I get a little tired of the old “two kinds of people” thing, but it does apply here. There are two types of collectors- those who display, and those who play. And if you like to play, I have some ideas for you.
Playsets often become the crown jewel of a collection. This can be because of sheer size and price point, because nothing commands attention like a two-foot tall castle and a $400 price tag in a room full of toys. The sheer mass of these types of things tend to make them fixtures, and that can limit the amount and the use you can get out of them. The USS Flagg doesn’t turn on a dime, if it can turn at all. And that’s it your fortunate to have the space for this kind of thing. If you live in an apartment, or with the ol’ wife and kids, it can be pretty hard to dedicate the square footage for that city block playset that you so desperately need. So, what are the alternatives? There’s got to be somewhere between Castle Greyskull and a roll-out play mat with printed-on mailboxes, right? Indeed there is.
One of the last great holdouts for playsets in the 6-7″ scale has always been the Wrestling figures. Going back as long as anybody can remember, there have always been great scale rings and accessories to bring back famous matches in plastic on your living room floor. There have also been many great iterations of backstage areas, dressing rooms, weight rooms, even a mess hall and a loading dock, many of which I’ve owned, that offered some great variety in display options and brawl stagings. Some of these Jakks Pacific offerings were extremely ambitious and still look very impressive, but the aftermarket prices for hard-to-find wrestling items can be absolutely brutal, if you can find them at all.
Mattel has not completely given up the ghost on WWE, though, and in 2013 they released their own Backstage Brawl playset, exclusive to K-Mart. They followed this up with the Training Center Takedown last year.
What makes these sets interesting is the fact that they are modular. Both sets can combine with each other, and be rearranged in various ways, but simply pegging and un-pegging the walls.
Naturally, when I came across a few of these at a closing K-Mart earlier this year, I grabbed a couple of each at some good discount prices. I wasn’t sure what I would end up using them for, I just know you don’t walk away from this scale playsets of any kind. It’s a great concept, aside from the couple cardboard sections in the Backstage set, and after getting 4-5 sections connected together, wrapping around the table, I realized how much fun these could be. And that’s where the customizing starts.
One of the cooler aspects of this kind of setup is that you can build separate “rooms” for the action as you need them. The Backstage set comes with a couple of doors to partition them with, but the design was lacking an important point. That’s where the customizing part begins.
I added a third connection to the door pieces, so now they can fit in between wall sections, instead of needing to be folded into the walls. Both sets have some “extra” connecting sections, either to hold up the cardboard panels or as a random curtain section, so a little bit of cutting and gluing fixes that up easy. This means that not only are the included pieces all interchangeable, but with a little effort, other parts and pieces could be made to connect up as well…
I wanted to incorporate some of a salvaged Jakks playset I found, so I did the same: I added a connector piece to each wall end, and for the door section that it came with. The simple white and red wall colors were easy to match up, so I did a quick paint job to show how it lines up.
The Takedown playset has really great parts for the instant weight room, as advertised. Having two of this set though means I can make these other sections more generic. I removed the mirror stickers from the breakaway wall, and now it could make a good hallway section. I’m thinking about maybe putting some posters on them, but they don’t look bad as-is. For the smaller sections, I just removed or styrene-ed over the weight-lifting equipment ports, and added some vent covers I found in my parts box, so they could be used in more rooms.
So, as it is right now, I have enough to make several rooms of a winding building corridor, most of it straight out of the box. Everything is still very clean and plastic-y looking, but you all know how to fix that, so we’ll get into it in the next part. For right now though, this is building toward a happy medium in my playset collection. Unlike pretty much everything else in the genre, this is something that can be put on the table, built in a couple minutes, used for pictures or playing, and then a couple minutes later disassembled and back in a box before my girlfriend gets home. And it can be built differently each time. I see a lot of potential here.
Check back a little later as I start to turn this into more of a display-worthy piece. If you’re thinking about getting in on your own, check with the retail exclusive K-Mart, although they don’t look to be on their website, though Amazon does.
