Review: Total Action Force: Volume Three
Story by @GIJoeRepairShop
Brian Hickey is back! Total Action Force: Volume 3 is a brand new 196-page book published by Total Toy Books. This volume focuses on unproduced concepts, prototypes, and the process of producing the first few years of original Action Force characters and associated figures and vehicles. This successful Kickstarter project is the final volume of the Total Action Force trilogy of books. In the front papers, this volume includes the names of contributors and Kickstarter backers (including this author!). You may recognize several GI Joe community usernames in the list.
In order to document unproduced concepts, Hickey has delved deep into the personal archives of the Palitoy design team. This includes work by Bob Brechin, the late Brian Turner, and the Pape & Woodward Product Design Agency. One of the really fascinating things about this book is browsing all of the unproduced concepts for figures and vehicles. Knowing the end-state figures and vehicles makes it all the more fascinating when seeing the various concepts that could have been. One example of this is that Baron Ironblood was a very different character in the early design stages. Similarly fascinating are unproduced figures, creatures, bad guys, and all sorts of very cool vehicles that collectors would still be chasing today!
Another fascinating section of the book centers around Action Force toy fair displays. In many ways, these are more innovative and interesting chronicles of the time. While being very 1980’s Britain, they provide a look into an era that most modern Action Force collectors have never seen, or were too young to really remember.
Previous volumes have shown the complete line of Action Force figures and vehicles by year. However, This volume presents a complete photographic gallery of the full Series 1, Series 2, and Series 3. This includes mint-on-card figures and boxed vehicles that can serve as the ultimate visual reference for any collector. This author was fascinated to learn that several pieces photographed in the book are held by the Victoria and Albert museum. Apparently, the museum was the recipient of the entire Palitoy archive and maintains a very large Action Force collection.
Finally, the book concludes in the years where Hasbro figures and vehicles are simply rebranded as Action Force toys and the true innovation of Palitoy came to an end. Here, too, though, there are fascinating pieces, such as an Action Force Deep Six, completely repainted in yellow, red and blue. In the same way that Palitoy produced a more vibrant version of the GI Joe Headquarters, they have done the same to Deep Six, as well as several unreleased vehicles, such as a grey VAMP that was never released.
With this third volume, Brian and this team bring a close to a fascinating trilogy of must-have books for anyone with an interest in the history of Action Force!
