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Totemic Artefacts

Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 2 (Part 2)

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We also got some new action figures to go along with our new models, all based on stories from the second season. This wave is a healthy mix of variants and new figures (and, like TNG, once again spread out across 1994 and 1995), and really, just about more than anything else from this period, tantalizingly points at how interconnected the worlds of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really did seemed poised to be at one time. First up, let’s talk about the predictable variants: There’s “Emissary” Jadzia Dax and Doctor Bashir, that is, them in the TNG-style two-piece suits with the polygon design instead of the DS9-style black jumpsuit and open collar shirt. I talked about Dax the first time I did Playmates DS9 because she’s one of my favourite toys in the whole line, expertly re-using the already excellent Duty Uniform Deanna Troi body sculpt. I don’t have Bashir though, because his Wave 1 figure was already pretty good and he feels more superfluous to me. There’s also Q in the DS9 jumpsuit, from “Q-Less”. But really, when it comes to Qs, my advice is still to stick with the TNG Wave 3 judge’s robes one.
 
Q is your biggest hint as to the defining feature of this wave: In a word, Crossover. In fact, almost the entire 1994 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine wave was actually made up of Star Trek: The Next Generation characters-The only actual DS9 figures in this first batch are “Emissary” Dax and Bashir. To complete your “Q-Less” set that you apparently have for some inexplicable reason there’s Vash, who, interestingly enough, gets her one and only Playmates effigy on this side of the wormhole. There’s also, somewhat astoundingly, yet another Lieutenant Thomas Riker! And this is 1994, so well before he made his non-TNG reappearance, so it makes precisely zero sense for him to be here. He is straightforwardly the laziest and most indefensible variant in the Playmates line so far, being a literally just a DS9 Wave 1 Miles O’Brien with a TNG Wave 1 Will Riker head, creating a kitbash the likes of which will never and can never be explained.
 
I mean come on. No one, but no one rolls up the sleeves of their uniform except Miles O’Brien. That is an iconic distinguishing physical tic of the chief’s. Without even getting into questions about why the hell Thomas Riker is on Deep Space 9, that body simply should never have been re-used.
 
 
Thankfully, the remainder of this first batch is considerably more interesting. Miles O’Brien gets a lot of love (his body being repurposed for a nonsensical Thomas Riker notwithstanding): Next year he’ll be outfitted with his dress uniform, but in 1994 he gets an absolutely vital variant: “Chief Miles O’Brien in Starfleet Duty Uniform”. That’s right, this is Transporter Chief Miles O’Brien. Miles O’Brien from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As one of the very first characters to be introduced in the modern age of Star Trek, it’s wonderful to have a representation of Miles from this stage of his career.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 2 (Part 1)

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1994 didn’t see Playmates unveil a lot for fans of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine side of the Paramount lot, but what it did release was more than enough. Because for the first time, Starbase Deep Space 9 was finally immortalized in plastic.

If you wanted a model of the one-time Terok Nor back in the day, your options were pretty limited. There was, of course, the laughably expensive and decadent pewter desk sculpture I talked about in my essay on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine, but you weren’t going to be getting that. AMT/ERTL released a model kit of the station in 1993, but model kits are aimed at a very specific sort of fan, and I was not that sort of fan (I did eventually get one, as well as the 1995 re-release that had a fiber optic lighting system, but my crafting skills are so hopelessly inadequate I was never going to be able to do it justice). No, for the overwhelming majority of people, it was going to be up to Playmates to give us a version of Deep Space 9 we could take home and display on our shelves. It’s kind of surprising this wasn’t a 1993 release: After all, you’d expect people would want the titular space station straight away-The Enterprise was among the first wave of releases for the Star Trek: The Next Generation line. But the Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line was always smaller and more subdued than its sister, and maybe there was concern during development as to how the new show was going to take with people.
 
 
Even when it did come out, I remember this being a right bastard to track down. I seem to recall only actually seeing it in the toy store once, and I keep kicking myself for not springing for it then and there. I never saw it again until eBay was a thing, by which point it was going for astronomical prices as a collectible. Long story short I finally was able to find one for a more reasonable investment (*in 2009*) and I’m proud to say DS9 now occupies a prominent position in my collection. In terms of detail, this sadly trends to the toyetic side of things, and some of the more subtler nuances of the shooting model have been lost in translation. But, it’s of a piece with the Playmates Enterprise at least. Speaking of! The Deep Space 9 toy actually comes with a little miniature Enterprise that snaps into one of the docking pylons! It’s little touches like this that really endear the Playmates line to me, and to this day this is one of my favourite things about this model.
 
 
Primarily because it demonstrates how intertwined and interconnected Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were supposed to be in the beginning. The Enterprise is featured prominently on the box art, and Deep Space 9 is specifically called a “command post”, which reminds me of those old jumbo GI Joe or Micro Machines playsets you could get to play with all your figures in.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Waves 3 and 4

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The final group of toys in Playmates’ Star Trek: The Next Generation line (that is, before all of their Star Trek toys were consolidated under one homogeneous brand label) have something of an unusual release history. The third wave released in three parts over the course of 1994, surrounding the premier of the movie Star Trek Generations, with a fourth dropping in the summer of 1995. I love how, as far as Playmates was concerned, Star Trek: The Next Generation fully remained an extent, relevant and marketable brand for at least a full year after the TV series itself went off the air. Even though the show was over, Star Trek: The Next Generation remained very much a present cultural phenomenon for some years after the fact, a theme I’ll be returning to in the remaining chapters of this volume. It almost kind of makes you wish the show itself had been around to bear witness to that, but that’s beside the point tonight. Tonight, it’s all about the toys.
 
And what toys they were! Playmates had already endeared itself to me as the makers of probably the greatest plastic effigies of anything ever, and these waves contained a number of my absolute favourite figures in the whole line. I am combining both of them into one essay, however, because a couple of these batches, particularly the 1995 one, didn’t quite have the same volume of releases as past years and I’ve already covered a great many of them in previous posts in this series. There was just no way I wasn’t going to talk about Tasha Yar, Ro Laren and Duty Uniform Deanna Troi and Beverly Crusher in the bridge crew essay, just to name a few notable examples. There were still a lot of new figures, of course, but the first set of releases from these waves continued the pattern from wave 2 by giving us a lot of variants: Aside from Duty Uniform Deanna, we got Commander Riker as a “Malcorian” (from “First Contact”), Geordi as a “Tarchannen III Alien” (from “Identity Crisis”), Worf in a “Starfleet Rescue Outfit” (from “Birthright, Part II) and two figures based on “Unification”: Captain Picard and Commander Data as Romulans.
 
 
I didn’t have any of those figures except Captain Picard, and let me tell you, boy is he ever a boring toy. Although the likeness is absolutely spot-on, you’d expect that from Playmates by now and he has a whopping five points of articulation: Two shoulder joints, two swivel arms and a neck joint. He’s so boring they had to include the “Romulan Disguise Kit” as an “accessory” which, upon careful inspection, seems to mean not just his clothes and facelift, but a generic Starfleet bag with a Romulan insignia on it. Romulan!Picard also suffers the same fate as Guinan and Doctor Crusher (and another figure in this line) by being plagued by the curse of the long jackets: His Romulan hoodie or whatever is a solid chunk of hard moulded plastic, which means any action in the torso or legs area is out of the question.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 1

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I first learned Playmates were going to be doing a line based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on the cardback for one of my Star Trek: The Next Generation figures. In fact, on the back of my new Sela figure you can still see in bold red lettering the excited announcement that “toys and accessories” from the new show are “coming soon!”. Some of the figures from Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 and the Original Series line (here called “Classic Star Trek”, which is how I knew that show for ages) even came with a mini checklist of all the Playmates toys released so far, with headshots of the figures and close-ups of the vehicles, playsets and prop replicas.

On the back of that checklist was one of the first-ever promotional shots of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast-It’s the one where everyone’s standing around in costume in front of a brown shag curtain haphazardly draped over the walls and floor of a photo studio somewhere. This was the first static image I ever saw of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cast together in one place, and it was the first chance I had to get a good look at them. What’s also interesting about this promo is what it promised was coming in the Deep Space Nine line: All of the characters you’d expect, as well as vehicle toys of Deep Space 9, the Runabout and a Caradassian Galor Warship. That will be interesting to go back and examine in a few months, methinks.

Even though I followed this launch fairly closely (well, as closely as I could at the time at least), it took me a *very* long time to actually bring anyone from this line home. At first it was due to simple wariness: While the characters looked cool and all and I dug the general design aesthetics, in 1993 I still wasn’t completely 100% sold on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as an overall thing yet. So while I definitely saw these on store shelves at the time, I took care to admire them from afar-I was afraid to outright ask for them, and given a choice between spending my action figure money on one of these as opposed to a Wave 2 Star Trek: The Next Generation figure, the choice seemed clear. This turned out to be a cripplingly poor decision on my part, however: Within just a few months I was utterly hooked on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and I would have killed for these figures and, of course, that was just when the Playmates Star Trek line in general was starting to retreat from department stores, and the first casualties were the lowest selling toys. Namely, the comparatively more niche Deep Space Nine figures, which seemed to disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

For practically an entire *decade*, I languished in regret knowing I had very likely missed my one chance to bring home my second space family, as well as the last remnants from the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew (namely Tasha Yar and Ro Laren).…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 Errata

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You can’t have action figures without some place to put them. Even if you’re too embarrassed to move them around in a playset, you’ve got to admit having a lavish plastic display to pose them all in looks awesome on your shelf. It was Wave 2 that started giving us those playsets for our Star Trek: The Next Generation friends-I’ve already talked about the bridge playset in this book. Although it technically came out as part of this wave, I felt compelled to talk about it back in the first wave because I really just wanted to go all-out gonzo with the first Playmates essay. This leaves me with one extra essay to write about and not a whole lot to fill it with here, however. So, let’s see how long I can talk about what’s left of Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2.

The other playset released this year was a transporter room. Now this was really cool because it actually worked by way of an old theatrical trick called Pepper’s Ghost. In a Pepper’s Ghost illusion, a one-way reflective surface is placed between the audience and a hidden room on the other side. There’s also an overhead light source that, when raised or lowered, makes any objects in the room appear to appear and disappear out of thin air. This is how the Haunted Mansion in the Walt Disney resorts create the illusion of the dancing ghosts in the ballroom at the beginning of the ride, and it’s also how Tupac Shakur appeared onstage at Coachella in 2012 and Michael Jackson did the same at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards (not, as is often reported, through the use of holography. We don’t have holodecks yet).

A lot of times in a Pepper’s Ghost trick the hidden room is painted black so that the “ghost” seems to materialize right in front of the audience, when really they’re in another closed off area. The Playmates transporter conveys the illusion a little differently, with the mirror dividing the transporter pad in two. You put your prospective away team member in the area behind the mirror, close the door and manually raise the sliders (which wonderfully take the form of the LCARS finger panels from the TV show and make a satisfyingly accurate shimmering sound when activated either way) as the overhead light gradually shifts. Obviously to give the illusion your character is standing on the pad both sections have to look identical, and this also necessitates the transporter becoming more of a chamber than a pad. As a matter of fact, during the seven years I didn’t watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, but did have these toys, I completely forgot the transporter room was even a pad on the show at all-I completely mentally retconned it as being a chamber and always remembered it as such until I saw “Encounter at Farpoint” again for the first time.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 Vehicles and Role Play

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The first wave of Playmates’ Star Trek: The Next Generation toys focused primarily on the Enterprise and its crew: For action figures we got (most of) the bridge crew, and for electronic light-up ships we got the Enterprise itself as well as a Shuttlecraft. Following along with the accompanying Wave 2 action figure releases, which both expanded upon the Starfleet crew and gave us a greater assortment of aliens, the Wave 2 vehicles included a Klingon Attack Cruiser and a Romulan Warbird.

Both of these ships are very nicely detailed. Actually, in hindsight, I have to say they’re a bit more impressive than the Playmates Enterprise itself: The colours and proportions of both are screen accurate, which is really important when dealing with starships this distinctive and memorable. The Attack Cruiser does fare a little better in this regard: All of the little details and elevations Rick Sterbach sculpted onto it to emphasize shadowplay with the studio lights have translated perfectly to consumer-grade plastic, and as such I’ve always considered it one of the most bang-on replicas of the Playmates line. The Romulan Warbird only suffers a bit due to limited lighting: Just like all the vehicles, only the Warbird’s nacelles light up, and while that’s nice, one of the best things about the Warbird studio model is all the beautiful windows on the…prow I suppose, or beak section. That gives the ship an incredible sense of scale and grandeur the toy just isn’t capable of recreating, and this hurts the Warbird more than probably any other ship in the fleet, save perhaps the Enterprise itself.

(One of my biggest disappointments is that Playmates never made a Ferengi Marauder. You’d think given Letek’s headlining role in the first wave this would be one of the light-up starships they’d release first, but it never happened. Maybe it was because the Ferengi didn’t play as prominent a role in the sixth season, although given all the callbacks to first that seems strange. Or maybe they were holding it back for a possible inclusion in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line. Although perhaps its for the best, as a Ferengi Marauder without windows would have left me heartbroken.)

What the Warbird does have are some awesome sound effects. Both the Attack Cruiser and the Warbird have four sounds: Cloak, Disruptor blast, “shield hit” and impulse. Neither one has what I’d call especially accurate samples, but the Warbird’s at least were terribly cool sounding. I think I pounded that disruptor cannon button enough times to wear both it and the sound chip out. At least, that’s the excuse I’ll give for the electronics in mine no longer working. Also, my Attack Cruiser is missing its battery case cover for some reason, as well as one of the “prongs” at the front of the ship, which is really annoying. I seem to recall getting my Attack Cruiser (and maybe my Warbird too) one Christmas at my great-grandparents’ house on my maternal grandfather’s side.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2

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As the Playmates line of Star Trek: The Next Generation action figures expanded, I have to confess I started to get less of them. I know it’s hard to believe and that I have to keep stressing this, but I was actually never a hardcore Star Trek fan, and thus didn’t possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every single character and every single episode. When it came to toys, I was primarily interested in the Enterprise crew and the most recognisable aliens: My fondest memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation are of images and scenes, not specific episodes or stories. So, as Playmates began to expand beyond the main cast of characters I wasn’t as feverish about keeping up with their releases.

It’s the second wave where this began to manifest. That’s not to dismiss the toys from this wave and beyond in the slightest: They’re all of the exact same peerless quality you’d expect from Playmates Star Trek, just to articulate and further highlight where my interest in this franchise really lies. This is the wave where variants, one-shots and reoccurring characters started to become more pronounced (for obvious reasons), and the simple fact is I just wasn’t as interested in that stuff. I still had a fair amount from this wave, but I didn’t have *all* of it. In fact, I still don’t, and I’m not likely to ever finally “complete” my collection as it were. I’m not the kind of collector who has to horde absolutely every release from every line imaginable: I like to have representations of my favourite characters, and I don’t really need more than that. So I’ll review the figures from this line that I have, and only give a passing mention to the ones I don’t.

A few of these ones I’ve already looked at as part of the bridge crew retrospective last season. Even though they weren’t part of the Wave 1 1992 releases, it would frankly have been ridiculous of me *not* to look at Doctor Crusher and Guinan,who in fact didn’t actually get plastic likenesses until 1993. It’s especially dumb that Doctor Crusher wasn’t among the early releases. Normally I would grumble about sexism in the toy industry leading manufacturers to believe that action figures based on girls don’t sell and aren’t popular (which is sadly based on real, material sales figures in spite of what certain activists would have you believe and how much we might want to think), except Deanna Troi was part of the initial wave, and she seems like far less of an action-oriented character, and thus a weaker candidate for an action figure, than Doctor Crusher. Maybe it’s because Deanna’s not a mom. The Bev released as part of Wave 2 is the rather boring, unplayable version with the lab coat moulded to her body and hands that can’t hold anything, but for quite some time she was the only Bev we got.

Speaking of Bev being a mom, Wesley Crusher is (regrettably) another new release from this wave.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 3 – Wave 1 Vehicles and Role Play

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The USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D is one of my favourite designs for anything ever. I have been fascinated by this starship and the way it looks for *literally* almost as long as I can remember to a degree that borders on outright obsession. I cannot fully put into words what the Enterprise means to me because even I’m not sure I fully understand the true depths of that meaning myself. Whenever I look at it I’ll sit entranced its curves, the vibrant colouring of the panels and the deflector dish or the slope of the stardrive section as it flows elegantly into that giant saucer. I don’t even think there’s just one thing about it that makes it so incredibly beautiful; it’s a genuine work of art in the sense everything about it sings together in perfect harmony such that you could stare at it forever.

The Enterprise is the centrepiece of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s iconography for me. It’s the one piece that sums up everything that I found so powerful and captivating about this series’ look and feel. When I would get merchandise for the show, I would often cut apart the various boxes and hold onto them: To me, the artwork and iconography was so beautiful and it so consumed my imagination I wanted to somehow be able to physically *hold* it, as if that would bring me closer to the emotions and atmosphere they conveyed, or that I might perhaps be able to channel that through me and bring some of it into my own being. My room would be littered with various carboard effigies of the Star Trek: The Next Generation logo or Playmates’ own space art that adorned their packaging: Dissociated, scattered signifiers of some ethereal confluence. And there always was that azure tinged Enterprise.

When I finally got the Playmates Enterprise toy it was an absolutely monumental moment in my life. Here finally was my very own spirit totem of this ship of the imagination, in three dimensional plastic instead of cardboard. My constant exposure to various representations of the Enterprise and my obsession with its design meant that I had become an expert on its every detail, but not in the classic Star Trek Nerd sense of memorizing deck blueprints or anything like that: My resources were disjointed publicity stills, toyetic caricatures, half-remembered effects shots and ViewMasters. What I knew best was the Enterprise‘s *soul*, not its body. And even then my intimate familiarity with every detail of the Enterprise‘s vibe allowed me to make some specific observations about this new toy.

First of all, even I could recognise Playmates’ Enterprise was based on the four-foot shooting model, not the six-foot one. This may sound like pedantic nerdery, but it’s actually hugely important to me because there are significant and noticeable visual differences between the six-foot and four-foot models and I think the six-foot model best captures the Enterprise‘s divine essence.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 2 – Wave 1 Aliens

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Any self-respecting toy collector knows you’ve got to have bad guys for your heroes to fight against. And yet this is Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in spite of what certain creative figures might thing, fighting is pretty much the last thing we ought to be considering. And so we see another manifestation of the curious dual role the Playmates line must play: Fun enough for kids to want to play with and bang together, and sophisticated enough to engage adults.

Playmates knew the Enterprise crew had to meet some people while they were out there exploring space, so as part of the first wave of releases they included a handful of aliens you could either speak or spar with: A Borg drone, a Ferengi, a Romulan commander and Gowron. In hindsight these are sort of interesting picks; the first wave came out in the wake of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s fifth season and was clearly meant to capitalize on it-Just take note of how Captain Picard is wearing his “captain’s jacket” and, of course, the Star Trek 25th Anniversary branding. But while these aliens are in many ways the iconic ones for Star Trek: The Next Generation, none of them played especially major roles in the fifth season (with the notable exception of the whoppers that were “Redemption” and “Unification”): If anything, you’d at least expect a Cardassian to be among the initial releases, but nope. Presumably Playmates figured that since this was the first set of Star Trek: The Next Generation releases, it’d be best to start with the recognisable staples.

Even so, the inclusion of a Ferengi pirate, particularly one who looks like this, is an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. Although they were intended to be Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s primary antagonists, they were supplanted at the beginning of the third season by the Romulans, and they haven’t really played any significant role in the TV series’ plot in three years. But Playmates’ Ferengi is explicitly modelled after the ones in “The Last Outpost”: He’s got it all, from the animal skin uniforms to the fur boots to the crackling energy whips, down to the fact he looks eerily like Armin Shimerman’s Letek. Even the clip-and-collect card cites the same Federation intel the crew went over in “Encounter at Farpoint” and “The Last Outpost”. Furthermore, this Ferengi is most assuredly not meant to be a joke, with the card making numerous references to how cunning, dangerous and ruthless his people can be.

Here I am finding myself talking out of two sides of my mouth again. Because I have to write this with the conceit that I’m just now discovering this toy and the Playmates line now, when in truth this guy was one of the very first pieces of Star Trek anything I ever got. To me, this is *always* how the Ferengi have looked and acted, and this figure gave form to the half-remembered dreamlike imagery from half a decade prior I could only hazily recall.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 1 – Wave 1 and the Bridge Crew

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Alan Moore teaches us that reality begins with fiction. “The idea of a god is a god”. But fiction can not just be written, it also must be read. And when we read things, according to Shoshana Felman, we are not uncovering hidden meaning, but generating truth. And the truth that we generate will be different for each person, for each person is different themselves. My truth will not necessarily be your truth, and yours will not necessarily be mine.

If this project has taught me one thing, its this: Reinforcing my conscious intellectualization of the reading process by forcing me to undergo it at an intimate and primal level so that I may attempt to convey what I’ve seen to all of you. It’s a shamanic process; travel inside and out (because they’re the same thing) and try and share the experience through art for the benefit of others. It’s no great arcane secret-I’ve always helped that by my doing it, it would demonstrate that you could do it too.

When we talk about a work of art having a transformative effect on us and leaving a lasting impact on our lives, what we’re really talking about is the experiential meaning the work evoked in us, not the physical work itself. The material artefact is important, obviously, but that meaning only manifests when creators and audiences both react to it, and any meaning inherent to the text itself by necessity undergoes a process of translation. I can say Star Trek: The Next Generation has been a huge influence on my life for decades, but I’m only ever going to fixate on specific things about it that resonate with me personally: My positionality and perspective define what I take out of it and how I react to it.

And then what happens when ideas, characters and themes migrate? They travel, and are shaped and reformed by their travels just like the rest of us.

The Wave 1 line.

The second line of Star Trek: The Next Generation toys and action figures debuted in the fall of 1992. Playmates Toys received the license this time, after the failure of Galoob’s earlier stab at adapting the show to the 3 1/4 inch plastic scale. Marketed, of course, as part of Star Trek’s 25th Anniversary (indeed, the only part of the two-year celebration apart from The Star Lost and The Return of Okona officially and specifically dedicated to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: The Next Generation alone), Playmates’ auspicious first wave featured the toyetic likenesses of Captain Picard, Counselor Troi, Lieutenant Commander Data, Lieutenant Worf, Commander Riker, Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge, a Borg, a Ferengi, a Romulan and Gowron.

As fans we sometimes talk a lot about “our” Star Trek (or whatever your pop culture mythology of choice might be), or at least those of us who were exposed to the show sporadically on initial run broadcast TV do.…

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