Sunday, October 12, 2008

I have the power!

And my first son-justified-but-completely-self-indulgent-purchase is...
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(drumroll please)
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That's right. Castle Grayskull beeiaatches! I found it for $10 including 7(!) Masters of the Universe figures with all their swords, comics, and add-ons. Battle armor He-Man, Skeletor, Man At Arms (aka Waste of Time), Orko, and a bunch of others I can't name.

Notice the laser is still on top? Heck, the trap door even works.

Some history. Before I went to kindergarten my entire play-world involved whatever games I could think of for me, my younger sisters, and other various farm animals. Games like old tree-trunk space-ship adventure, church songs to cows, and twirl a cat in a bucket filled our afternoons. Then, within the first week of starting kindergarten, kids with a TV that got something other than PBS told the rest of us about He-Man, and his daily trials with Skeletor.

And they had lots of toys, magical toys.

I'm sure GI Joe was big at that time too. But that never really interested me. He-Man, after all, was the Master of the Universe, not some rinky-dink planet. Universe is always better in my book.

Back to the toys. Of course as a kid, especially in our little class, you had to have the coolest toys to be the coolest kid in class. Most everyone else had at least heard of He-Man and had a couple of action figures to play in the games. I remember being behind the eight-ball so bad that I brought some toy bird to play along as Sorceress. Someone told me later that Sorceress was a woman. I didn't know that.

I wanted to get Castle Grayskull so bad my Kindergarten year I cut it out of our 1983 JC Penney Christmas catalog and hung it on my wall.

Needless to say, for better or worse, no Grayskull for me that year. Or any other year. It became quickly obvious to me that I wasn't going to be the coolest kid in class. Grayskull probably wouldn't have helped anyway.

Now, 25 years later, Grayskull is mine. I mean Noah's.

...jealous?

4 comments:

Cory said...

Is the sticker of the grating with the tentacles underneath the trap door still there?

I always wondered why the otherwise good/benevolent-seeming sorceress kept a cthulhoid monstrosity in the sacred castle to feed people too. It never made an appearance in the cartoons, as I recall.

There were a crapton of He-Man toys too. I guess when you have a press that makes "Muscle Guy body" you can make a billion heads and paint them different colors and call them new characters. "No, this isn't Zodac! This is Stratos! See, he's gray-ish rather than orange-ish!"

Anonymous said...

That's so true. It wasn't until you got into your Moss Mans and Mekanecks that you started sort of "breaking the mold"...although Moss Man is really just a green Beast Man. Whatever. Poor me. I was the kid who had Castle Greyskull...and every other sweet-ass thing from Omega Supreme to Robotix, so I really can't identify with your "play in the cornpile" underprevilaged upbringing. I am glad you finally got one, although I always liked to believe that my old He-Man stuff was worth more than that.

Leviathan said...

CN, all the stickers are on in their proper places. To be honest, I didn't even realize they all had the same moldings until right after I got the new set. Ingenious cost-savings.

I'm banking that they'll come out with a new movie, (ala Transformers, Star Wars, TMNT) that'll re-establish the franchise in the near future.

Cullen, I don't think $10 was representative of worth. I bought it at an old church sale. It was probably some grandmother's toy-set for her grand-kids based on how little the thing was used.

Valfatale said...

I asked for She-Ra's Crystal Castle for three years in a row...never got it. Although now I ask myself why I wanted it so badly. Jake recently made me suffer through the horrible He-man/She-ra Christmas special (he posted here about it) and I didn't know ANY of her friends or villains, or any of the background lore, so I don't think I was ever big into her anyway. But damn if I wasn't upset each time Santa deemed me unworthy of her pink palace. I mean, the thing had a freaking elevator in it!

So cheers to you for finally getting what you wanted. For Noah, of course...