Marx
Carry-All Action Knights and Vikings Playset
By Jay
I suppose I
didn’t know what a Viking was until I was about six years old. I remember
playing at the home of my parents’ friends, who also happened to be the
godparents of my younger brother. They had a son who was about three years
older than me, and he had a wonderful medieval action playset – grey castle
with all the accessories such as a drawbridge, banquet table, catapults,
horses, silver knights, and oh, yes – these mint green Vikings that looked as
tasty as mint chocolate chip ice cream! I remember taking them out of these
small brown bags and setting them up in different positions within and outside
the walls of the castle. Although I did
not own the set, my brother and I played with it every time we visited our
friends, and though we wanted one of our own, we were never able to find one.
There was
something mystical about this playset that inspired my interest in medieval
life, Christian Knights and Vikings which has not abated to this day. Every time I still think of a Viking, I
cannot help but remember those mint green plastic figures with horned helmets
wielding battleaxes and swords, struck in various martial poses. The same can be said for the Christian
Knights, who seemed pure and upright in their handsome silver cut. Of course,
being a Roman Catholic, we always made the knights the good guys and the pagan Vikings
the bad guys even though we have quite a bit of Danish and Viking blood, our
great-grandmother hailing from Copenhagen.
With a
little research, I recently found out that this playset was manufactured by
Marx, a manufacturer that specialized in playsets and action figures that were
popular during this time period – late 60’s early70’s. I was also determined to own one, something
that I had been unable to fulfill in my childhood. I began searching on EBay, and, wow!... The price
for these old sets was way beyond my bank account! I was looking at upwards of a hundred and
fifty dollars! Yes, it would look nice set up and sitting in the corner of my library
with the morning sun shining upon it, but not at that price. And so I resigned myself to forget about it
and chuck the desire away as a mere superficial whim. However, little did I know that my brother
was just as determined to get the same set, or… Well, I guess I should have
known. He is just as mentally unhinged
as I am on these matters. And so it was
that on our birthday, at the top of the stairs to his library was the Marx
Carry-All Knights and Vikings Playset, set up and ready to go! He had bought it for me so that I could put
it in my library! So now I finally have
one, but the question remains. Why would
a grown man nearing fifty with terminal cancer want a play castle and a bunch
of plastic figures? What am I going to
do with it now that I possess it? As I
sit here in my library with my lazy cat sitting on the chair beside me, I ask
myself this profound question. I hear a
dog barking a few houses down… An old
man, my neighbor across the street, sits on his porch looking up at the clouds… The chirrupy sound of the ice-cream man
drifts by as my neighbor’s head turns to watch the colorful vehicle roll around
the corner… The dim rumble of rush hour traffic has begun its weary moan in the
distance… And a large commuter jet has
just groaned by overhead as if something somewhere up in the great big sky is
about to burst forth and come flooding down to Earth…
