[Toys] [D&D] The Strange Case of Those AD&D Toys

Around the spring or summer of 1983 (so, a few months before the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon premiered) a line of "Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons"-branded toys appeared in stores, featuring such characters as Strongheart the good paladin, Warduke the evil warrior, Kelek the evil sorcerer, Elkhorn the good dwarf, Zarak the evil half-orc assassin, and a handful of others, plus a small and somewhat random selection monsters (hook horror, cave fisher, etc.). There were also a few other ancillary licensed products released (storybooks, beach towels, wood-burning kits, etc.) featuring these characters, and TSR's games division sort of half-heartedly got in on the action by featuring these characters in a couple of D&D game products - AC1: The Shady Dragon Inn (which gave character stats for the entire line) and XL1: Quest for the Heartstone (a module where the toy-characters were the pregenerated PCs).

The immediately odd thing about these toys is that they and the D&D cartoon came out very close to the same time as each other (within a few months in the same year), but featured completely different sets of characters. I vaguely recall that there was one episode of the D&D cartoon where Strongheart the paladin appeared as a sort of "guest star," but I'm pretty sure that's the only overlap - no toys were made of the characters from the show (either the heroes or the villains) and none of the other toy-characters appeared on the show. 

At the time, it actually didn't seem that strange to me - after all the show was branded Dungeons & Dragons and the toys were Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which the rule books (due, presumably, to various legal settlements with D&D co-creator Dave Arneson) were always careful to tell us were two entirely separate games (even though everyone I knew treated them interchangeably - with D&D as the "beginner's" game from which you quickly graduated up to the "real" game, AD&D). Even that distinction doesn't stand up, though, since the ostensibly-D&D cartoon featured a large number of character (ranger, acrobat, etc.) and monster types (shadow demons, bullywugs, beholders, etc.) that were only found in AD&D, and the two game products that tied-in to the AD&D toy line were both released for the D&D game (which created a bit of cognitive dissonance when, for instance, "Zarak: evil half-orc assassin" had to become "Zarak: chaotic thief" because half-orcs, assassins, and evil characters all didn't exist in the non-Advanced game at that time).

Yet another weird wrinkle to the story is that there was also a second, seemingly separate, line of AD&D-branded toys on the market at the same time - a pretty extensive line of "bendy" and PVC monsters that were at sort-of the same scale as the other toys but were much more cheaply made and had different trade dress on their packaging than the other toys. I wasn't sure at the time (and, honestly, am still not) whether these were considered to be part of the same line or not.

So what gives? Why did TSR bother creating two (three?) competing sets of licenseable IP within a few months of each other? One possible explanation is that the toys were intended for a slightly older audience than the show, but still not quite old enough for the actual game. That could be, but it seems like a weird and wasteful way to go about it (especially since TSR already had the "Endless Quest" series of choose-your-own-adventure books - featuring, of course, neither the characters from the TV show or those from the toy-line - filling that in-between niche).

What I suspect (though I've never had confirmed) is rather that this is just a tangible example of the chaos of bad management that was afflicting TSR at the time, and that almost drove them out of business in 1984 right as the game was near the height of its mainstream popularity. The D&D cartoon was produced by Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corp., which was Gary Gygax, operating out of his home/office mansion in Beverly Hills. I suspect the licensing deal for the toys was probably handled by a different department at TSR, in-house at the Lake Geneva office, under the direction of Brian Blume (and that Blume maybe made two separate licensing deals, one for "character" action figures and a different one for PVC and bendy monsters?).

Gary mentioned in later interviews that when he arrived in California he found that TSR had a bad reputation so he had to, essentially, start everything from scratch (which is one of the reasons "TSR-West" was renamed to DDEC). It's possible that perhaps a show featuring the toy characters had been pitched, but that in order to restart negotiations and get something off the ground Gary thought it best (or the other parties involved insisted) to drop that approach and start again with something fresh - making it just an accident of fate that the separately-licensed toys had already hit the shelves before the cartoon replaced them. But even that might be giving the mess of 80s-era TSR too much credit - the real story may well be that by the time the toys and TV show were being developed, Gary and Brian were on such bad terms that they didn't even bother speaking to each other about it - that neither side knew, or cared, what the other was up to.

But, whatever the explanation, the result was undeniably weird, and seemingly a perfect lesson in how not to go about expanding your IP across different platforms and media.

[Toys] He-Man and youthful disillusionment

Prior to discovering D&D, probably my main source of fantasy (along with movies like Clash of the Titans and The Last Unicorn) was Mattel's Masters of the Universe toys, which debuted in 1982 (truly the annus mirabilis of my childhood pop-cultural obsessions).

As toys, they weren't that great - all of the figures had the same super-muscular body, just with different heads, paint-jobs, and accessories, and I believe they only moved at the shoulders and hips - I don't think you could even really turn their heads. Nevertheless, something about them really clicked with me. Loking back, I think it was the way that all of the initial characters were all primal, mythological archetypes, more like gods than people: He-Man was Hercules, all strength and heroism, Teela was magic and wisdom, Man-at-Arms was science and reason, Stratos was the air and the sky; on the bad-guy side Skeletor was the personification of death and evil, Beast-Man was primal rage and fury and fear of the woods, and Mer-Man was the dark depths of the sea and fear of drowning. None of this was articulated at the time (I was, after all, 7 years old), but I think it must have been floating around in my subconscious. Plus they all looked really cool - sort of a kid-version of Frank Frazetta, with big muscles and deadly-looking weapons and Castle Grayskull all darkly foreboding and mysterious. This seemed like a strange, dark, violent, and dangerous world.

Anyway, I really loved those toys, probably even more than my Star Wars and G.I. Joe toys. I especially loved the little illustrated storybooks that came with them that provided details about the characters and their world. There were apparently four of them initially, but the only one I remember was King of Castle Grayskull - I must have read that thing 100 times, and a lot of the pictures are still embedded in my memory decades later.

Alas, things went downhill from there pretty quickly. The second and subsequent waves of toys got more gimmicky with lots of moving pieces and increasingly lame concepts, like the guy whose head spun and had three faces - one good, one evil, one (?) - or various figures with spring-loaded fists, or (a particular low-point) a guy who was covered with fuzz and smelled like a pine-scented air freshener. The little booklets also changed - they became mini-comics with a different style of art and (so it seemed to me at the time) cheesier stories. I lamented that it didn't seem as cool and dark anymore, but stuck with it nonetheless.

And, of course, anyone who was a kid in the 80s knows where the story went from there. In the fall of 1983 the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon premiered and it was just lame as hell. He-Man was no longer a Conan-esque barbarian hero, but was the alter-ego of wimpy and effeminate Prince Adam (who was, literally, He-Man in a pair of pink tights) and his pet tiger was also a wuss, and there was some comic-relief "thing" in a floppy hat, scarf, and oversized shirt with a big O on it called Orko that made no sense at all, and all of the bad guys were totally hapless and goofy, and nobody ever got hurt and there was always an explicit moral lesson at the end. Of course all of this was totally standard-issue for 80s cartoons, especially those based on toy franchises, and a lot of people a couple years younger than me seem to have a strong nostalgic connection to this series, but it felt like a huge betrayal to my 9-year-old self. He-Man was cool - it was dark and violent and dangerous, and the show wrecked that and turned it into garbage.

Luckily, right about that same time I discovered a new outlet for my dreams of a dark and violent fantasy world in D&D - and then watched over the next few years as it too grew increasingly sanitized, kiddified, and lame. Which is how I learned as a kid that nothing good lasts forever, so you need to hold onto it and cherish it while it lasts. Live in the moment, and accumulate a store of great memories that you can look back fondly on later. Good advice for a kid dealing with changes to their favorite toy franchises, and (I'd suggest) for life in general.

Flint Dille and Pimm's Cups

Flint Dille is an interesting character in 80s pop-culture. He's part of the family that owns the IP rights to Buck Rodgers, he's been involved in a ton of shows and games and media ventures over the years including, most famously, the Transformers and G.I. Joe cartoons from the 80s, and he was a good friend and writing partner of Gary Gygax when Gary was living in Hollywood (c. 1983-85). They co-wrote a series of "choose your own adventure" books (that I haven't read) and a screenplay (or possibly just a treatment) for a Dungeons & Dragons movie, presumably intended to replace the really dreadful screenplay TSR had commissioned from Oscar-winner James Goldman (excerpts from which can be read here (trigger warning: it's total garbage)).

Last year, Flint posted a bunch of excerpts from his in-progress memoirs to his Facebook page. One in particular (that I'd like to link to directly, but can't find, so I'm going with a cust & paste version that was re-posted here) stands out in my memory:

PIMMS CUPS

Somewhere in 1985, I threw a bunch of G.I. Joes and Transformers into a box and took the winding drive to the D&D Mansion. The idea was to see if it would be possible to make a miniatures game with Joe and the Autobots fighting Cobra and the Decepticons. The sand table was made for inch-tall (25mm) miniatures, so the scale was all wrong. We’d have to play this game outside.

Sometimes life all comes together in a perfect harmony. Disparate elements come together to a larger whole. Try as I might, I can’t pinpoint exactly what month or season it was. Say what you want to about Los Angeles, the weather is constant -- any day is ‘impromptu adventure day.’ There’s a reason the Movie Business moved here from New Jersey. But more to the point, weather won’t help me remember when this happened. 

I do remember the lawn, the tape measures and Gary and I. There were other people around, I just can’t remember who. I have to think that John Beebe, Joey Thompson, Donna and Penny, maybe Ernie and Peggy and possibly some Sunbow types (I can’t remember). That might have been the day Frank showed up. I can see him looking on the game stuff with amused distant fascination. And I can’t quite remember what triggered it, other than that it was the most natural thing in the world and it felt like that day when you were a kid and you decided it was time to build a fort.

There was a gigantic oval stretch of grass and some foliage created by the drive around the DDEC Mansion. I would have liked more terrain, but it was a good enough battleground. I don’t remember how long we discussed exactly how far a Joe gun could shoot or what the destruction power of Megatron in Gun Mode would have, or how long, in game terms, it would take for a Transformer to transform, but it was a matter of minutes. Usually, with this stuff it's best to jump in and figure it out as you go. Planning has a funny habit of making things not happen -- especially things like this which are done for the pure fun of it with no practical outcome in mind. It's important to note that nobody thought this should be a product or if somebody did suggest we make a massive miniatures game together with Hasbro, the talk disappeared like the smoke from our Camels. That wasn't the point. In fact, the point was that there was no point. I’m not going to declare that the best stuff happens for no purpose, but I’m tempted to. I will say that breakthroughs and ‘Perfect Moments’ often happen when there’s no practical purpose for them and nobody is trying to engineer them.

What I do remember was that at some point there were people holding trays of Gin and Tonics or Pimms Cups or some other British Imperial Drink and we were moving figures around fighting each other. We had to use tape measures, because the distances were far too long for yardsticks or rulers and I’m quite sure nobody was all that concerned about millimeters or even feet. The battle had begun.

It was a quintessential ‘80’s moment, but it felt like something out of a Merchant Ivory film of the day. Mansion. Exotic Environment. Civilized people. We were like bored ExPats or British colonials wiling away the remains of a day. I’d give a lot for a picture of it, but maybe the image in my memory is probably better. It hard for my mind not to insert people in period uniforms and fan chairs (I think there actually was one) and silver trays (I think there were) and probably Wellington’s Victory playing on a hybrid boom box cassette player of the day. Don’t think I had a portable DVD player yet. Napoleon and Wellington had nothing to do with Optimus and Megatron, but it somehow fit. The ‘80’s were a time when things fit together that weren’t supposed to.

It's not important exactly what scenario we created or who won or whether we even finished a game (It’s unlikely, there’s something disturbing about actually finishing a game), but that there was this moment when Transformers, G.I Joe, Chainmail and D&D all came together in glorious harmony. There are few things I like more than when things all harmonize, when irreproducible moments occur. They happen in small windows... Small windows of opportunity. This had to be 1985. There were clouds on the horizon for DDEC. TSR was bleeding money and sharks were circling. But that day, there was no trouble. The world was a symphony. 

I won’t say that it was all downhill from there. It wasn’t. But we’d reached the top of some mountain and for just a moment, I could see whole possibilities in the world that I’d still like to see realized.

There's a few different things I like about this story. One is that it's just a fun bit of reminiscence, well-told; a nice little scene. Another is that this is totally the kind of stuff my friends and I used to do as kids - set up large-scale battles in my basement or out in the yard using our G.I. Joe and Transformers toys and then play them out, including improvised dialogue. In those days we just called it "playing with toys", but looking back if we'd been trying to sound impressive we could have credibly called it "free kriegspiel" or "quasi-Braunstein" or whatever. So it's kind of funny to me to read about a bunch of adults doing pretty much exactly the same on the lawn of a Beverly Hills mansion. Third is the way this story intersects with the legend of Gary Gygax's Hollywood tenure, which is all coke-fueled hot tub shenanigans and fiddling away on the company dime while unsecured debt was piling up and people were getting laid off back in snowy Wisconsin. Yes, Gary's lifestyle in those days was pretty extreme, and that generated a lot of resentment among the fans and other employees at TSR that is still festering over 30 years later, but for all that he was still, deep down, a kid-at-heart who loved playing games with his friends, and I like knowing that. And, last but not least, is the "what if" thought about how, in some alternate timeline where Gary and Flint's sister (Lorraine Williams) were able to get along and work together, that maybe TSR and Hasbro might have struck some sort of deal to actually produce a set of G.I. Joe/Transformers wargame rules, and how awesome 11-year-old me would've thought that was.