As a kid, I collected the hell out of action figures. If it was even remotely semi-humanoid and had moving arms and legs, I had to own it. G.I.Joe, He-Man, Star Wars…hell, I even had those those crappy figures that came with Fisher Price vehicles because they were action figures (in the loosest sense of the term, but still). And there were always cartoons and comics that I desperately wanted toys of, but for some reason, they never got made. Over the years, especially with the rise of the internet, a light has been placed on so many of the prototypes of figures that never saw the light of day, from the Rocky Balboa figure that was going to be part of the G.I.Joe line (canceled after Stallone signed his likeness over to another company for their Rambo line) to the mythical Unicron from Transformers. Hell, even WCW’s P.N. News was going to have an action figure before someone realized they were about to release a fucking P.N. News action figure.
"No baby, no baby, NO!"
But then…then there were entire lines of action figures planned out, to the point of prototypes being made and even catalogues advertising them, that never got released. For a variety of reasons, the lines were killed before making it to K-Mart shelves (what? K-Mart was THE place to get these things in the 80s, so shut the snickering). And while there’s a whole legion of these things, I figured I’d take a look at five of the more interesting ones here on FAN.
5. THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN
Frankly, if images of planned prototypes for this line had ever surfaced, I can almost guarantee this would be #1 on the list. But sadly, all we have is a paper trail showing how Mego – the top figure company in the 1970s – licensed the sword-and-sorcery/sci-fi cartoon and planned to release a line of 3 ¾” action figures to compete with Star Wars (Mego had already released other similar sci-fi lines in their attempt to win back the market from Lucas, including Buck Rogers, the Black Hole and Star Trek). By the time they got around to Thundarr, something happened: Mego filed for bankruptcy. Within the year, Mego was gone and we were deprived of our own personal Ook figure until decades later.
4. WONDER WOMAN AND THE STAR RIDERS
…are you quite done laughing? Okay, well, for the record, this one is interesting to me due to it being a DC tie-in line, regardless of which gender it was aimed at. That it would have been the first (I think) comic book toy line aimed at girls would have been historic for what it was. In 1992, Mattel wanted to launch this series, complete with media tie-ins (comics, cartoon, etc) but it never got off the ground. It had a lot of problems; first, action-skewed girl figures/dolls had a history of not selling well (She-Ra never gained a fraction of her brother He-Man’s popularity, for instance). Second, it had zilch to do with anything Wonder Woman outside of her name and her look, and even that was stretching it a tad. Basically, the entire concept seemed to be “What would a bastard child of She-Ra and My Little Pony lines look like?” The line was scrapped after a lot of promotional work, mostly due to it being absolutely fucktarded.
3. DINOSAUCERS
One thing we 80s Kids lacked that was more than made up for in the 90s was dinosaur figures. Sure, we had the occasional Dinobots and maybe a Battle Bones, but where were all the dino-man hybrids? DIC Entertainment tried to right this wrong with a short-lived cartoon series, and Galoob was brought on board to make some killer action figures out of the now-obscure series. For reasons that still aren’t very clear, Galoob decided to kill the line after producing an entire line of prototypes and showing them off at toy shows. They then sold the molds to a South American company who produced cheap knock-offs of a toyline that never actually existed to begin with, so you can actually find a few of those if you look hard enough.
2. THE CHEETAHMEN
Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you. Even if this line had actually launched (and it was apparently planned), it still would have sucked.
2. DARK CRYSTAL
Hasbro couldn’t get it together to actually release these, even though they made some swanky catalogues showcasing them. I would kill – KILL – for that Garthim figure, even now. Was it because the movie was too dark for kids? Didn’t perform well enough in theaters? I dunno. Garthim. Want. WAAAAAANNNNTTTT!!!!!
1. THE LAST STARFIGHTER
Galoob strikes again, as they bailed out of releasing this line when the early-80s sci-fi film epic failed to meet box office expectations. Now, granted, some of the figures are really shoddy, and I hate the “air guitar” hand pose several of them are molded in, but it would have been really sweet to have some of the cooler ones mixed in with my Star Wars figures.
CREDIT for many of the images used here goes to PlaidStallions, ActionFigureInsider, ToyOtter, ToyArchive and muppet.wikia.com.