I miss these things.
Usual story. You box up a part of your childhood, go to college, and come back home for the summer to find out that your parents went through your belongings and threw out everything they thought you didn’t need anymore. In one fell swoop, I lost a classic Atari 2600, an NES, a box of classic PC games, and worst of all, the Micro Machines Action Fleet toys I had since I was seven.
But this isn’t the post to mourn the loss of those toys (that would be odd and somewhat creepy). It’s to look back at one of the coolest product tie-ins the Star Wars universe has ever seen.
To the jump!
It seems like everyone I knew who collected the Action Fleet toys always started out with the Red Five X-Wing. KB Toys was always flooded with this particular model, often outnumbering the other AF toys by at least two-to-one. Oddly, the one my parents wound up buying me for my birthday was the Red Two model belonging to Wedge Antilles. Given that I thought Wedge was cool because he survived three movies, I was okay with this.
The AF X-Wing featured two little mini-figurines, an astromech of some variety and a Rebel pilot that could slide into the cockpit. They even took the detail to distinguish the pilots so you could actually tell which one was Luke and which one was Wedge. The model itself had articulating S-Foils, allowing it to switch from attack mode to the closed cruise position.
Darth Vader’s TIE Advanced x1 was another super popular seller early in the Action Fleet run. Yes, that is a Vader mini-figurine complete with a cape. Unfortunately that cape sometimes made it hard to get mini-Vader to squeeze into the odd-shaped cockpit. And once it was in there, the moment you started playing with the toy Vader would get jostled around and eventually find himself face-down in the bottom of the TIE.
Still, having both the X-Wing and the TIE Advanced was vital for the hundreds of recreations of the Battle of Yavin seven-year-old me performed every day.
One of my favorites was the B-Wing, featuring articulating S-Foils and a cockpit that swiveled around the pilot. It was one of the more complex of the Action Fleet toys, adhering to the specifications lined out in the old X-Wing PC game. It’s actually funny how much that game influenced imagination time with the AF toys. “No, you’d be silly to use the Y-Wing. Do you know how slow that is? If you need to blow something big up, use the B-Wing.”
Yup, fleet junkie since age seven.
Now this was the Holy Grail of Action Fleet toys, the Millennium Falcon. Retractable landing gear, firing concussion missiles, Han and Chewie mini-figurines, rotating gun turrets and sensor dish, smuggling compartment. Sure, it wasn’t quite to scale with the rest of the AF toys, but it was still the crown jewel of everyone’s collection.
Action Fleet even ventured into the Expanded Universe realm from time to time. One of the first I can recall was the TIE Defender, a starfighter that had only appeared in the TIE Fighter PC game and a small number of EU books and comics.
I loved these. Really miss them, especially since they were replaced by Transforming ships. Not nearly as cool. Though the Lego stuff is probably about as cool, or maybe even cooler.
I love these so much. I still have the X-Wing, A-Wing, Snowspeeder, and TIE Intercepter. They technically started as my brother’s, but at some point he let me have them. He even let me have the Millenium Falcon (eventually), which sits on my bookshelf to this day.
Now, if only they put these back into production so I can get the TIE Fighter….