The original Action Man is now almost old enough to qualify for his free bus pass.
Launched in 1966, this foot-high (29cm) action figure – never call him a “doll” – was inspired by the GI Joe figures released a few years before in the US. Action Man’s makers, a British toy firm called Palitoy, added distinctly British features to make him stand out from the American original, including examples in ceremonial dress.
Between the late 1960s and the mid-80s, Action Man was a must have toy for boys across the UK and the Commonwealth; improved models sported more realistic hair and “lifelike gripping hands”, as well as a plethora of accessories like armoured cars and one-man helicopters.
But the toy business can be fickle; Action Man had run out of puff by the mid-1980s, and an icon of British childhood suddenly found himself on civvy street.
Action Man’s retirement wouldn’t last long; in 1993, he returned, this time via US toy giant Hasbro. The 90s-era Action Man was marketed less as a war toy – possibly because the Cold War was now over – and more as a dare-devil adventurer, and the revitalised Action Man universe would eventually encompass books, video games and a TV show as well as toys.
In 1998, Hasbro launched Action Man Photo Mission. This version featured Action Man as a combat cameraman, complete with press card and a TV camera. And that wasn’t all. Photo Mission Action Man is himself a camera.
Photo Mission Action man contains a 110 film camera – not in the video camera, as you might expect, but built into Action Man’s torso: the lens is part of his protective vest. It’s the perfect hidden camera, apart from the fact that you actually have to aim, wind and fire…
The Kodak-invented 110 format was by now a fading format – small, cheap 35mm compact cameras had largely stolen their market in the 1980s and 90s. But various novelty cameras still shot 110 thanks to its small size. A frame of 110 film is about half the size of a 35mm frame, making it much easier to incorporate into another object (even an action figure).
The camera is, of course, pure point-and-shoot – a single shutter speed and aperture. To access the camera, a section of the figures back is removed via a latch, and the 110 film can then be loaded. The camera features few controls: the shutter button is located on the right shoulder blade, and there’s also a small thumbwheel to advance the frame and a small window to read the frame number.
There’s no viewfinder, but a screen on top of Action Man’s video camera can serve as a crude sportsfinder, though the framing should be regarded as approximate and not exact. This camera, as Peggy Marsh says in her review on her blog Camera Go Camera, is definitely in the novelty toy camera department, but still capable of taking perfectly reconisable images, though it suffers from the same limitations as any 110 camera – the negative is too small to make enlargements bigger than 6×4 prints.
The Photo Mission set shipped with a range of accessories, including a pistol, a pair of sunglasses – and a roll of film, because every self-respecting photojournalist remembers to take film with them on assignment, right?
The discontinuation of 110 film by the end of the 2000s made the Photo Mission Action Man a curio rather than a usable camera unless you were able to find an expired roll. In 2012, however, Lomography relaunched the format, and now make colour negative, slide and black-and-white films, aswell as some experimental emulsions, such as Turquoise.
With a new supply of film, Action Man can once again carry out his photo missions – in secret, of course.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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