40 years later … He’s still a much-loved toy! In fact, very possibly the best conceived toy ever on the market. This site (like all sites) is Under Construction, but I am working away on it as you read this!

I started this site years ago, in fact it was in the 1990’s that I first started to rediscover my lost love for a toy with which my parents surprised me on Christmas morning 1968. I have a vivid memory of a year earlier, and being in kindergarten. It was (I think) the autumn of 1967 and a fellow classmate had brought in his space station for Show and Tell. He had all the accessories as far as I recall and my level of envy was through the roof. Major Matt Mason was the name and my heart started pounding as I was shown all the workings of the station, the attached Crawler, the Moon Suit and of course the figures. I was amazed that the station even had a sink. Only a genius would think of such a think on a space station!

Christmas at my house (at least for my brother and me) began with the arrival of the Simpsons, Sears and Eatons Christmas catalogues. They were delivered by mail to the house, each wrapped in brown paper (no plastic wrapping back then) and were each over an inch thick, printed on very thick coated paper, and being the primary sales vehicles for those stores back in the day, they were of course mostly in colour. Back in the 60’s, these stores (all three now sadly long gone) had extremely large toy departments and their catalogues featured most of what they had (or would have) on the shelves well before December. Of course that year they had a double page spread (likely more) of the Major and his vast collection of gear. My long-term memory doesn’t recall me asking my Parents for this directly but as the “hot new toy” my parents were likely very aware of it, and also very likely, I probably wouldn’t shut up about it.

In any event, come Christmas morning of that same year, my parents had put several very large and festively wrapped boxes next to the tree. Upon careful unwrapping (yeah, right) it was revealed to be a Flight Pac, Space Crawler, Space Station set (the big one), several separately packaged astronauts, Space Probe Launcher, Satellite Launcher, Moon Suits, and on and on and on! My brother and I played with that stuff until the figures broke, many smaller parts were lost to the sandbox outside, and the gears in the Space Crawler started to grind together. It was only many years later that I suddenly recalled The Major, but by then they had all be tossed out in several house moves. But once the fire was lit again, it would not so easily be extinguished. It was in the early 90’s that I came across fellow enthusiasts as the internet started to emerge. I met many more at local toy shows and managed to re-collect much of the stuff I had as a kid. My collection was further fortified by my Brother-in-law who (for some reason or another) didn’t want his Major Matt Mason stuff anymore. One Christmas a few years back he handed me several astronauts in decent condition, a few moon suits (sans arms of course) and a box of assorted bits and pieces. I said I would give them a good home, and I have — repairing the broken wires in the figures and attempting to repair the lost moon suit arms (more on that in a separate post).

Well, I’ve had this site up for years, and today for some reason, I decided to redo it completely and in the process I converted it to WordPress. That way I can easily add updates and maybe even find a few wannabe commentators who share there affection for The Major. Here’s hoping.