Friday, November 4, 2011

Tim Mee Jumbo Galaxy Laser Team!

As some of you may know, I'm a complete nut-job over the vintage Star Wars knock-off line of Army-man-style plastic figures from Tim Mee called Galaxy Laser Team.

I had gotten a bag of these toys back in 1979 and played with them constantly, mixing them up with my Army men, and later with my figures from my Dragonriders of the Styx playsets, making some of the most epic time-traveling, UFO-landing, dimension portal-finding adventures to ever take place on my bedroom floor.

It took a while, but I finally managed to score some Galaxy Laser Team (sometimes called Star Patrol) figures on eBay a while back, and they have held a high place of honor on the Epic Shelf of Nostalgia ever since.

So imagine my joy at finding two of the very rare jumbo versions of two of the figures at a recent toy show...


Above, we see what I have always thought of as the Han Solo and Chewbacca of the Galaxy Laser Team universe, although the gunslinger clearly looks to be modeled off of an earlier Buck Rogers kind of vibe. A fun fact about them is that they appear to be carrying little molded replicas of actual toy guns also made by Tim Mee.


As you can see, the larger figures come in at about 5" tall, show above with a regular figure for comparison.


The truth is, I'm not exactly positive that these are actual Tim Mee productions or simply larger bootlegs. I do know that Tim Mee made larger figures (such as their line of 5" tall Army men), but I also know that this particular line of toys has been bootlegged quite a bit.

I'm not sure. They're pretty darn good sculpts, so I'm leaning towards them being official, but I've never seen silver ones before. Anyway, it was a hell of a find for me and now my Epic Shelf of Nostalgia is all that more laser-riffic.