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

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. I was utterly shocked-That's how deeply rooted these little pieces of plastic had become in my mind.

The box for the transporter shows a realistic Captain Picard, in full captain's jacket regalia, beaming down in the chamber, delightfully with a full-size child's fingers engaging the transport. I like how the implication is that Star Trek: The Next Generation exists in this miniature Gnome-world of playsets that interacts with playing children. That's exactly what it felt like. What's also cool is how there's an accompanying screenshot from the TV show of the transporter in action, and in spite of this being 1993 they went with one from “Encounter at Farpoint”! This means we get to see Tasha Yar, Skant Deanna and Babyface Will in all their glory in one of those glorious glitter water composition shots. I seem to recall this shot, or other ones from “Encounter at Farpoint” being used a lot to promote the Playmates line, actually: That's probably why my sensory memory of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a mash-up of imagery from the first, sixth and seventh seasons alongside the box art from the Playmates toys, as I held onto all of them.

It's also fitting because Tasha was far and away the character I stuffed in the transporter chamber the most. You were supposed to only beam down one person at a time because the chamber could only really accommodate one at a time (there was only one foot peg, for example). So I figured the best person to send down would be the action/scout/recon character, and that's who I imagined Tasha to be. But I sometimes tried to fit a whole away team in there, because even then I knew that, outside the Game Boy game, the Enterprise always sent people down in teams. And let me tell you, things got pretty crowded in there.

It wasn't a playset, but the “Star Trek: The Next Generation Collector's Case” was an important addition nevertheless. It was a little vinyl carrying case with some great sci-fi art of the Enterprise and the show logo on the front and back. Inside were plastic trays where you could store your collection of figures and accessories. The box says you could keep six-eight figures in the case, but I've seen some people stuff a whole lot more in there. And frankly, that was probably a better solution, because I always found that the trays tended to slide around a lot, leading to your precious accessories getting mixed up and sliding out through the cracks. You could, of course, avoid this travesty by bagging everyone up in snack bags beforehand, but I didn't figure this method out until much later in life. And anyway, at the time, for me this was an imperfect solution until I got ahold of the bridge playset. After all, where would you rather store your Star Trek: The Next Generation toys? Posed heroically on the bridge or stuffed away in a box somewhere? Admittedly, it is a very nice box: The skeleton in mine broke a long time ago, the vinyl is all ripped and the cards that form the picture got dislodged, so I've been on the hunt for a new one. It would actually be a really nice way to store my Star Trek: Deep Space Nine figures, who sadly never got a playset of their own.

But that's for next time.

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

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. It's a nice memory, but one that's due to be replaced. Maybe someday when I have all the money in the world I'll get a new set, but the Playmates ships are getting harder and harder to find these days and thus more expensive (in stark contrast to the action figures, which are damn near ubiquitous).

If my sources (meaning Memory Alpha) are correct, this wave also saw the release of the special “7th Anniversary” edition of the Enterprise model. It's literally the exact same ship as the one from the first wave (even with the 1992 date stamped on it) except it was gold-plated and marked as a collector's edition limited to 50,000 units. I'm not sure if it was common knowledge at the time that Star Trek: The Next Generation seventh season would be its last on television, but this toy was the first I recall hearing that the seventh season was important somehow. Anyway I do have one of these, and it's probably far more battle-worn than a “collector's edition” toy ought to be, but who cares. I got this while visiting a Toys R Us with my aunt one day, and it became my primary Enterprise for a few years due to a couple of reasons. One, the electronics on my original model stopped working for a time, and two, the gold finish made this one quite a bit nicer to look at. Still not the azure blue and rainbow I wanted (the deflector dish is *still* a boring red and doesn't do anything), but better than flat off-white. A few other differences between this release and the previous: The nacelles are glued to the struts so you can't take them off, and the sound effects are much deeper and lower pitched. This makes them sound richer and more powerful, but even less accurate. Still, a really nice model, and the light-up nacelles really pop against the gold finish in a way they don't on the original.

Not my box. Obviously.

There was one other ship released as part of this wave. It's the Enterprise again, but a really weird version of it, because instead of an electronic replica it's a lightweight Styrofoam *glider*. There was a little handle on the bottom of the saucer section, and the idea was you'd grab hold of it, toss it forward and ideally it would glide on its own power for some distance. Mine crumpled into a heap years ago and the box was long ago the victim of my person-of-interest level fixation with scissors and random logos and promotional art so I can't show you any pictures of it, but I seem to recall that in practice it flew about a foot before taking a swift nosedive into the ground. This is also probably why my glider is crumpled into a heap somewhere. One thing I definitely remember is that I was really impressed with the design of the thing: It managed to resemble the actual Enterprise to an uncanny degree (probably why it had the aerodynamic capabilities of a rick), and I seem to recall the nacelle struts being better than the ones on the actual electronic toy. The deflector dish was definitely the right colour too, and I always loved that about the glider. Being styrofoam it was still an uninspiring white though.

(Funnily enough, while doing research for the Galoob chapter in the previous book, I learned that they too were planning a Styrofoam glider model of the Enterprise, but theirs would have had a more exaggerated saucer section that resembled a Frisbee. I guess kids who were fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation really wanted an Enterprise they could make fly.)

As fun as the ships were though, the real highlight of this wave on the replica front was the role-playing stuff. Considering my communicator toy broke within hours of getting it, I was stoked to get this set of communicator badge walkie-talkies! There was a badge you could attach to your shirt that worked as a speaker, and a receive/microphone pack you could clip to your belt. Of course if you really wanted to play a Starfleet officer you'd hide the packs, but you wouldn't want to because they were so beautifully designed! Each had a lovely glossy black finishing sticker adored with the show's logo, the insignia itself and its own individual waveform display. It doesn't look quite like anything from the show, but it does look very much of its time and I absolutely loved that.

Even better was the tricorder, the final piece needed to complete your away team set. This has got to be one of the best replicas in the line hands-down: I mean, as far as I can tell it looks exactly like the prop from the show (I'm sure hardcore Star Trek nerds will be able to prove me wrong though). Either way it's just the coolest thing-It has a screen that lights up when you turn it on (via a power switch on the back) and it has three buttons you can press to activate sound effects that are expertly worked into the face design of the toy itself. The scanning sounds don't have actual names on the show as far as I know, but thanks to this toy I will forever know them as “GEO”, “MET” and “BIO”. The screen is an amazingly detailed little LCARS display that shows a topographical overlay of a planet and an interface link to the Enterprise computer, and when you push the buttons a set of lights on the side lights up in sync with the sound effects! This tricorder is one of the prize gems of my Playmates collection: It saw action decades after the fact and, miraculously, is one of the only electronic toys of mine from this era that *still works*.

I think that's somewhat sweetly fitting: A tricorder is a scientific tool designed to scan things, and thus learn about the natural world. If there's one object the sums up my feelings on what Star Trek: The Next Generation means to me, I think it might have to be this.

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

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. And, unlike Bev, I can totally see why he was held back a year for the second wave. This Wesley is dressed in a Starfleet Academy uniform and is therefore intended to be based on his appearance in “The First Duty”, which strikes me as just an incredible idea: “Hey kids! Here's a new toy for you of a boy, just like you, whose criminal negligence led to the death of one of his classmates in a story intended to patronizingly browbeat you into always telling the truth and trust authority figures! Have fun!”. I actually do have him, but he's buried in a box somewhere and I couldn't be bothered to get him out for a picture. I have no idea where his accessories are. All I remember is that he barely ever saw any action, but not out of spite: Wesley Crusher was, believe it or not, actually a character I never really knew at the time. I was vaguely aware Doctor Crusher had a son somewhere, but we never saw him and thus I didn't care about him one way or the other. So my Wesley figure was basically only used if I needed a random, generic-looking crewman extra to hang around in the background somewhere. I *think* he may have also been Julian Bashir prior to me getting the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line as well.

There's also, as I said, a fair amount of variants and a surprising number of reprints. I don't have any of them, personally: I was never a fan of variants, always preferring to have one neutral, “definitive” figure who could represent their character in the vast majority of situations. So a bunch of figures based on alternate uniforms or outfits they only wore in one or two episodes didn't appeal to me. The variants in this wave predominantly feature the original uniform designs by William Ware Theiss, that is, the spandex jumpsuits the crew wore in the first and second seasons before Bob Blackman radically redesigned the uniforms to be two-piece cotton suits with collars in the third season after the actors complained about asphyxiation and back problems they were developing as a result of spending long filming days in the inane original ones. So here we get Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Data with the full spandex treatment. Will's sculpt is specifically a second season one because he has a beard, and Playmates didn't want to spring for the new head mould that would have been necessary for a babyface first season Riker.

(However, much later they did release a line of alternate universe “Starfleet Academy” toys depicting the Enterprise crew as teenagers, and that line's Will is a new clean-shaven sculpt. This figure is a favourite amongst hobbyist customizers who like to take its head and affix it to a Wave 2 Second Season Will body to create a functional Playmates First Season Will.)

Also like Will, Deanna Troi gets a specifically second season variant in a figure depicting her maroon jumpsuit and later hairstyle (although this is less specific as I believe she has that look in a number of third-fifth season episodes too). Once again, Playmates obviously did that because it's very cheap to change one colour injection for an existing mould and call it a new figure. In contrast to Will and Deanna, the Geordi and Worf variants are specifically first season, as they're in command purple and are referred to as Lieutenant J.G. (Junior Grade) Worf and La Forge. Geordi and Worf actually get two variants this wave: In addition to their early days figures, Geordi is also the first character to be depicted wearing the dress uniform, and Worf gets a “Klingon Warrior” variant based on the traditional Klingon warrior caste uniform he wears as part of Kurn's crew following his temporary resignation from Starfleet in “Redemption II”.

I'm fairly certain, by the way, that it was these exact Playmates toys that first jogged my memory that there was in fact an older uniform design from the first two seasons (and, for that matter, that Geordi and Worf had been promoted at some point). I seem to recall reading about these figures on a cardback or catalog, then going back to my ViewMaster reel of “A Matter of Honor” and having a sort of lightbulb-clicking moment. The uniform redesigns had become so ubiquitous and familiar to me that I'd completely forgotten they weren't the original ones. Even to this day, when I go back to the first season, seeing the old uniforms feels ever-so-slightly wrong to me. And it also makes my back ache in sympathy pains for the actors.

There's also no less than *three* Original Series characters in this wave, which frankly seems somewhat stunning. Looking back, it does make a lot of sense: Not only had both Ambassador Spock and Captain Scott had significant roles in comparatively recent episodes, Playmates' line of Original Series action figures had just come out too, so naturally they'd want to do a little cross promotion, perhaps in the spirit of that ever-present 25th Anniversary that's now two years old. I do have the Original Series line but, fair dues, I'm not going to review it here for purely personal reasons. I don't have a lot to say about them anyway: If I wasn't re-enacting Star Trek: 25th Anniversary with them I was using them for whatever spare roles I had lying around that needed to be filled.

What's neat about the Next Generation versions of these characters is that they're not cheap kitbashes which, given what some of this wave looks like and the fact a contemporaneous TOS line did in fact exist, would have been understandable. Playmates could have just taken the Spock and Scotty heads, repainted them, stuck them on a new body and called it a day (though admittedly this would have been harder with Scotty), but no: These are entirely new sculpts with all the appropriate aging moulded in. This is especially evident in Admiral McCoy, the third Original Series character in this line, who's practically unrecognisable from his counterpart in the Original Series set. I'll admit he's one of my favourite releases purely for his uniqueness: Not only does his presence reach *all* the way back to “Encounter at Farpoint” (and hey! maybe that's why we got so many first season variants in this wave!) he's quite possibly the least “action” action figure Playmates ever released.

(I do actually have Scotty and McCoy, but not Spock, though I often forget I do. They never saw a ton of play time either, though McCoy made a fun “Old Man” figure.)

The big draw in this wave for me where the new aliens, in particular the new figures based on reoccurring characters. There was a re-release of the Borg drone from the first wave, I'm guessing because it was a popular character (this is the one I think I have, by the way, because mine comes with a trading card and Playmates didn't start packing trading cards in with their figures until this wave) along with Locutus (just in time for The Worst of Both Worlds too!). I was always deeply uneasy about Locutus: I didn't like seeing Captain Picard's face staring back at me from a Borg drone, and it seemed wrong to commemorate the worst moment of his life in plastic form. If I used Locutus, it was only ever as a second Borg drone (I just had to pretend that wasn't Captain Picard's face) or, rarely as a Borg “clone” of Captain Picard. There was a also a Vorgon, who I don't have because he was utterly random and forgettable (remember the Vorgons? Those guys from “Captain's Holiday”? Yeah, them) and K'Ehleyr, who I also don't have, because she was a non-presence whose episodes I never saw.

Captain Dathon though I definitely knew. Even back then I knew “Darmok” was incredible, and he was far and away one of the most unique characters in this set. He looks dynamic and noble, as befitting the character he's based on, and I think he was one of the only aliens in my collection who never wound up doing double duty as someone else. He comes with the two daggers from the episode, one of which you can actually fit into the holster on his uniform, just as Dathon does on TV. Dathon also comes with the book of poetry he reads from and, most interestingly, the burning branch from the iconic scene where he helps Captain Picard get his fire going. The branch is a truly lovely bit of design: It's very stylized, completely eschewing any sort of representationalist look. It's the last thing you'd expect would be given an artistic design, but it's incredibly appropriate because, if you think about, what better accessory to represent the themes of the episode than that one? No wonder Playmates' toymakers took care to sculpt poetry into its design.

Then there's Q, and you just have got to have Q. As far as characters demanding a figure go, he's practically right up there with Doctor Crusher as being people you just expect to have from the beginning of a Star Trek: The Next Generation toy line. He's depicted in his most usual form here, wearing a Starfleet uniform with captain's rank insignia. He comes with some really cool accessories too, like a big scepter, once again invoking “Encounter at Farpoint” (though he wouldn't be depicted in his iconic judge's robes until next year) as well as a miniature purple Earth and USS Enterprise, really driving home his omnipotence. He also comes with a dilithium crystal for some reason, I guess in case you ever needed a spare dilithium crystal for something (you wouldn't. You never, ever need another dilithium crystal. They're like phasers, tricorders and computer bags: Every other guy comes with one). Q I actually never used much, though I can't for the life of me think of why. I certainly liked the character; I guess I just couldn't think of any good stories to tell with him.

One of the biggest standouts of this line for me was actually Lore. I've loved him as a villain since the very beginning, and have always felt he was almost the definitive antagonist for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Q always has a more complex relationship with the crew I'd be hard pressed to call antagonistic, and at the time the Borg didn't appeal to me as true dark mirrors: To me, they were cannon fodder at best, likely due in part to how underwhelmed I was by the Playmates Borg action figures in terms of playability and how absolutely overblown fan opinion on “The Best of Both Worlds” was and is. Lore though was deliciously, skin-crawlingly evil and played with charismatic aplomb by Brent Spiner, and I'd just been blown away by the “Descent” two-parter. As such I do wish Lore was wearing his black jumpsuit from that episode instead of the slightly doofy Pakled uniform from “Brothers” he is in his figure. If for no other reason then the Pakled look limits his mobility, and thus his playability. Lore's accessories are pretty standard as well, but it was enough for me to have him.

The second most used figure from this set in my house, believe it or not, was the Benzite! For everyone else I'm sure he'd be like the Vorgon-Some utterly random one-off alien from an episode a million years ago everyone's forgotten about. But the Benzites were always very iconic characters for me because of how intimately familiar I was with “A Matter of Honor” thanks to my ViewMaster reels. But to me he was a necessity, and, as Ensign Mendon, he was actually a bridge crew *regular* of mine for quite some time. Of course, this Benzite is meant to be Mordock from “Coming of Age” instead of Mendon from “A Matter of Honor” (perhaps another reason for all those first season variants, though strangely enough Wesley wasn't one of them). But because it was the exact same actor and the exact same prosthetic, he passes for Mendon just as well, barring his lack of a Starfleet uniform. Mordock also comes with the usual stuff you'd expect from a Starfleet officer.

(Both my Benzite and Dathon are probably due a regeneration. As you can see, poor Mordock/Mendon is broken in several places due to how popular he was, and my Dathon is missing a few of his unique and lovely accessories.)

But the big standout for me in this wave, and far and away my most loved figure from it (not counting Doctor Crusher, who I mentally don't even associate with this wave) is none other than Commander Sela. The stories my Sela could tell. First of all, she's an incredibly cool character, both on TV and in figure form: She looks sleek, svelte and fiercely determined, and those pointed shoulder pads and sharp-edged sashes let you know she means the most serious kind of business. At first glance, you might think she suffers from Playmates female dainty hands syndrome, but then you might notice one hand can hold a Romulan disruptor just fine, while the other is posed in such a way that should you move her arm to her chest, you can make her do the Romulan salute!

Interestingly enough, though she comes with the same “Romulan phaser rifle” that the previously released Romulan guy came with, Sela is completely incapable of holding it. But you know who is? Tasha Yar. In fact, Tasha's hands seem to be sculpted *specifically for* this particular accessory. Tasha never used the rifle on the show, so this is another example of Playmates opening up avenues for storytelling its source material would never do. And it totally makes sense: This is exactly the sort of pose you'd expect a space marine to adopt.

From the moment Sela was released and I brought her home, she became *the* go-to Romulan character for every single story involving Romulans that would get told. She even rendered the original Wave 1 Romulan obsolete (she even comes with every single one of his accessories, except hers are cast in an *awesome* electric blue instead of his boring black), although he did wind up finding second life as Commander T'Alar from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Hearts and Minds. Either as Sela or some other female Romulan/Vulcan character, although increasingly just as herself, Sela was absolutely *everywhere* in my plastic Star Trek: The Next Generation. And naturally, once I eventually made the connection, she became Tasha Yar until I finally at long last picked up the real Tasha Yar figure. But Sela's time spent as her mother from an alternate universe (gotta love genre fiction) left her with an interesting legacy in my head: I wound up having to explain away this “Tasha”'s very Romulan mannerisms and dress sense as being the result of some significant amount of time spent with the Romulan Star Empire, perhaps as an undercover Starfleet intelligence officer or, most intriguingly, as a Romulan operative herself involved in a form of officer exchange. Much like, actually, Ensign Mendon.

 
The only annoying thing about Sela is that she's glued together in such away that it's extremely difficult to have her sit anywhere. Every time you move her legs, it puts stress on the seams that hold the two halves of her torso together, and if you do this enough eventually the glue will dry and separate and she'll collapse into seven neat compartmentalized parts. Of course, since I played with her *all the time* this eventually became an inevitability. The nice thing is this also makes her a very easy fix, which I did with some modelling glue. Problem then is that just bought me time until she fell apart again. So in this way she's actually a great deal like Season 6 Deanna Troi, although in Sela's case I was able to keep all the pieces together so she never became Crewman Just-a-Head or something. However, this did mean that Sela is my most recent figure to be regenerated, partly because she kept falling apart, but also because the paint apps on mine had faded to the point she was starting to develop an uncanny resemblance to Angela Lansbury.

I mean nothing against Angela Lansbury: She's a great actress and I'm a fan of hers and all, but, y'know.

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

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. The struts that connect the nacelles to the stardrive section are thinner and have much more of an elegant and organic curve on the six-foot model, whereas the ones on the four-foot one are squarer and more angular. The six-foot model is thinner and wider overall, most noticeable at the back end and in the more pronounced deflector dish, to the point it almost seems top-heavy with its overwhelmingly dominant saucer section. But this just adds to the almost impossibly mystical and futuristic nature of the technology that we can imagine went into building the Enterprise, as does the fact it's so eerily smooth all over. And it's only the six-foot model that has that striking azure blue colour scheme.

I probably like the six-foot model the best because it was the first and is thus closest to Andy Probert's original vision. The four-foot model was introduced midway through the third season to make filming easier, and, by contrast, is visibly chunkier and squatter than its predecessor. It also has a lot of engraved detail all over its body, the idea being the studio lights would generate a lot of eye-catching shadowplay on the model that would show up nicely on television. But this has the side-effect of making the four-foot Enterprise look grungier, more utilitarian, less graceful and less futuristic, and that's to its detriment. This is especially noticeable on the high definition restoration, where it becomes clear there was no loss of visual interest in shots using the old six-foot model. Even back then I could tell watching the show that there had to be more than one Enterprise model used for filming: I could tell some shots looked different (and better) than others, even if I couldn't place my finger on precisely why at the time.

So as overjoyed as I was to finally have an Enterprise of my own, I couldn't help but feel disappointed by this. Stuff like the nacelle struts and the general stoutness bothered me, as did the colour scheme. In lieu of the Enterprise's signature azure, or even its iconic battleship grey, the Playmates model is a flat dull white. The windows are nothing more than little indentations in the plastic, which is sad, but it probably would have been time consuming and expensive to do them any other way. But what upsets me the most about the Playmates Enterprise is the deflector dish: It's cast from a solid piece of translucent red plastic, and there's no light bulb behind it so that it could light up with the rest of the ship. But what annoys me even more is that the deflector dish isn't supposed to be bright red: It's actually supposed to glow concentric circles of neon blue and dull maroon. In fact, some publicity art even has the deflector dish glowing a *rainbow*, which I absolutely loved. This was actually so important to me I even remember once having a dream where that was fixed on the toy, that's how much I thought about this stuff.

Happily, even though the struts are a letdown, the nacelles themselves are pretty cool. They're the only part of the ship that lights up, and while it's not the bright and captivating neon of the TV show, they're still quite striking. The Enterprise has four buttons running down its dorsal spine, and pressing each one activates the internal sound chip for a unique sound effect. From the bottom up, it's photon torpedo, phaser blast (and explosion), warp drive and impulse cruising, respectively. Each button also activates the lights in the nacelles, and one of my favourite things to do was go into my closet, shut the door, turn the overhead light off and just stand there making the ship light up over and over again. Another thing I always thought was fun is that the nacelles are removable, probably to pack and ship the model easier, but for some reason I thought that was really cool: If nothing else, it all but demanded “Cause and Effect” style alternate timeline ship explosions as it made doing them effortless.

Speaking of those lights and sounds, my Enterprise has a little bit of battle damage, as you might be able to see from the photos. One day they stopped working, even though I was reasonably certain the batteries were fresh. So my dad took a knife to the stardrive section to try and open it up to get at the electronics inside, but to no avail (in hindsight, it probably would have been a better idea to unscrew the screws at the bottom of the model). Thankfully they started working again of their own accord sometime later, though they're still intermittent sometimes (there's got to be a loose wire in there somewhere). This does not, I should add, have anything to do with the fact the registration decal is on upside-down. That's all on my stupidity: The original ones fell off ages ago and I tried to replace them with decals from other Enterprise models (you better believe I have a bunch of them), but in my haste and ignorance I grabbed the wrong ones and put them on incorrectly.

Even though I'm a bit harsh on the Playmates Enterprise, it's only because it's representing one of the most profoundly powerful and personally meaningful things in existence for me and I care so much about it. That's not to say that, like the four-foot model itself, that I don't have fond memories associated with it, or that I didn't share a great many special experiences and adventures with it or that's it's still not one of my absolute most treasured possessions. I would be hard on *any* effigy of the starship Enterprise, and in fact I've not yet either seen or acquired one that I'm fully comfortable with. I'm still looking for a model that embodies everything I love about this remarkable design, but that may well be an impossible goal.

Now the shuttlecraft was an absolute blast, because it was actually *to scale* with the figures, and even had a fully decked out interior you could put them inside! Playmates' shuttlecraft is modeled after the Goddard, which is going to become famous next year for its appearance in “Relics” but at this point would have been best known for its role in “The Next Phase”. Like its parent vessel, the shuttlecraft has light-up nacelles and two sound effect buttons that trigger them: Phasers and impulse engines (though the battery terminal on mine is corroded so they no longer work). It also comes with a pallet of cargo sensors that you can slide onto the back via a set of tracks. Inside, there's a cockpit with a whole array of control panels that was frankly mesmerizing at the time, as well as two little benches that you could either use to seat passengers or fold up to accommodate the cargo pallet. Theoretically speaking you could fit five guys in total in the shuttlecraft, four in the back and one up front, but that makes an already cramped living space all the more of a tight squeeze, so I usually do no more than two at a time.

There are also little wheels on the bottom of the nacelles so you could scoot the shuttle along the floor, but I usually just swung it around in the air, because, after all, isn't it supposed to be flying through space?

It was probably the Playmates shuttlecraft that really inspired my love of small starships. Cramped as it may have been, I loved how confined the space was and it always felt cozy to me. To me it was a good place to put two characters in for a little outer space camping trip of sorts, and I always wished I had a little starship like that of my own. Well I mean I did, but one that was *my* size and that I could actually go in and fly around in myself. Sadly, Playmates never made life-size starships for role-playing purposes, but they did make prop replicas from the show.

The first was a type 2 phaser, modelled after the one used from the third season onwards (as opposed to the earlier model that had the derisive nickname of “the dustbuster”). Like on the show, it has two settings, stun and kill (it would be best not to confuse them), and you can even switch between them using buttons that correspond to the exact ones used on the actual props, and then fire using the exact same fire button! The neat thing about the Playmates phaser is how it has a unique sound effect for each setting: During that seven year period where I didn't watch any Star Trek (or any statistically significant Star Trek at any rate) I had assumed that worked the same way on the show. It turns out it didn't though, and that was purely an innovation by Playmates, which I think is a neat thing. Obviously I have it, but sadly, like a lot of my electronic Playmates toys, it doesn't work anymore. This time I attempted my own repair job on it, taking it apart to see if I could get at the loose wire that was preventing the circuit from completing. Sadly however I was not skilled enough electrically to actually fix it once I took it apart, and I have since lost a great many vitally important pieces, like the bulb, the bulb casing, the battery cover and all the screws. It will likely never be fixed.

There was also a personal communicator accessory. Now this is an unusual one, because while I still have the original box it came in...I can't for the life of me remember what happened to the toy itself. I think that's the only time something like that's ever happened to me. It's a pretty box, mind, with a lot of bright colours and exciting rays. Captain Picard is on it. Based on what the box says, I can presume you would clip the communicator to your shirt pocket and press a hidden button to make the communicator sound play. It also advertises “authentic lights” as well as “authentic sounds” from the TV show, which is interesting as I don't think the communicators ever lit up on the show. I do seem to recall my communicator breaking not long after I got it (for reasons that may or may not have something to do with the clip failing and dropping it on a cement sidewalk somewhere). I don't know why we never tried to fix it, or why I would have committed such a blasphemy by permanently losing it: I'd always wanted a communicator badge of my own, and had I kept that toy I might not have peeled the nametag stickers off my figures' bases. Maybe it's with my copy of The Star Lost.

Revisiting my Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation toys (of which what you've seen over the past few nights is but a small fraction) has reminded me, possibly more than anything else, of what these characters, images and memories mean to me. I can't put it into words and I'm not even entirely certain I know what it is, but...Somewhere in all of this is the Star Trek: The Next Generation that I love and that has inspired me all my life. And while this may not by readily apparent day-to-day on the TV show, the fact that the TV show was able to spawn all of this is significant in and of itself. Star Trek: The Next Generation is far grander and far more important than its egoistic sense of self-identity as a materiel artefact of television production: It's something timeless, transcendent and profound, and each individual manifestation of it is simply a small part of a much greater whole. The most important truth is in the understanding of how it manifests in you.

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

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. With this Ferengi, Playmates invoked and caricatured the imagery of “The Last Outpost”, and in the process made it bigger, grander and more memorable than it had ever been: Apart from the whip, he comes with a unique stand, a set of dilithium crystals (not in the picture) and two Ferengi standard energy weapons (again, I cut the phaser beam off of mine), all clad in unforgettably striking metallic blue. It's that whip that still sticks with me though: It looks menacingly lithe and as if it's constantly crackling with electricity, ready to discharge it all with a strike on some unfortunate victim.

This Ferengi seems feral, dangerous and intimidating, yet also oddly bewitching and captivating. He seems almost...Dare I say it? Cool. He's one of my favourites from the first wave, probably one of my favourite Playmates figures in general because his iconography sets my imagination running wild like little else in this line. I maintain there's a haunting, ineffable power to extremely early Star Trek: The Next Generation, something fluid and intangible belonging to the realm of dreams. This is very possibly connected to it being made in the High 80s, and for me it showcases Star Trek: The Next Generation at its most raw, pure and powerful. “The Last Outpost” is one of the key defining moments in this for me, and this Ferengi figure captures that. To me he embodies everything that was evocative about “The Last Outpost” and also everything I projected onto it. This is what real modern totemism looks like. Naturally I looked for any excuse I could to use him, up to an including subbing him in as an understudy for Quark.

As we go along, you may find. I have some very unorthodox views on Ferengi cultural norms.

Like just about everyone in the first wave, the Romulan saw an incalculably massive amount of action. Although he bears a passing familiarity to a few Romulan commanders, most notably Tebok (another call-back to the first season!) and Tomalak, he's ultimately meant to be just a generic Romulan. Which is fitting, as that's precisely how I used him: Apart from Tomalak himself and T'alar from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Hearts and Minds, this guy was wheeled in literally any time a Romulan of any status or distinction was required. He's got the weathering to show for it, though he's held up surprisingly well over the years all things considered as far as my Playmates Star Trek figures go. He comes with a Romulan PAAD (which I have since lost), a disruptor, a “Romulan phaser rifle” described as a “perfect copy” of the Starfleet phaser rifle (which really just meant Playmates didn't want to spring for the extra mould to make the Romulan disruptor rifle from “Unification”) and a unique base.

(That disruptor, by the way, has had just as storied a life as its owner. Partly because of the distinguished role they played in Hearts and Minds, but mostly because the Playmates figures idiotically couldn't hold normal phasers, Romulan disruptors became the weapon of choice for *everyone* in my plastic Star Trek universe. As a result, Romulan figures and accessories became quite precious and sought after recruits for my crew.)

The base has a funny story attached, because for the longest time I visualized the Romulan insignia upside-down. That is, I thought the part that was pointing down was meant to be pointing up. See, I thought the pointy end at the bottom that's meant to be the bird's tail feathers was really it's beak and that we were looking up at it in flight from the ground. Actually, the beak is an indefinable squiggle in the middle of the symbol and we're meant to be looking at the bird rearing up head-on. One thing I will give Star Trek Nemesis credit for is coming up with a new emblem for the Romulan Star Empire that looks far more striking and distinctive, one of the only times I prefer something about Star Trek: The Next Generation that didn't have its origins on the TV show.

I have very little to say about the Borg drone, because he is very boring. He's got a bunch of wires and cords and shit coming off of him that restrict how much you can move him, and indeed you can see in the picture one of the cords on mine is broken off because I had the audacity to actually want to play with him (in fact, I even think there's supposed to be one more of those rubber hose things that just came completely off). He does come with two swappable arms though, which is cool. The silvery one I've got on him now is my favourite because it has a little claw grip you can move up and down. He also has a base and a trading card (which leads me to believe my Borg is a reissue from a later wave rather than one of the initial releases). Because he was boring and useless the Borg drone was mostly cannon fodder for action scenes, or comic relief as we watched him topple over under his own lopsided weight hilariously.

Gowron, by contrast, is a true warrior. The would-be chancellor of the Klingon empire is one of the most unique and exciting figures in the first wave and has lived many lives. He comes with a Kligon scepter/painstick, an eye-catching imperial insignia base, a disruptor and, delightfully a targ minifigure! Targs are awesome and minifigures are awesome, so this makes Gowron awesome by association. Once again, Playmates has gone back to the iconography of the first season and evoked it with style and flair: The targ from “Where No One Has Gone Before” was a boar with some fur and sticks glued to it, but this little guy looks positively regal, as if he belongs on some heraldic symbol somewhere. Also neat is how Gowron actually has a holster for his disruptor: Unlike the bridge crew's phasers, which you had to cut the beams off to fit them in the holsters and even then it wasn't a perfect fit, Gowron's holster is meant for his gun and it first very snugly. So snugly, in fact, it can be a bit of a chore to get it back out again.

Like the Romulan commander, Gowron has played many different roles over his life. Apart from Gowron himself, he acquits himself quite well to being any generic non-Worf Klingon, including Captain Kargan of the IKS Pagh from “A Matter of Honor”, Captain Kol and Lieutenant Koleth (both from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Hearts and Minds). Unfortunately, this has also meant Gowron has sustained his share of injuries over the years, the most crippling of which has been the loss of his left arm. Like Wave 1 Deanna Troi, Gowron was also the test subject for some experimental surgery performed by my grandfather, however the methodology used on him, involving a golf tee and a hollowed-out arm socket, was noticeably less effective this time around. I'd say Gowron was due for a regeneration, except I'm not sure if Klingons would consider that dishonourable or not.

What's important to remember here is that objects hold the meaning we project onto them for us. When we write the symbol of our memories and emotions onto an effigy, we give it power and allow it to remind us of those things forever more. This is the power of the facsimile.

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

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. If you're perhaps a little younger than me or consume most of your visual media these days through marathon binge-watches, you might not feel this way. I've tried to make it clear “my” Star Trek was, is and always will be the Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired between 1987 and 1994, and that by definition I can't have the same set of emotions and experiences with any other incarnation of the franchise. It's these characters and settings and what I see in them that defines what Star Trek means to me. But that's in many ways a deceptive simplification: Star Trek was a huge part of my life for way more than those seven years, and yet I still didn't watch it between 1994 and 2001. The television show (and even the comic books) went away, or came into and out of my life over the years. But I always had my Playmates toys.

So if I were to talk about about what “my” Star Trek *really* was, I'm not sure I could confidently say it was the TV series, or at least the vast majority of the stories it told, or even the comic book line, whose stories I tend to prefer more on the whole. Perhaps a case could be made it really was this line of toys, and the ideas, stories and personalities I projected onto them. The Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation toys were not the first action figures I ever got, but this was the line I remember getting into the most vividly. This Geordi (or rather a rerelease of him, which I'll get into later on) was probably the first piece of Star Trek merchandise I ever owned (and of course it had to be Geordi, because I knew LeVar Burton). Following him came the Ferengi (probably for him to fight against) and the rest of the first wave. For the next three years, I collected the Playmates Star Trek lines fairly obsessively and to this day they remain some of my most treasured and deeply meaningful personal possessions.

The Playmates Star Trek toys, and in particular their Star Trek: The Next Generation line, came at an interesting time in the toy industry's history. Nowadays all action figures are sculpted to the pretense of extreme realism and accuracy to the onscreen character they represent, and have heftily inflated prices to match catered as they are to the kind of obsessive collector who would care about that kind of thing. But back in the day, back when action figures were still *toys*, that wasn't as big of a concern. In fact you could argue they went too far in the *opposite* direction, with figures that barely resembled who they were supposed to be. But Playmates made an interesting creative decision with this line, and as a result their Star Trek: The Next Generation toys were destined to become every bit as liminal as the show they tied into: Although they would be produced as toys first and foremost, they would be marketed just as much to adult collectors as to kids.

This had huge ramifications, and more or less invented the collector's market for toys wholecloth (...which has both positive and extremely negative consequences). One particularly fascinating side effect of this is how the toys themselves looked: Every figure looks like a radical caricature, with wildly exaggerated proportions emphasizing a wholly cartoonish look-and-feel. Yet at the same time Playmates managed, almost to a disturbingly uncanny degree, to effortlessly capture the likeness of their characters: These toys may not be crafted with extreme realism in mind, but through the stylized art style they convey the “soul” of the person completely (this also leads to fun stuff like the figures themselves being meticulously detailed, but coming with a flood of accessories all cast in neon primary colours, which I of course adore). These toys exude personality and heart from every angle, and when I look at them I see the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew staring back at me. No other toy line I've ever come across has managed to so thoroughly embody something for me, no matter how realistic they may strive to be. Divine avatars in plastic.

So what I wanted to do here was take you through a small piece of my Playmates Star Trek collection, but one that's very dear to me. Obviously this is going to be just the first of many essays on the Playmates line, but this one is probably the most important: I'm bending time a bit again as I'm going to be looking at more than just the Wave 1 figures tonight, but considering the first wave is most of the bridge crew it wouldn't feel right to exclude the few remainders who weren't given a seat in this set. And I thought the best way to do that was to take you on a tour of the bridge itself, or at least of my personal bridge playset. That didn't come out until 1993, but come on, where better then to meet the bridge crew than on the bridge?

First, a little overview of the bridge itself. Like all good playsets, this isn't just a place to display your figures in various poses: It's got all manner of fun features and gimmicks all to itself. The first neat thing is that, just like the set on the show, everything here is fully modular-You can add, remove and swap all the major walls to get different angles of the action (the two big ones at each side are even hinged for easy access). The chairs all swivel (as do the conn and ops stations), you can pull the science station chairs away from the wall to sit your crew down at them (again, just like on the show) and you can take everything that isn't part of the electronics apart for cleaning.

Sensors indicate the presence of a blinky red light, Captain.

Speaking of electronics, it has them! There are seven buttons on the tactical console you can press that activate various sound effects, like the computer readout, phasers, photon torpedos, red alert and, of course “hailing frequencies open”. The main viewer is a kind of backlit screen too, so with the electronics on, every time you push one of the buttons something happens on the it: There's a Romulan Warbird on the viewscreen, and if you fire your weapons a little red light on it flashes. And it even has the running lights at the base of the viewer that light up whenever you have Commander Riker take the ship to red alert!

And now, if you enter the bridge from the upper right-hand turbolift doors (which slide open, as do the set of doors directly opposite them) and walk towards the science stations, I'll introduce you to the crew and talk a little about each one of them, starting going counterclockwise. First is, of course Geordi at the engineering station. There is actually a main engineering/engine room playset and I do have it (and we'll talk about it two seasons from now), but it wouldn't feel right to me to have Geordi anywhere but the bridge.

Most Playmates Star Trek figures came with a standard set of accessories, a stand, a phaser, a tricorder, a laptop terminal or a computer bag and a removable holster, and Geordi is no exception. Most figures also came with a few special personalized accessories, and Geordi has a lot of fun ones: An engineering diagnostic tool, something that looks like a wrench, and a nifty set of green translucent dilithium crystals. The holster was intended for the tricorder, but you never really saw the crew doing that on the show, and I figured the holster would be a better place to put the phaser. I also didn't like how the phaser always came with a phaser beam permanently moulded to it, so for some figures I actually cut it off with scissors so I could get one in a neutral state. Others I kept intact, so I could swap the two kinds in and out for action scenes.



Geordi's was one I cut, but the one you see in the picture is intact because this is actually my second Geordi figure. I still have my original, I would never get rid of him, but he (along with many of my other Playmates figures) was starting to look pretty worse for the wear and I wanted something that would still look nice on the shelf. This Geordi, like many of my Star Trek figures, wound up serving double duty as a myriad of other characters, including LeVar Burton himself. Really the only action figures I had were Star Trek ones (although I desperately wanted ones of other shows I was a fan of, oftentimes we either couldn't afford them or they didn't make ones I wanted), so my Enterprise crew had to take on many other roles, like the consummate performers they are.

So because they worked hard for me and served me so well for so long, I feel many of my figures have earned a graceful retirement and deserve to regenerate into fresher forms. Geordi was one of these, so he was due for a shift change even before I realised that my original Geordi was a re-issue: The first Playmates Geordi figure actually has a removable VISOR, but it was considered a choking hazard for kids so they made a second one that was glued to his head. If you buy a Geordi figure, you can always tell which one you're getting by looking at the back of the card: Geordi's VISOR is listed as an accessory on both releases, but the original one shows a picture of him without it whereas the reissue just uses a static headshot. Clearly I had to have one with a playable VISOR!

(People laugh at the VISOR today, but I always thought it was so cool. I even took a hair clip and fashioned it into one for my own personal use. This became delightfully fitting years later when I found out that's literally what the VISOR prop on the show was: A hair clip spray painted gold and silver with LEDs on the side!)

I still remember the day I first got my Geordi. There used to be a chain of department stores called Ben Franklin, and there was one just a short drive over the mountain from where I live (I don't know if they're still around nationwide, but the one in our town left long ago). My mom and I walked in one day and once we saw the racks of Star Trek: The Next Generation toys, well, that was it, really. It was an exciting experience for me to see Star Trek: The Next Generation toys in a local store like that because it was physical evidence that this thing I watched late at night at home with my parents was actually a phenomenon that was out there and that was bigger than us: I used to always really anticipate going shopping because I couldn't wait to explore the display stands to see if any new Star Trek figures had been released. For the next three years, going around to different stores and finding new faces to bring home and add to the family became almost a sacred rite of sorts.

Geordi's clip-and-collect headshot is different too.

I love the packaging design for the Playmates toys, this initial wave most of all. It has a stylized, almost pop art-deco look to it, but filtered through a lens of Long 1980s design sensibilities. It's an incredibly busy, but visually captivating and provocative style and is a major influence on my memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation's look and feel. And of course like all action figures from the late 80s and early 90s, you had to have the clip-and-collect trading cards. Playmates actually gave you *two*: A brief in-universe biography of your character, as well as a visual list of all the accessories they came with (likely in case you happened to lose any, which was a distinct possibility and a fate that befell a tragic many of my little Star Trek friends). Early on I would cut out all of the cards, taping them together for safe keeping. I even went further than that and would cut out the logos and pieces of the design, because from a very young age I was fascinated by design work and wanted to be able to somehow “hold” that art in my hands. After awhile though I stopped doing that, figuring the cardback art looked better when kept in one piece. None of my more recent acquisitions have gone under the knife, as you can see with this Geordi.

To Geordi's right on the bridge is Tasha Yar. Tasha isn't one of the Wave 1 releases (in fact, she's one of the very last figures released as part of Playmates' Star Trek: The Next Generation line, and *the* last regular to get a figure), but there's no way I wasn't going to talk about her here. This essay is about the *bridge crew*, and Tasha belongs on the bridge, end of story. Tasha's moved around the bridge a lot since I got her: At first I proudly displayed her at the tactical arm, but eventually I felt compelled to move her because that's where Worf stood for six years and as much as I love Tasha, he's still the iconic person to hold that post for me. For a time she guarded the turbolift or hung around in engineering, but now I've got her at the Mission Ops station; a holdover from an old headcanon of mine where Tasha became the Enterprise's Strategic Operations Officer.

Tasha was the figure I was most desperate to get. Because she was such a late period release, I never saw her in stores: By the time she was out (and by the time I knew enough about Tasha Yar that I was chomping at the bit for a toy of her), the Playmates Star Trek line was already on the decline on both the production and consumption end. You didn't see them in stores anymore, except in more rural and remote ones that had older stock they hadn't managed to clear out. And even then you were lucky to find two or three displays, if that. In their place were what to me were a veritable infestation of Star Wars toys tying into the Prequel Trilogy and the Special Edition rereleases of the original trilogy. That I knew this was the reason my beloved Star Trek toys were disappearing, and in particular that I knew this was part of the reason I couldn't find a Tasha Yar of my own, was a *major* contributing factor to the grudge I held against Star Wars for years, and the minor bias I still have against the franchise to this day.

Tasha was a Christmas gift from my generous parents one year in the late 90s long after the Star Trek fad had passed, and even then I'm pretty sure they had to order her for me online somewhere. But that Christmas morning was one of the happiest of my life, because I had been pining for my very own Tasha for *literally years* by that point: Knowing there was a toy of her and knowing I couldn't find it had been driving me half mad, and I was absolutely overjoyed to finally have her. Not only that, but I happen to think Tasha is one of the best Playmates Star Trek figures ever made! Most action figures of the female characters Playmates sculpted were very slight, delicate things with dainty hands you couldn't really play with to a satisfying degree (they couldn't even hold their own accessories!). Not Tasha, though: Tasha is broad-shouldered, broad-chested with long, powerful thick arms and legs and can grab onto anything. And she totally walks with a swagger.

Tasha can grab onto anything.

Tasha doesn't look a thing like Denise Crosby, apart from her head sculpt (which is actually bang-on) and the general proportions of her limbs, but here's a case where that's actually a massive positive. This is a lady who looks like she works out. She looks like she could kick your, mine and everyone else's asses. If you were to get in a wrestling match with her, she'd pin you without breaking a sweat. She properly looks like a soldier, just like Private Vasquez, who was, of course, the person Tasha was always supposed to be. And this is unusual, because by this point in Playmates history they had long since eschewed the caricatured stylization of their earlier figures in favour of more staunch realism, particularly in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine figures that were contemporary with the Star Trek: The Next Generation wave Tasha was a part of. But for Tasha, and only Tasha, Playmates seemed to deliberately go back to their earlier style so that she would fit in with the Wave 1 releases from three years ago, and that warms my heart. Just like them, she exudes personality and captures the soul of her character, regardless of whether or not that's “screen accurate”.

Looking back now, I think this toy is the real reason Tasha Yar is such an important character to me. My inability to find her for so long is a manifestation in the material world of the mythic stature Tasha had accrued in my mind as I read fan reference books, unable to watch any of her episodes. And this toy has so much personality that when she speaks to me I hear her character loud and clear. This is my Tasha.

what the shit is this?

Tasha doesn't have many accessories apart from the requisite base, tricorder and phaser (it's her phaser, actually, I use to stand in for phasers being discharged with the other figures most often): Just a PAAD and a flashlight. The phaser is worth talking about a bit though-Almost every Playmates Star Trek figure, even if they can hold things regularly, is completely incapable of holding a phaser properly. Even Tasha, who you'd kind of like to be able to take aim, can't because of the position of her fingers. The best she or anyone else can manage is to hold their phaser like a lightsaber, which looks silly, ridiculous and impractical, not to mention reminding me of that far more successful and popular science fiction franchise that we shan't bring up again. But hey, at least Tasha can hold shit, which is more than can be said for some of her shipboard girlfriends.

The flashlight though is interesting. I don't recall her ever using it on the show, and actually, I don't recall there ever being any kind of a flashlight used on the show much at all. But Tasha seems sculpted to hold it, and she looks really cool when she does: She holds it military style, grasping it in the palm of her hand and holding it up by her head. This just reinforces how much of a genuine “action” figure Tasha really is: She's clearly designed for some rugged adventuring and it's practically physically impossible to pose her in such a way that she doesn't look unbelievably cool from whatever angle you photograph her. She's not just the most action-geared of the female characters, she's probably the most action-geared of *any* of the Playmates Star Trek toys, including Billy Riker down there. Tasha was undoubtedly worth the wait: She's not just one of my favourite Star Trek toys, but one of my favourite action figures in general. I love her so much.

Doctor Beverly Crusher is at Science Station 1, because, of course, she's the science officer. There are two different Beverlys made by Playmates, neither was released as part of the first wave (but come on), and I have both of them. The one on the bridge is a comparatively recent addition and features her in the standard issue uniform Bev wore mostly in the third, sixth and seventh seasons. Apart from the standard issue accessories (although *her* computer bag has a *medical* symbol on it), she also comes with a thermos of something or other, as well as a Skybox trading card. This Bev is also a late release, coming out 'round about the same time as Tasha and Ro Laren, and by this point Playmates were giving us *actual* laminated trading cards in addition to the clip-and-collect ones. This Bev is my favourite of the two for one major reason: Her body sculpt.

The original Bev (who was part of the Wave 2 Star Trek: The Next Generation releases in 1993) used a unique mould that added her surgical gown as part of the sculpt and, like most Playmates ladies, she couldn't hold jack shit. Sculpted jackets are a big no-go for me when it comes to action figures, because it completely hamstrings their posability. So poor Bev more often than not had to sit out any away team adventures because of her limited mobility and inability to hold a tricorder or phaser (although she was, I believe, for a time Daphne from Scooby-Doo). The later Bev uses the excellent Duty Uniform Deanna Troi body (which we'll talk about further down) as a base, which means she can finally run and jump and play just like the rest of her friends. And frankly, that only seems appropriate for someone who's also a choreographer.

Before I got my second Bev, Doctor Crusher was typically relegated to standing pensively by the left-hand turbolift door. Today, that position is held by her colleague, Doctor Katherine Pulaski. Kate was such a late release she wasn't even part of the Star Trek: The Next Generation line, coming out after Playmates had consolidated their disparate lines into one uniform (and frankly homogeneous) umbrella Star Trek line in the mid 90s. Even so, I still managed to get her before I did Tasha. Her unique accessories are a medical kit and a medical scanner (though I would have loved a bowl of PCS) and she has a unique sculpt that's different from any other female character. It's not as good as Tasha's or the one for Duty Uniform Deanna, but it suits her and she can at least more or less hold her things, which is what matters.

I should also explain the base, which, as you can see in the picture, has no nametag. This was because as part of the same bargain basement cosplay drive that led me to fashion a VISOR out of a hairclip, I set aside some of the bases to stand in as communicator badges, which I accomplished by peeling the labels off of them. Sadly Kate's was one of the ones that were sacrificed (actually I can't even be sure if that *is* hers in the picture), but you have to understand I wasn't as much of a fan of her back then as I am now.

Worf is probably the character who most embodies the caricature style of the early Playmates toys. He looks ludicrously proportioned, almost Rob Liefeldian, and has a bunch of accessories that, should you have him hold them, always make him look like he's about to go apeshit. Apart from his nameless base (I think the tag just fell off of his, as I don't think I would have sacrificed the base of a major character) and Tasha's phaser, Worf has his ceremonial Klingon swords and daggers, one of which is naturally broken. I don't have much to say about him because, thanks to the unrealistic proportions, he's tough to stand up on his own (I try to avoid using the bases unless absolutely necessarily because, well, real people don't have bases) and that makes him a little tough to play with and take on adventures. So, he usually spends his time leaning up against the tactical arm (though he may be reassigned shortly: As of this writing there's a special new addition I'm hoping to bring home soon who might like to take that post).

On the other side of the bridge by the main turbolift stands Guinan, watching the comings and goings intently. I'll bet she knows just what those Romulans are up to as well. Like the original Doctor Crusher, Guinan is a Wave 2 release from 1993. And also like the original Doctor Crusher, she's sadly not much of an “action” figure: Her flowing robes make it impossible to pose her much beyond some really basic arm and leg joint movement.

Of course, standing behind a bar dispensing sage advice means Guinan isn't going to be doing much running and gunning anyway, although it would be cool if she had a phaser rifle so she could go to the holodeck target practice range or curtail unruly crowds in ten forward. Instead, she comes with a 3-D chess set (which is broken) and a tray with set of drinking glasses (one of which is missing).

Unfortunately for Captain Picard, because he was one of the very first figures I got (possibly the third, after Geordi and the Ferengi), he's seen better days and is probably due for a regeneration soon. His paint is chipping and fading in a lot of places and most of his accessories are missing, including, crushingly, his unique type-1 phaser. I picked up a generic laptop terminal and PAAD for the photo, but I have no idea if they're his or not: A lot of the accessories for my early Star Trek figures I just threw in a bag, and since there were so many duplicates, no matter how brightly coloured they are, I have a hard time remembering which ones go with which guy unless they're particularly iconic to them. Later on I started bundling them together in individual snack bags, so it's easy for me to pair up characters like Tasha and the ones I got as adults with their accompanying accessories. The neat thing though is that Jean-Luc has a holster, just like the more action oriented figures (except Tasha, weirdly, though perhaps that would have messed up her sculpt), so you can take him on away team adventures just like he started to do more in the later seasons of the show.

Commander Riker is unique in that his uniform is “battle damaged”, with all kinds of rips and tears all over the place like he thinks he's Captain Kirk or something. When I was younger I thought he was wearing a special pattern uniform with leaf designs on it, and I was mildly annoyed to find out it was supposed to be rips in the fabric. I like my action figures to be “neutral” as often as possible, and while I don't mind stuff like this as a variant it irks me a little bit when this is the only option I'm given for display. And in Will's case it really is, as there's no other “basic” Commander Riker figure made by Playmates that's not based on one of the movies or some weird variant. If the action rip wasn't a tipoff, Will is supposed to be the big “action hero” of the first wave and is sculpted in such a way so you can pose him in really fluid and dynamic ways. This also means he's the *only* Playmates Star Trek figure who can hold a weapon properly, as I shall now demonstrate with Tasha's phaser.

The downside to this, however, is that Will unfortunately can not hold literally anything else in that hand, a problem compounded by the fact his other hand is sculpted in a weird claw grip/jazz hands fusion pose.

And that's a shame, as Will has some of the neatest and most distinctive accessories of the bunch: For one thing, they're all *gold*, which is always awesome, but apart from the base, tricorder and phaser he's also got the “directional UV source” from “The Best of Both Worlds” (I always thought it was just a fancy scanner) and a field kit that even opens up to reveal a hidden PAAD (and yes, the PAAD is removable. This was the coolest thing back in the day, you have no idea). Funnily enough, as much as Will is positioned as the action hero of the crew in this set, I never used him that way. *Tasha* was the action hero: Will just parked his ass on the bridge most times.

I've probably gone through more Deanna Trois than I have just about any other Star Trek figure, probably because there have been a lot of her. This Deanna, again a late-period release, is one of my favourite figures in the entire Playmates line. As I mentioned above, pretty much all of the female characters (with the exception of Tasha and, as we'll see once we hit the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line, Kira) have insultingly dainty hand sculpts and whisper-thin limbs that really limit the amount of things you can do with them. The Wave 1 Deanna was one of the worst offenders, and in fact my Wave 1 Deanna even had her arm snap off in two places, making her one of the only Playmates action figures of mine that's actually *broken*. My grandfather and I did a quick and dirty repair on her arm joint once many years ago by gluing it in place, but this means she can't twist it anymore. The other place it broke, at the joint connecting the lower arm to the upper arm, I was just able to set it back into place. It'll still fall off if you breathe on it though.

Just looking at you makes my arm hurt. And my eyes.

A few years later, they came out with one based on her regulation uniform she starts wearing midway through season six of the TV show (seriously, why didn't she have that from the beginning? Actually don't answer that, I know why and don't want to think about it) and she was a beloved addition to my family. The Duty Uniform Deanna is probably the best female sculpt Playmates ever did: I love Tasha to pieces, but her body type wouldn't translate too well to many other Star Trek ladies. But this Deanna was used as the basis for a number of other figures, like Duty Uniform Bev above and “Emissary” Jadzia Dax from the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line (which is somewhat touching, as my old Duty uniform Deanna used to pull double duty as Jadzia back in the day before I got any of the DS9 toys).

And this was quite appropriate, as it's a great sculpt: It's generic enough it can fit a wide variety of body types and has hands that can actually hold things. Although even so, that didn't stop Playmates from giving Deanna a special tricorder with a little handle, just to make it easier for her hands to grasp. It also has a nice range of motion such that you can set it in a lot of cool action poses: She's one of the few Playmates ladies who actually seems designed to be played with and allowed to pull her own weight on away team missions. Apart from the usual set of accessories, Deanna also comes with another telltale sign of a late-period Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation release: A Space Cap. “Space Caps” were basically Playmates' version of Pogs, because everything in the early 90s had to have an accompanying set of Pogs. The space art on them was pretty though, and I seem to recall they were of decent quality when compared to the flood of other Pogs you'd find in grocery stores and the like.

As good as she is, Deanna is not immune to injury, however. This is actually my third Deanna, and my second one of her in the Duty Uniform sculpt. My original Duty Uniform Deanna was a staple of the bridge crew and away team adventures both until she...well, “exploded” is probably the best descriptor: One day the adhesive keeping the various pieces together dried out and she completely fell apart. I long ago lost every part of her except the lower body, so Deanna had to revert back to her lavender space pyjamas for many years, and this also meant Jadzia Dax couldn't show up in any stories until I finally got my hands on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line. So a new Duty Uniform Deanna was one of my first purchases once I started collecting Playmates Star Trek again, and I'm really glad to have her back in action because she's just a better figure and looks way more professional. I panicked a bit at first when I got her as it seemed like her waist joint was fused together, but after some exercise it thankfully eventually snapped free.

I still have the bottom half of my old Deanna, by the way. Unable to adequately play the role of Deanna Troi anymore, she became known hereafter as Crewman Legs.

Data is one of the most fun characters of the line. First of all, his accessories are *bright orange*, which is just a blast to begin with. Like Deanna his tricorder has a little handle attached (as does his phaser, which makes it unique) because, also like Deanna (or at least Wave 1 Deanna), he cannot hold jack shit otherwise. Which is odd to think of: Among the guys he shares this ignominy with Worf, which is a little surprising considering their status as away team staples on the TV show. So I guess not being able to hold things isn't a sexism problem after all. Because of this, neither Data nor Worf were away team regulars in my adventures: That honour went most of the time to Tasha, Captain Picard, Geordi and Deanna.

Data was more fun to play with on his own-His accessories are mostly the various android diagnostic tools you sometimes see the crew using on him on the TV show. This is significant, because Data actually has little panels you can open up to see his inner workings: One on his back and one on his right arm, so you can re-enact the climatic sequence from “Cause and Effect” where he punches the number 3 into his interface there. Because I was very easily amused, I took great delight in opening Data up over and over again to gaze at his insides. To me, the detail that went into sculpting that was meticulous and fascinating, and the mere fact someone thought to give him that feature seemed genuinely whimsical and delightful.

Data is another figure who has been regenerated comparatively recently. He was badly due for one, as my old Data has had his paint fade and rub off to such an extent he looks disquietingly ghostly, and he's also missing both the panel to his back access point and his diagnostic tools. Fittingly for Brent Spiner, the man of a thousand funny faces and accents, my old Data served for a time as a less-than-reasonable facsimile for Odo before I was able to bring home the real Star Trek: Deep Space Nine crew (among the numerous ways this was unsatisfying was the fact this made crossing over the Enterprise and Deep Space 9 crews effectively impossible, and there came a time I could no longer stand this). Between that and constantly wearing out his joints and hinges opening and closing him all the time, my old Data has more than earned a cushy retirement.

Ro Laren is the newest addition to my family: She only joined the crew in the past two or three years, but I'm so unbelievably grateful to finally have her. Laren was a chase figure for me to be sure: Not as much as Tasha, but she was definitely an irritatingly unfilled position for quite some time and was one of those characters I could never find for years thanks to the plague of invasive Star Wars merchandise. Before her, the conn station on the bridge sat lonely and empty, unless I felt guilty and threw Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Wave 1 Jadzia Dax there just to fill space (she was a pilot once, right?). It was only when I could start shopping on Amazon for myself that I finally got Laren, and when I brought her home, it felt like the family was finally complete for the first time ever.

Apart from the standard stuff, you'll see Laren also comes with a Starfleet-issue messenger bag, the ubiquitous Pog and a contest entry form for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Design-an-Alien contest (much more on that later, to be sure). The sad thing is, she can't really *do* much of anything with them because Laren is quite possibly the most egregious example of Playmates' female character design philosophy that exists. She's absolutely *tiny*, which Michelle Forbes is most assuredly not, and because she's not even made to the same *scale* as the other characters, she looks completely out of place alongside them. Hell, it's all the poor thing can do not to slide off of her chair! Laren dates to the era when Playmates were striving for more “realism” in their toys so I can understand eschewing the cartoony, caricature look of the earlier figures, but realism doesn't mean unplayable! She looks woefully inadequate standing next to Tasha, and is certainly not going to be winning and wrestling matches with her. Maybe a lightsaber duel, though...

You were the chosen one!

Even though Laren is something of a disappointment as a figure, I'm still incredibly happy to have her because she completes the Enterprise family. In fact, I would hold up my little plastic Enterprise family here as the definitive one: This is the complete happy family we never got to see on TV, and whenever I need my spirit uplifted, I go upstairs to visit with them, paying my respects to the adventures and fond memories we once shared. And even today, they still hold the power to inspire me and make me smile.