Sammy Steel: The Lost Brother of Mighty Max

The following is a guest post by Mike MacDee of MikesToyBox.net

In the early '90s Polly Pocket started an amazing toy trend: playsets the size of drink coasters, with figures tiny enough to inhabit them. It was invented by a clever and loving man who built a dollhouse for his daughter out of a discarded makeup compact so she could take it anywhere. This begat what I believe to be the most brilliantly designed toy of all time: Mighty Max, the short-lived “Polly Pocket for boys,” which really kicked off the “mini playset” trend of the '90s. Suddenly every licensed toy line was doing it: Power Rangers, Tarzan, Star Wars, Pokemon, Micro Machines, even Goosebumps.

These days, Max is reliving his adventures via night terrors in an asylum somewhere in Massachusetts, blissfully unaware that he has a brother who went on similar adventures: a boy named Sammy Steel.

Okay, all pretensions aside, Sammy Steel vs The Micro Mob was a dollar store knock-off of a popular toy: Warlord to Max’s He-Man. But the fact that this toy existed was amazing to my little child mind, being such a young fan of odd knock-off toys already.

But Sammy Steel wasn’t just a handful of inferior dollar store knock-offs: like Max, it ran for three different series, and each one featured a comic strip on the back of its card. It tried so hard to emulate the source that it’s hard not to admire it a little bit. Every year when I went to the dollar store toy aisle and found another new lineup of Sammy Steels it blew my mind. Stranger still, I discovered official UK variants many years later.

Nowadays the toys are unicorn rare, and really not worth anything, nor are they in demand. But that just makes collecting them all the more fun. I get a rush of excitement whenever I find a new Sammy Steel listing, and I’ve hoarded an impressive collection of the things. I’m pretty sure my site, MikesToyBox, is the only source of info on these forgotten toys anymore.

One major stylistic difference between Max and Sammy is that Sammy never abandoned the cute design motif of Max Series 1, opting for Hanna-Barbara while Max took the Lovecraft and Hammer Horror route. They also lacked the ingenious designs of Mighty Max: the playsets weren’t configured for everything to fit in exactly the right place so the compact could close without trouble. You basically pack Sammy away by jangling the figures around inside until the lid finally closed.

Sammy Steel Series 1 was four sets: Vicious Volcano, Face Mountain, Dome of Doom, and Sinister Saucer. These are the most easily found on eBay and elsewhere, particularly Face Mountain. Sinister Saucer is the best because of its inorganic environment where everything seems to serve a purpose, while the other three were mostly set in the wilderness. The compacts were shaped like mountains or cute flying saucers.

Things get more interesting with Series 2. Club Dread is a water park overrun by terrorists, robots, and giant octopodes. Hurtin’ Safari is set around a Minecraft-like jungle tree fort. Prehistoric Peril takes Sammy to Forbidden Valley to fight Gwangi and other Harryhausen delights. The series climaxes with Star Trap, an adorable moon base that would better suit Polly Pocket than Mighty Max, if she ever went to space. The compacts for these are wonderful, because two are “disguised” as Walkman cassette players, and the other two as Game Boys. I wish they were all the latter, because the screens of the Game Boy compacts are made to resemble LCD games depicting the action inside - an unbearably cool touch. They went nuts with the accessories, too: look at all the stuff you got! Look at that dinosaur with the saddle-crane!

Things end weak as a baby fart with Series 3, which only featured three toys instead of the usual four: Submarine Sandwich, the laughable Tomb of Terror, and Chasing the Mob’s Missile. These playsets came with built-in sound effects, at the expense of figures, detail, and anything else more interesting. A depressing end for a fun little knockoff toy that shelled out more effort than most dollar store ripoffs…in the beginning, anyway.

I occasionally find other Max/Polly knockoffs I never heard of, and it’s always a treat for some nerdy reason. I continue browsing the Mighty Max listings in the hope of finding Sammy Steel stuff. Maybe someday I’ll find someone selling a carded lot, or a piece I’m missing. Or maybe I’ll start collecting Polly Pocket knockoffs next. I still need to buy a house for Max to retire in.

For more Sammy Steel information and photos of additional playsets, packaging and more, visit MikesToyBox.net!

Mysteries of the Universe: UFO playsets, Mighty Max-style

Mighty Max micro playsets were some of the most popular toys of the early-to-mid 1990s, which of course resulted in plenty of rip-offs. One of the coolest releases that took advantage of the Mighty Max concept was a small line from 1996 titled Mysteries of the Universe, which consisted of three different compact UFOs that fit in the palm of your hand and contained micro visitors from outer space.

These were manufactured by Uni-King Toys of China, and I believe distributed mainly to discount stores. That's where I remember getting mine--probably for a couple bucks.

There's a black ship, a green ship and a blue ship, each with a different design and each including different micro aliens and other accessories. To add to the coolness, all of the sets include items found on Earth that have been associated with extraterrestrials, such as pyramids, a Moai, a Dogū, and Nazca Lines.

I own only the shiny green UFO, which comes with the classic alien greys, plus the awesome little Moai and Dogū statues,and a couple machine-type accessories. All four aliens have a different sculpt, which is a nice touch.

When you open up the ship, you see a few more aliens lying in pods, either sleeping or being experimented upon. So cool!

Considering these were dollar store types of toys, the fun factor and level of detail are fantastic. Whoever designed them clearly put a good amount of research, thought and effort into them. I like the one I own so much that I've been tempted to track down the others.

You can find a detailed review of one of the additional two UFOs over at Dinosaur Dracula.

Who else has any of these or remembers them?

Mighty Max mini monsters

Note: the little green guy on the left is from a Mighty Max knockoff set

Mighty Max toys were definitely some of the coolest toys of the '90s. I was way into them as a kid and still have all of my old sets from back in the day. I loved all the little details and features that were packed into the compact playsets, but most of all I loved the tiny figures that came with them.

One set even had a little Cthulhu-esque monster!

For anyone unfamiliar with the line, Mighty Max toys primarily consisted of "Doom Zones" and "Horror Heads," which were both forms of micro playsets, each with a theme or storyline that found the young hero Max facing various types of villains and monsters (for example, "Mighty Max Liquidates the Ice Alien" and "Mighty Max Challenges Lava Beast"). The Doom Zones were the larger of the two, often featuring moving pieces and other cool features. Basically, they were like Polly Pocket toys only marketed toward boys and 100 times cooler.

There were some pretty awesome little monster pieces that came with the sets, from a big tentacled eyeball to a brain monster to more standard types of baddies like a mummy, Frankenstein's monster and zombie. Above you can see a sampling of the micro figures from a bunch of the different sets. My most prized Mighty Max possession was probably the Skull Mountain, which was a huge (at least by Mighty Max standards) mountain playset that included multiple levels and lots of cool features and figures. I especially dig the little skeleton-turtle monster that came with it (shown in the top photo above).

What do you think of Mighty Max toys? What are some of your favorite pieces?