Remembrance of Things, Passed

Was It Real...or Was It Memory?

Memories are odd things. We've probably all had the experience of returning to a vividly-remembered place  to discover it wasn't like that at all. Sometimes with the passage of time we begin to question whether some things we remember ever happened. That's what this post is about: a childhood memory so vivid that it's remained with me my entire life. Yet I've never found evidence that the remembered event happened. Even given my small group of followers, I'm hoping the magic of the Internet will finally give me an answer. That fantastic toy I lusted after one Christmas nearly 50 years ago..did it really exist? Or have I carried a false memory with me for half a century?

In the early 1960s I lived in a small Washington town called Snohomish (pop. 4000). The nearest large town was Everett (pop. 14,000). In Everett was a Sears store. Next to the main Sears building was a sort of annex. I think it served as the garden and hardware department for most of the year. But at Christmas it was transformed into a Toyland to dazzle the eyes and quicken the heart of any pre-teen boy or girl. Especially a boy. Toys were strictly gender-segregated and the boys got all the trains, bikes, airplanes,  guns (of course), construction equipment, and spaceships. One special Christmas I saw a magnificent toy line that brought the last two items together:  a group of futuristic building machines, like Tonka Toys from the 25th Century.

These were the days when Marx and Tonka sold big, ruggedly-built toys representing the era's construction equipment: earthmovers, caterpillar tractors, road graders, steam shovels.The toys I seem to remember were similar to these. They were supposed to be construction machines of the future: larger, fancier, and more exotic than their contemporary cousins. They were big, and therefore expensive, which is why I knew I'd never convince Mom and Dad to buy me one. I estimate they were some 12 to 18 inches in height and length, but I'm remembering their scale as seen by a kid, so they could have been bigger.

I haven't retained detailed pictures of these machines. Rather I have impressions of how they looked. One feature was an exaggerated vertical scale; that is, the cab section of a futuristic steam shovel would be two or three times as tall as a real one. Second was an enormous overall scale. Though the toys were roughly the same size as their realistic counterparts, details like their cabs were scaled such that the machine appeared to be several stories tall. I remember streamlining and futuristic crisp edges, like American cars of the post-fin era. However (as you'll see below) this impression conflicts with the art-deco styling in images that "resonate" in my memory. I also have a vivid impression of lots of wheels. Not the big, fat wheels like on the realistic toys, but many small ones. Where a real tractor would have one big wheel at each corner, the futuristic tractor sported a housing grouping together perhaps a dozen small ones. Oddly, the strongest impression I've carried for all these years is of the "glass" used for the cab windows: a vivid turquoise plastic that to my young mind seemed indescribably exotic, the very essence of the future.

Three or four times in my adult life I've encountered images which remind me of these wonderful machines. None of them evoke a "that's it!" reaction. Rather they stir old memories, tantalizing me without ever coming into focus. Two images with the strongest resonance come from Arthur Radebaugh's amazing series of advertising paintings for Bohn.

This one produces the strongest reaction. The scale, the many small wheels, the segmented steering unit, and the tiny glassed-in cab are much like I remember the toys having. The glass would be turquoise, of course, and the scale of the driver might be even smaller.

What resonates most in this one, apart from the mini-wheels, is the proportion of the cab area. Narrow and quite tall, with a streamlined canopy integrated into the body. The tall chrome grille also seems familiar.

The last resonant image surprised me when I encountered it in one of Alden McWilliams' Tom Corbett comics. I didn't recognize the shape of the "water-manufacturing machine" so much as I did its scale and purpose. This is the sort of job my dreams toys were built to do. That rear-mounted scoop rings a bell, and something about the view of the machine in the final panel is tantalizingly familiar.

I've never met anyone who has heard of these toys. I've never found them in old ads, nor offered on ebay, nor described on baby-boomer toy fan sites. The more I research them the closer I come to concluding that the entire experience was imaginary. Maybe I saw ordinary toys which my memory transformed into things of magic. Or perhaps I saw one of those Bohn ads and over the years manufactured the memory of seeing them as toys.

One thing I know for fact. The annual visit to the Sears Toyland was real, and the store definitely pulled out all the stops to fill their huge room with the most mouth-watering toys. Using several autobiographical guideposts I've determined that I would have seen these toys (if I did see them) sometime between 1959 and 1964, more likely earlier than later. In 1964 I entered high school and this is definitely a memory of my elementary school years.

So I entreat you to spread the word and establish for all time the truth or fiction of one of my childhood's fondest memories. Were the super-machines real?

Things that happened to me

1. Blades and Guns

While I was working as director on the final season of the animated TV series Street Sharks, an odd thing happened. One day Management came in and announced that the legendary Sharks were going to be booted out of their own series and replaced by an entirely new cast of alien dinosaurs.

Like all toy-driven series, Street Sharks was owned (and run) by the toy company. Publicly both studio and manufacturer belched a lot of gas about how toy shows were independently-produced entertainment, not manufacturer-dictated commercials. Everyone inside (indeed, anyone with half a brain) knew otherwise. In this case the toy company had run the latest Street Shark numbers and determined that the finheads were at the end of their long, lucrative career. The company wanted to get busy on what they hoped would be the Next Big Thing. Plugging the dinos into Street Sharks would introduce remaining Shark viewers to the new toy line, giving the rollout an extra boost it wouldn't have were the dinos simply launched cold in their own series.

The last several Street Sharks scripts were ditched and new ones quickly written. The Sharks would meet the team of good-guy alien dinosaurs (and their bad-guy alien dinosaur antagonists), then work with them for an episode or two. After that the Sharks would disappear and the dinos--as I recall their name back then was the Dino-Vengers--would have the remaining shows all to themselves. Once the change was decided upon, there was no time to mourn the Street Sharks' passing. If anything the toy company was annoyed by the transition episodes. They'd rather have dumped the Sharks immediately and got on with it.

We needed to rush out new model sheets because we had no development time. The toy company arranged for us to see their character prototypes. Our studio brass and several of us creative types drove to toy headquarters, a shiny high-rise south of Santa Monica. In a generic conference room we met with their management and chief designers. The designers, pleasant if rather intense fanboy types, proudly displayed their maquettes. These were highly-detailed resin statuettes the same size as the finished toy. The maquettes were modeled in pieces and came with removable accessories. Eventually they'd be the basis of moulds for the actual toys. The maquettes were amazing pieces, bristling with teeth, blades, spikes, guns, and every other mayhem-producing device imaginable.

After the meeting I found myself chatting with one of the toy executives, a tall youngish man who bore an uncanny resemblance to self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins. Our conversation turned to how the studio would tone down the dinos' blades and guns to meet network guidelines limiting violence in cartoons. Clearly the exec chafed at the rules. After all, the blades and guns were the toys' selling points. Then in a moment of remarkable honesty the executive said something that really creeped me out.

“You know,” he said, “we advertise these things as being for 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds, but they're not our real audience. You gotta learn to like these things, and if you're 8 or 9 and aren't already playing with them you never will. But four- and five-year olds, they love this stuff [the blades and guns]. If we hook 'em when they're four, we've got them for years. They'll keep buying 'til they're practically teenagers. We can't say it directly, of course, but four- and five-year-olds, that's who we're really designing these things for.” I remember thinking the guy would make a great tobacco company executive.

Anyway, the Sharks went bye-bye and the Dino-Vengers took their place. The following season the dinos, now rechristened Extreme Dinosaurs, spun off into their own series. Alas, they were not the Next Big Thing. Many, many more maquettes have marched across the conference table since then. Some have hit the mark; most haven't. I wonder how many four-year-olds we hooked with our show. And whether their present-day incarnations--they'd be in their early twenties now--are training their own four-year-olds to love blades and guns.