There aren’t many things from my childhood that still haunt me. I either don’t care about them (my long gone G.I. Joes, say) or I have obtained them (Time/Life’s Enchanted World series). But there are a few. One particularly vexing one was an action figure case. My aunt gave it to me for Christmas or my birthday and it wound up staying at my grandparents’ house before vanishing into history. It was a generic product, maybe from Sears, made of cardboard and covered in that slightly sticky clear vinyl. It was science fiction themed, had some cardboard accessories inside and, the most vivid part of the memory: it folded up into a sort of hexagonal cone. I don’t want to own this thing, I just wanted to see it again, to sort of reify my dim memory. But how do you search for something like that?

Best course of action? You let someone else do the searching for your. I had a break in the case when I discovered Philip Reed, former CEO of Steve Jackson Games, had published a number of guides to toys, toy ads and…toy cases! Voila: Action Figure Carrying Cases (2016) (many thanks to Hodag for putting me in touch!).

What a lovely book. As with Sears Wish Book catalogs, it provides a portal into another time where a painful level of nostalgia that I did not realize I had awaits. I don’t want to collect action figure cases. I don’t even like most of the toy lines they are intended for. But I do wish I lived in a world where action figure cases like this were still around. They’re cool and weird and seem to embody a different sort of play.

And of course, Philip’s book had the object of my quest: the Star Fortress Outer Space Play Set, sold through the Sears catalog from 1979 to 1981. I got it when I was a little older (I was three in 1981) so maybe they showed up in Sears stores for a while after that. Who knows, maybe my aunt found it in a rummage sale or something.

And, OK, I don’t want to own another Star Fortress, but I did buy one case, the Fantasy Figure Collector’s Case (1983), for my random fantasy-themed toys to live in. Love that knock-off Skeletor!