02/07/03’s illustrious band:

Bratkins Rides Again

Brought to you by a childish mind.

When I was a little Media Sensation, I didn’t play with dollies or Barbies. No feeding, burping, diapering and rocking for me. I did, however, play “people.” As a wee tot, I amused myself for hours with small wooden Fisher Price people. I called the woman with the red hair and green dress/body Patty, I remember, and the blond man with the blue body Bob. These people seemed to be especially fond of fire trucks and hospitals.

As I grew a little older, however, I realized that my true calling was to be a cowboy. So sometimes the wooden Fisher Price people would visit the ranch of the plastic cowboys, their plastic livestock and their Native Plastic American neighbors. The FP people, lacking arms and legs, had a hard time riding horseback, but they made great rodeo clowns.

A giant step up the evolutionary ladder from the plastic cowboys & Indians were the Johnny West action figures I got when I was a little older. Johnny was an 11.5-inch-tall cowboy molded of brown plastic, his clothes indicated by bas-relief outlines on his body, with bendable arms and legs. He could mount his trusty (plastic) steed with no problem. One of his horses, a palomino, had a jointed neck and could look from side to side. Very cool. Another, later addition to the herd had not only a jointed neck, but a nodding head and fully articulating legs. VERY cool! His name was Comanche.

Johnny did not travel alone, of course. He had a wife whose name, I believe, was Jane. I remember her being dark blue. They had a few kids: a blond boy named Jay, a dark-haired girl named Janice, a brunette boy named Jamie and a blonde girl named Josie. There was a bad guy, Sam Cobra, for Johnny to keep in line, and a few Native Americans who could be friend or foe, depending on the day. There were also some U.S. Cavalry types, but I never had those figures. A quick peek at this toy website shows pictures of the whole clan.

The West family, in addition to horses, had all kinds of little plastic accessories, from hats, vests, kerchiefs, skirts, camping gear and horse tack — saddles, harnesses, bridles with removable reins — to the foot locker in which Sam Cobra carried his explosives and pea-sized bags of stolen money. Heck, I think the only non-plastic pieces of the entire, enormous ensemble were the metal staves that supported the canvas-colored vinyl cover for the covered wagon.

The Wests and their retinue had many, many adventures in the basement and later the attic of our house. My friend Ann and I played with them by the hour. They acted out mostly traditional western scenes, but we added a few of our own twists as well. The one I remember best is that we decided Jamie was the black sheep of the family. He was always bothering his brother and sisters, so we renamed him Bratkins.

Bratkins was made to walk while the others rode horseback or lounged in the wagon. He had to sleep behind the privy. One of his most annoying traits was that he had no manners at all and was constantly belching or breaking wind. If evil Sam Cobra needed a hostage, Bratkins was always the one captured. The other kids were always happy to give him up, but Jane and Johnny rescued him every time.

We discovered during one period of captivity that Bratkins’ hands and lower extremities could be popped right off at the joint. So in addition to getting captured a lot, he usually got at least partially dismembered, too.

Eventually I outgrew my cowboy phase (most of it, anyway) and moved on to Star Trek action figures. I had a plastic Enterprise bridge — pressed on the decals myself! — and a full crew complement from the first movie. The bridge alone was not enough, however, so my friend Mitzi and I fashioned a sickbay and an engineering/transporter room out of Legos. We arranged them on the shelves in my bedroom and also built, out of Tinkertoys, a working turbolift to move the crew from deck to deck. This amazing feat of engineering had a shaft several feet high and Lego basket that you could raise or lower by turning the crank at the top, winding a ratty length of twine around the crankshaft. I was well into my teens by the time I dismantled it.

One of the tiny plastic horses from the earliest days of playing people survived the transition to sci-fi, and for some reason roamed freely about the Enterprise for several years. He had a tendency to leave meadow muffins on the lower decks, making Chief Engineer Scott very angry.

I think the Trek people still live at Mother Media’s house, but Johnny West and company are long gone. While they might have fetched a few bucks in the collector market on eBay, I think they were donated or given away instead so that future generations could enjoy them as much as I did.

E-mail the Media Sensation: jugglernaut@hotmail.com