Back when I was a pre-teen in the late 1970’s, one of my favourite toys to while away the hours with was my collection of Micronauts space-based toys. They might best be described as a ‘what if we combined Kenner Star Wars with K’nex?’, and offered kids the ability to truly create new toys out of an existing set because of their adaptability and their accessibility to kids wanting to create new things out of existing pieces. To my recollection, the Micronauts toy line petered out by the early 80’s and was all but forgotten except for the ongoing Marvel Comics series that was based on the line, and which lasted until at least the mid-Eighties.
So why am I dredging this up here and now for anything other than the value of installing a fleeting sense of nostalgia in the reader?
A few months back, I stumbled upon a comic blog that had a post mentioning how a major toy manufacturer was planning to have a series of feature films produced based on a number of their more famous past franchise products; This list included such perennial favourites as Battleship, Risk, Candy Land, Monopoly, Clue, and even Stretch Armstrong, as well as one other toy line: the Micronauts. To top it all off, the article mentioned how there had been rumours cirulating online that the Director for such a project might be none other than hit Writer/Director, J.J. Abrams.
Well, after recently working my way through Season 1 of Lost on DVD, and after seeing the last star Trek movie (just like millions of other people), I am starting to have high hopes for anything that this guy lays his hands on. The Micronauts were huge for me as a kid and it would be great to see interest in them revived in such a way as to spark interest in the concept from a whole new generation that has almost moved on from playing with toys that require the user to bring their own imagination to the table. Heck, these days even the perennial favourite Lego has succumbed to a large extent to marketing its line of construction block toy sets to whatever movie line is big at the moment. things have sure changed since I was kid, when Lego was just a toy that let the child bring his or her imagination to the table with no real preset designs required.
Okay, that’s enough of a rant from me.(that was not my intention here, honest) Anyway, I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope that the rumours will become much more than that in the near future…