M.A.S.K. Article in Tomart’s Action Figure Digest #174
While at Borders over the weekend I picked up issue #174 of Tomart’s Action Figure Digest because, as I flipped through the magazine at the store, I noticed a M.A.S.K. article that included several photos. For $6, I thought it was worth a try. (I flip through Action Figure Digest every now and then, but I rarely buy a copy because the magazine’s usually not all that informative; the net has better information — faster — than pretty much any print magazine these days).
Well, I’ve finally had a chance to “read” the article. I place the word read in quotes because, as with most articles in the magazine, it’s more like a collection of recycled photos with some regurgitated words than it is an information piece of journalism. For an article covering six pages, there’s nothing new here. The photos and scans are all from old product catalogs and box covers while the text, written by Chris Toth, covers the same ground we’ve seen before and includes such gems as:
“M.A.S.K., like many other toy lines, had its share of variations. Repainting of vehicles, figures, and masks was apparent, especially in the foreign action figures. Mask shaping was a very obvious variation and package and art design differences were also evident. Namely, the wide array of M.A.S.K. variations have continued to spark collector interests.”
What? All that basically says is that — “like many other toy lines” — the M.A.S.K. vehicles were released with a variety of color variations and minor detail changes; this is not news or interesting. And the fact that there is collector interest, in my opinion, has more to do with the age of the line (and the fact that more and more people our age, people who remember the toys from childhood, have a disposable income to devote to such worthless acts as collecting old toys) and less to do with the number of variations throughout the line.
The magazine was fun to flip through, and I’ll probably buy another issue in the future, but for pure informational purposes I give this a huge, failing grade.
If you would really like to find some great information on M.A.S.K. you’re better off checking out Albert Penello’s M.A.S.K. site.
A pity. Yeah, I’d definitely have preferred a less generic article. Although, MASK probably isn’t the most wise choice for an article anyway. Heck, it’d make more sense to talk about variants in say, Transformers than MASK. Or even Silverhawks if you want something that wasn’t super huge. As much as I dig MASK, I admit, it was reasonably obscure. Only slightly less so than Visionaries and stuff like that.
Was M.A.S.K. obscure? I mean, there were 75 episodes and the toys seemed to be everywhere during 1986/1987. Visionaries, on the other hand, only had something like 13 episodes before it was shut down.
Maybe it’s personal tastes (and different childhoods), but I would call Silverhawks more obscure than M.A.S.K. Of course, they’re all pretty obscure these days, I guess.
I’m quite surprised that Tomart’s is still around now that there are toy sites for just about everything that has ever existed. Every once in a while they manage to snag a decent exclusive (the Super Powers concept stuff), but most of the time it’s mediocre photography of stuff that’s already been covered somewhere on the ‘Net coupled with “phoned in” articles.
updatedude – I too would have jumped on Mother-1 at $12.