted to get rid of him. You can still see the glue-marks on his shoes. His “ammo-purse” is missing in action.
Here is a nice overview of the Beach Head action figure at action-force.dk
And the 1986 original over here at YO JOE!
From his character file:
“Most people get mad on occasion or at least get irritable – not Beach Head. He thinks anger is a waste of time and energy. Rage clouds the vision and pollute logic. Fury impaires judgement and makes you careless. The results of anger are totally unacceptable for Beach Head. He doesn’t get angry…he gets even!”
Well, you haven’t to watch Dexter to see here the pattern of a homicidal psychopath with some kind of Code…
So here’s a cool commissional artwork by Robert Atkins:
Plastic Idols 