The Captain and the Kid

Okay, I am here to confess that when I was a boy I played with dolls. Well actually I only played with one doll (I’d like to call it an “action figure” but that term hadn’t yet come into vogue back in long ago youth) and that doll was, of course, Captain Action.

G.I. Joe never interested me but I loved the idea of Captain Action the first time I saw a commercial on one long lost Saturday morning. The good Captain was not only a hero in his own right but he could become other heroes…Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, Aquaman, Captain America, Flash Gordon…simply by switching into different costumes and masks (all sold separately, of course.)

I can only remember two times in my childhood where I actively hounded my poor mother for a specific Christmas gift (I would hint strongly at other times…) once was in my teen years when I just had to have the four-LP set of Chicago at Carnegie Hall (Chicago was a relatively cool band before they let Peter Cetera turn them into the schmaltz factory they were during the 80’s) and the other time was when I was 10 and I just had to have Captain Action.

Mom came through.

I got the main Captain doll…sweet!...and the Superman and Aquaman accessory costumes and I was one happy camper. Never got Action Boy…he seemed a bit lame to me for some reason…but I loved the Captain.

I even bought the 5-issue Captain Action comic book series that DC put out (great Gil Kane and Wally Wood art with stories by Jim Shooter…I still have them, yellowed and dog-eared, in a box somewhere in the garage) though the adventures I came up with on my own seemed a hundred times more interesting.

I’m not sure why I thought of Captain Action today but the memory still warms the imaginative little boy who still dwells somewhere deep inside the cynically optimistic soul of the old man I am today :-)