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Star Wars Action Figures
An anonymous reader writes "Star Wars nostalgia buffs: X-E just added a fairly long feature detailing some of the many mail-away offers made by the Kenner company to keep kids interested in SW action figures in the 80s."
The thing I find funny is the consistent use of the term "action figure" (or even just "figure") to describe these things, even by people who are way too old and media-literate to be fooled any longer. Clearly, they're dolls, and hey, I played with them too (I probably still have R2-D2 - and if that one doesn't give the lie to the term "action" I don't know what does). Even as a ten year old boy I was apparently secure enough in my masculinity that I didn't have a problem with this - if we assume the same applied to the other members of the target demographic, who was the concocted "action figure" term actually meant to placate? The marketroids who coined it? The male parents, already distressed that their scifi-obsessed heir prefers fiddling with this weird crap to playing football like a good little oaf? I'm genuinely curious.
For that matter I'd love to know the history of the weird marketing term itself; were the Star Wars dollies the first use of "action figure", or was it ever used before that, say for certain toys with certain Kung-Fu grips? I'm pretty sure my disastrously-easy-to-disassemble Steve Austin doll wasn't called a "figure", whether or not he was a "doll". Though he would have been proud to be either, damn it.
Shoulda kept the Darda cars. Stupid kid.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of comments in this thread, I think the overwhelming opinion is "Who cares?" (/troll)
Seriously, though, the summation of the article wasn't exactly thrilling. Mailing list incentives to convince kids to buy Star Wars action figures?! Shouldn't you be linking to CES previews or something more interesting?