This week’s welcome to the insta-hood is on Dave and his is IG: @innerspace_online

1.  Tell me a bit about yourself.                                                                                         “Michigan born, Baltimore raised. Spent my formative years ingesting surgery breakfast cereals, watching Saturday morning cartoons and reading Marvel comics incessantly. Not much has changed in the last 50 or so years. I make all sorts of art for a living, and what I do now is a direct result from my childhood years. Wouldn’t change it for a thing. Except for all the sugary breakfast cereal eating maybe…”

2. What made you interested as a kid to start getting Micronaut toys?                             “How could I resist??? I was 10 years old in 1977…and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the 70s were by far the best era for movies, tv, music, comics and toys. The Micronauts commercials played like a loop during my Saturday morning cereal/cartoon binging and I was transfixed. Watching the dude with the beard in the turtleneck on the commercials showing me how the toys were interchangeable with the entire line and batteries powering the rolling robots…I was hooked instantly. The only thing better than watching the commercials was going into a toys r us and seeing shelves fully stocked with figures and vehicles…it was like crack for kids. Clear plastic and shiny chrome hypnotized me. And the real appeal was that the Star Wars toys at the time had basically no articulation…so how could that compare to the Micronauts “one toy is a thousand toys” idea? It didn’t. Just compare Kenner’s Land Speeder vehicle to the Micronauts Galactic Cruiser. The cruiser would decimate the speeder with one rubber tipped missile blow. No comparison at all. I think what appealed to me most was the toys packaging. The early figures were all photographed with a “blur/motion” effect, and when you’re a little kid that stuff looks damn cool. These days you can mimic that look with photoshop, but back then you took a photograph first and then got that effect when you developed the photo. That visual esthetic blew my mind as a kid, and set the bar for what appeals to me. Lastly…the Micronauts had no movie, comic or cartoon like SW in those days (the comic came later in 79, the original line was released around 76, with their Japanese cousins the Microman debuting around 74) so you had to make up your own adventure. So I did.”

3.What was your first Mego toy?

“That’s a hard one to remember, it was a loooong time ago. I’m gonna go ahead and say Action Jackson, and his Jungle Treehouse was one of my first Mego memories. POTA followed soon after, and of course WGSH were at the top of the x-mas list every year. Micronauts came into my life around 1975 or so, round about 3rd grade. We took them to school and played with them during recess. Then we went home and played with them some more. And of course Baron Karza was the approximate size of the Mego Spidey, so the battles crossed over. I ate, slept and breathed Mego back in the day. They just never stopped making the best toys that were ever made. Mattel’s Shogun Warriors came in a very close second though.”

4. What made you want to start innerspace_online ig account?                                   “Honestly? So I could pull out the toys again, take new photos, and enjoy them again like I did as a kid. So basically to have an excuse to play with them again. I started the website Innerspaceonline.com back in the early/mid 90s as a way to catalog all the toys and every last individual piece and part for fans to help them find and complete a loose collection. (And for me to practice building websites and doing photography; photography being another of my hobbies). I received a lot of positive feedback from collectors over the years thanking me for putting the info on the web, so I figured Instagram needed a Micronauts account as well. I lost the domain a few years ago and someone else put the site back up, which I guess is fine as long as whomever did it isn’t trying to take credit for what i did. I have a million hours spent learning photoshop making those images…! As long as it’s still free for people to view, it’s a good thing. All the toys pictured on the account are from my personal collection, so it’s another way for me to share my passion to like minded collectors. And I need to state this again: whomever is still hosting the website InnerSpace  is doing so without my permission, I and other collectors have attempted to contact them via the internet to no avail. The content in the webpage is mine and created by ME 100%. “

5.  What is your favorite Micronaut toy and why? “There isn’t “one”, there’s six. The Aliens. By far. Repto, Antron, Membros, Centaurus, Lobros and Kronos. I was 12 in 1979 when they were released, and were by far the coolest action figures made at the time. Interchangeable weapons, glorious card art by Ken Kelly…and so drastically different looking from the rest of the Micronauts robotic looking line. Diversity all linked together by 5mm ports. Brilliant. They were dark and evil looking, and then came the Hornetroid and Terraphant vehicles. The paintings on the box were exactly the way the battles looked like to me (in my mind) while playing in the backyard. And…they had removable frikkin glow in the dark brains. Game over man, game over. The Acroyears came in second, one of the most unusual robot designs I’ve ever seen. Then came Giant Acroyear! I mean the toy coolness just never stopped with Micronauts.

6.  Is there any exciting upcoming events coming up for this account or for you in general that you would like to share?                                                                                                            “I wish. I went from being a collector to actually working with Marty Abrams and A.G.E., who for a long time held the Micronauts license, and working as a consultant with Palisades Toys and S.O.T.A. Toys on their Micronauts lines. Long story short, the last Micronauts toys released were by Hasbro under license from Takara were the 3 figure “retro” set, which are more Microman than anything else. The fate of the line is in perpetual limbo, if a movie ever comes out it probably won’t be in my lifetime. Takara (as far as I know) holds the license for the toys, and time will tell whether or not new “Micronauts” are released. ”

If you like to know more information about Dave his IG is:

innerspace_online

And two articles that Dave wrote about Micronauts are below:

Unsung Heroes, the history of Micronauts

Oh Antron, Where Are you?

Until next time!