As far as I can tell, Wild Gunman is the first arcade video game to feature a replica gun used against replica people. A longer demo is here. I remember the experience with much bitterness, because the light gun was not very sensitive, and even if you drew and fired in time, the hit didn’t always register.
The flyer below shows the cabinet and the different cowboys you could duel. Shooting Trainer (1975) was the sequel. The player fired at white bottles that popped up against a Wild West backdrop.
I’ve never seen these before, but that’s not really a surprise. The mainstream expansion of D&D starting in 1983, when the action figure line and the cartoon were released, was a decadent mess. I have fond memories of both, but neither product broke new ground or had anything to do with D&D, and what’s worse, they lived in separate universes. It was a marketing disaster.
Had the cartoon featured the grittier action figure characters and Thundarr-like production and writing, D&D might have become a much different franchise.
I do get a kick out of the toy sets, and I think they’re interesting historically. Maybe I’ll be Warduke for Halloween.
According to the 1985 Sun Sentinel story, the toy gun in the photo belonged to 28-year-old Maria Ocana, who “was waving the gun near an outdoor cafe and pointed the weapon straight at Officer David Herring, 23.” When she disobeyed multiple orders to drop the gun, Herring shot her. An acquaintance of Ocana insisted “she was not well in the head.”
On March 3, 1983, a 5-year-old boy holding a plastic T.J.Hooker revolver was shot and killed by the LAPD. On June 4, 1986, a Washington, D.C. mother was shot and killed when she pointed a cap gun at an armed stranger. In early 1987, a 19-year-old holding a Laser Tag gun was shot and killed by police in California. The list goes on.
Then, on August 19, 1987, a man named Gary Stollman walked onto the set of an on-air KNBC news report, pointed a gun at reporter David Horowitz, and made him read a rambling, incoherent statement about a UFO-CIA conspiracy. The gun turned out to be a BB gun. Here’s the footage.
Horowitz, a consumer advocate who had started campaigning against the sale of realistic looking weapons before the incident, led the effort to ban replica weapons statewide in 1988. The ban was passed, but steamrolled shortly thereafter by a 1989 federal law requiring only that “some part of toy guns… be made of bright orange plastic.” Senator Bob Dole snuck the language into a last minute energy bill.
Skip to December of 2010, when a Los Angeles police officer shot and paralyzed a 13-year-old boy who was playing with a pellet gun at twilight. The gun had an orange tip, but the cop didn’t see it in the dark. Last year, an 8th grader in Texas pointed a pellet gun at officers in his middle school hallway and was shot and killed. The gun strongly resembled a real revolver and did not have any orange markings. (The 1989 law exempts BB guns and pellet guns.)
I talked about war toys. What about toy guns? We played guns a lot when I was a kid. We’d split up into teams and play in the hills, or we’d play in the house: the bad guy would hide upstairs and the good guys would try to sneak up and blast him before he blasted them. Identifying the “winner” was always problematic—“I got you, sucker. You’re toast.” “No way. I got you!”
The funniest thing about The A-Team, of course, was that tens of thousands of bullets were fired, but nobody ever died. Same with the G.I. Joe cartoon. Hardcastle and McCormick (1983 – 1986) was a small scale Mod Squad: A retired judge gets a car thief out of jail under the condition that the car thief helps the judge nail the criminals he was forced to free on technicalities.
Both shows represent a quintessential ’80s narrative: (1) the American legal system is irreparably broken, (2) traditional law enforcement is ineffective and/or corrupt, and (3) justice depends on reluctant-but-righteous vigilantes who live on the fringes of the society they are morally driven to protect.
After a number of fatal shootings, “realistic-looking” toy guns were banned in Los Angeles and New York in 1987. In 1988, Congress passed a law requiring that all toy guns “be identified with a `blaze orange’ tip over the gun’s nozzle.” The law is easily gotten around today.
Do war toys glorify war? I think so, but the president of Toy Manufacturers of U.S.A. makes a savvy point in this 1966 Gettysburg Times article: “Unless you eliminate the adult activity, you can’t stop the child from duplicating it.”
Anyway, this Marx set is beautifully made. Can a toy be art? Can a war toy be art?
As if there weren’t enough evidence* that Mikey did more before he turned 13 than I’ve done ever, here’s a movie he shot during the summer after 6th grade. He gave me some production notes to go with it.
My dad shot the scenes that I was “acting” in. Shot in order, no editing.
Original film had no sound, but I made a cassette tape using the Star Wars soundtrack and various sound effects. The tape is long lost, but I “recreated” the sounds for YouTube.
Stop-motion titles and credits.
Nerf ball planet, Earth image cut out of National Geographic.
My idea of kitbashing was gluing two battleships together (standard plastic model kits) and painting them white.
The famous black helmet that we both had is featured!
Please ignore the hanging potted plant when the ship takes off.
Lasers were scratched directly onto the film.
The doomed city is an HO-scale train set and a bridge building set that I loved to play with.
We think the top button on the control panel says ‘power’. The other two say `take off’ and `fire’. The dials and graphics on the control panel were cut out of Mikey’s dad’s old Air Force training manuals, and the buttons were capsules from vending machines.
As for the movie itself, the violence the director perpetrates on our poor planet is shocking! The slow head turn of the caped figure (who in no way resembles Darth Vader) is unnervingly menacing. And what about that innocent kid, sadistically vaporized right out of his clothes? Is there no mercy? No. Only death and destruction, and the realization that all men are mortal, that everything we build will eventually crumble.
By the way, Mikey hadn’t seen 1954’s Target Earth, a classic robot invasion movie starring Richard Denning, before he made his existential sci-fi flick, although he says he might have come across the title in Starlog.
*Mikey’s homemade D&D modules are here. His published (and now playable!) Atari BASIC video game is here. My interview with him is here.
My daughter and her friends will know the exhilaration of spending summer days sifting through stacks of books and comics. If I have to open my own store and lose money steadily over several years to make it happen, so be it.
Easton Avenue in Wellston, Missouri, once a thriving business district, is now an “urban ghost town.” More on the decline of Wellston here.
From David Thiel, who gives us the entertaining back story:
It should be a surprise to no one that I was one of the founding members of the Hobart High School Dungeons & Dragons Club. Each Saturday morning, about twenty of us took over the basement of the Hobart Public Library for a half day of imaginary violence.
Here, courtesy the HHS yearbook, is the sole photo I have of me In flagrante dungeon…
Note that I was both wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and using an Empire Strikes Back school folder as a Dungeon Master’s screen. Yeah, I was stylin’.
What’s truly scary is that I’ve just realized that all these years later I can still immediately identify the D&D adventure being played by the two virgins in the background: the infamous “Queen of the Demonweb Pits.”
All this is my way of pointing out that I am indeed an old-schooler when it comes to dungeoneering […]
The shirts are very cool, but apparently not very well-made. Here they are, courtesy of Grognardia.
The D&D Basic Set advertised in the catalog is the just released 1981 edition, written by Tom Moldvay with cover art by Erol Otus. The images on the t-shirts on the top left are from Sutherland’s cover to the original Basic Set—written by M.D. and fantasy writer-promoter John Eric Holmes—from 1977.
It’s from the magazine Games Merchandising (a retailer magazine), and shows the TSR booth at the Hobby Industry of America (HIA) 1981 trade show. Dig the red Face logo chairs!
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