Toys of Christmas Past

Hey, Heroes!

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Just Joshing With You, a new Patreon-exclusive place for me to dump my musings. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, both as a way of exorcising my writer’s block demons by word-vomiting more habitually, consistently and without boundaries; and as a way of giving you some much-deserved content™. Let’s face it, this relationship has been a bit one-sided of late and I really don’t do enough to show you how much I appreciate your support. So thank you for supporting me and the channel, and I hope you enjoy this festive celebration of rampant consumerism in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Growing up, we were very much an ‘Argos family’. Argos, for the uninitiated, is basically the UK’s answer to Sears, a catalogue retailer that inexplicably continues to exist in defiance of online shopping.

My older sister and I would spend hours leafing through the Argos Christmas catalogue, months in advance, jotting down the product numbers of our most-desired items. My parents would then head into town, order everything in-store and subsequently pay it off on credit throughout the year. And that was it. Christmas shopping done for the whole family. Who says the internet has made things more convenient?

Recently, Argos celebrated 40 years of catalogue shopping by compiling an online archive of every one of their hefty yuletide tomes from the past four decades with their excellent Book of Dreams site.

Join me as I peruse the pages of my childhood Christmases and share a few memories along the way.

1994

Christmas ’94 would have been around the time I first started to become aware of what Christmas actually was and engaged in choosing what toys I wished to receive. Having said that, I hadn’t yet fully graduated from Fisher-Price to superheroes.

I’ve pulled out this page featuring a nice big spread of X-Men figures. By 1994, the X-Men animated series had been on-air in the US for two years already, although I’m guessing it didn’t arrive on this side of the Atlantic until a year or two later. Either way, this was the height of Mutant Mania and Wolverine gets some prime real estate in this Christmas ’94 catalogue. I was a bit too young to get my hands on the early Toy Biz X-Men line, although I would inherit a well-loved Wolverine and a paint-chipped Cyclops from older cousins as the years went by.

Aside from a couple of Secret Wars figures in the 1985 catalogue and an unusual Spider-Man figure made by a company called Ideal in the late 80s, this was the first time any Marvel toys would be prominently featured in an Argos catalogue. Serendipitously, it was around this time that I was just starting to explore the world of comic book heroes through games, cartoons, and indeed toys. No wonder then that Spider-Man, Batman and Wolverine figures, play-sets and costumes would define my childhood for the remainder of the decade.

1995

The following year saw the release of Batman Forever.

It’s funny; outside of the Arkham games and my undying love for the 1989 film, I’m not much of a Batman fan nowadays. I can count on one hand the number of comics starring the Dark Knight I’ve read in the last 10 years and I remain totally ambivalent towards the Nolan movies. That being said, the character was instrumental to my early love of superheroes.

As a kid, Batman is so easy to understand. No weird superpowers or lore to memorise; he is totally unambiguous in his motivations. You don’t even really need to know anything about his alter ego Bruce Wayne to enjoy the character. He looks cool and he punches bad blokes. ‘Nuff said!

Batman Forever was really my first comic book movie. I may have already been watching Batman: The Animated Series on Saturday mornings and had played my older brother’s copy of Batman Returns on the Mega Drive but Batman Forever is the first time I really interacted with the character and attempted to understand his world. Not a great introduction in hindsight but as a lifelong Jim Carrey fan and lover of all things camp, I can still find a lot to like about Forever (the banging soundtrack, if nothing else).

Anyway, back to the toys. I had a bunch of Batman figures that I had accumulated over the years, including some that must have been Happy Meal toys because they had no articulation and were, quite frankly, a bit crap. But the figures that really stick out to me from this catalogue are the Kenner-produced Legends of Batman line. These figures were a weird jumping on point to the character for a young me but I absolutely loved them! They came out at that point in the mid-90s when toy companies were trying to pitch their action figures at older collectors but still make them on the cheap with poor paint applications and kid-friendly designs. They featured Elseworlds versions of the Dark Knight and his supporting cast from different time periods. Awesome.

I had a ton of these figures. Future Batman, Cyborg Batman, Medieval Knight Batman. But chief among them was a design that I still love to this day: Pirate Joker. Shiver me timbers!

I also have to devote some column space to the Batman dress-up costume at the bottom right of the page. I’m kind of overwhelmed by the tactile sense of nostalgia I have for that costume. I can almost still smell/feel the itchy polyester cowl and cape which was prone to giving static shocks. Very good times.

1996

The following year brought us toys based on the Spider-Man animated series, again two years after it first aired in the US. This seems about right to my memory because I vividly remember when the show began airing in the UK even though I would have been a bit too young in 1994. If Batman: The Animated Series first ignited my interest in comic book heroes, the 90s Spider-Man cartoon poured a bottle of lighter fluid all over it.

Once again, we see a fancy dress costume that I have (sort of) fond memories of. Don’t get me wrong, I adored this costume but, even as a kid, my concerns with comic accuracy interfered with my enjoyment.

I am of course talking about that confounded mouth hole.

Like, I get it now. They were wary about giving a full-face cotton mask to kids that were going to run around and potentially suffocate. But at the time, I despised that mouth hole. It didn’t make me feel like a superhero with the proportionate speed, strength, and agility of a spider. It made me feel like a dork. Which, of course, I was.

I always really loved those mini-playcases and I think my parents liked buying them for me more than full-size action figures. For the price of one figure, you got a whole playset with a bunch of characters to play out different scenarios with.

That particular playcase featured Mysterio’s Wonder Studio, replete with deadly traps and smokescreens. I think I still have this stashed away at my parents’ house; it was a big childhood favourite. Not pictured in this catalogue but also a big deal to me as a kid was the Spider-Man Projectors line. These were 10-inch figures with basically a View-Master in the chest that you would look through and see stills from the cartoon. The actual “projector” function wasn’t particularly impressive but just having a 10-inch Spider-Man doll that I could take everywhere and even sleep next to cemented him as one of my favourite characters from such a young age.

1997

Christmas ’97 brings us an even better look at the Spider-Gimp suit plus more Spider-Man animated series action figures.

That Spider-Mobile was always my white whale. I asked for it year after year but it was too high-ticket an item for my folks. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wasn’t hard done by; I recognise what a privileged and plastic-junk-filled childhood I had. Even so, I wish I’d got my hands on that damn Spider-Man car and I frequently have to remind myself that it would be an insane thing to buy as a 27-year-old.

Also, peep those Street Sharks. F**k yeah! I’m not ashamed to say that the Street Sharks were my generation’s Turtles. I went ALL IN on the cartoon and toys. I’d quite like to do a deep-dive video on Street Sharks at some point. Jawsome!

2002

Skipping ahead a few years to 2002 and Spidey is once again the headline act of the Christmas catalogue. No surprises really since this was the year of the first Raimi movie but what stuck out to me is that toys based on the film are so under-represented here.

As you can see, Spidey figures had come a long way since the 90s with the Spider-Man Classics line. These 6-inch figures featured more anatomically-correct sculpts and more articulation than a roomful of speech therapists.

Not a lot sticks out to me from this page. I had a bunch of Spider-Man Classics and movie figures from this time but I was getting to the “they’re not toys, they’re action figures” age of displaying them neatly on bookshelves and under no circumstances ever playing with them. I think I still secretly wanted that Spider-Car though.

From this point onwards, I received fewer toys and was more concerned with actual comics, video games and that early swathe of Marvel movies. The toys I did buy were the more heavily sculpted and articulated Marvel Legends and Marvel Select lines that I had to go to dedicated toy stores or comic book shops to seek out. With that, my days of poring over the pages of Argos catalogues and counting down the days until Christmas morning were over.

Thanks for reading and thanks as always for supporting Panels to Pixels.

– JS