I Was a Rocket Man

Ground control to Major Matt.

When I was a kid, I was really into astronauts. We lived about 30 miles south of Huntsville, AL, where NASA built and tested the rocket engines that took us to the moon. Space flight back then wasn’t like it is today, where you hardly even know anyone’s up there, unless it’s some egomaniacal billionaire who’s making sure everybody knows he can do literally anything he wants to do while they’re sweating their next car payment.

Families gathered around television sets just to watch the liftoff in the morning, then shook their heads in astonishment when it actually worked...as they damn well should have, and still should, even if the astronaut is an asshole. In case you haven’t considered this properly, people aren’t supposed to fly around in outer space. They’re supposed to watch college football and go to Dairy Queen to get a Dilly bar.

Anyway, every once in a while, technicians at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville would buckle down the kind of engine that can meld a family of four sitting in a Cadillac into a solitary burnt weenie, then let her rip.

We knew nothing about this activity when we first moved to town from Ohio—after all, nobody was testing rockets in Cleveland—so, when the ground suddenly started rumbling one afternoon, we thought End Times were nigh.

When Jesus didn’t show up, we went to Dairy Queen and got some Dilly Bars.

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In light of this, it’s no surprise that I began to mix astronaut action figures with my forever-beloved G.I. Joe as my toys of choice. When I was about 7 years old, this led me to a little go-getter named Billy Blastoff.

Gaze upon the molded plastic grooviness of Billy Blastoff. With a name like that, it’s no wonder he became an astronaut. I mean, you wouldn’t have much faith in a public defender or a doctor named Billy Blastoff.

Maybe a male prostitute, but that’s about it.

The great thing about Billy, and I suppose this held true for all astronaut toys, was the array of space-age gizmos he employed while stalking the outer regions of our universe. Like today’s influencers, Billy was mainly a vessel for the transport and display of gotta-have-it accessories.

There was a little vehicle you could sit him in that connected to a gear at the base of his spine (Okay, it was on his butt. Happy now?) When you flicked his “on” switch, the gear started spinning and caused the vehicle to roll forward. Dig also the ray gun he’s holding in the photo there. You plugged it into a little socket in his side, and it lit up. It looked great in the dark, too! I often turned the lights off in my room before playing with him. Billy also had a “camera” that did pretty much the same thing as the gun.

Billy’s most unique feature, though, was his ability to literally walk. There were little hooks in the bottoms of his boots that would slowly rotate and pull him forward across the carpet, alternating from foot to foot!

How can you not love him?! He’s just bursting with old-school personality. Even now, I feel like splitting some Kool-Aid and a grilled cheese sandwich with him.

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Even then, Billy was somewhat overshadowed in little Paulie’s playtime cosmos by Major Matt Mason.

This particular photo shows Matt holding his trusty helmet, but rest assured he would immediately put it on in the vacuum of space, lest he lose track of his all-important brain matter. Matt had a space sled, a space crawler, a ray gun, a really great jet pack with a thread you attached to the wall to make him “fly,” a moon suit, a moon base, and, for all I know, an intergalactic Roto-Rooter that doubled as an air fryer.

Matt had it all, and his buzz cut gave him a no-bullshit bearing that I found endlessly appealing. He looked like he smelled of Old Spice, like my dad did when he went bowling.

Mattel even made a weird little alien named Calisto for its “Matt Mason” line.

Get a load of this guy!

Callisto, as you can clearly see, had a luminescent green head. And he fired his shoulder-mounted weapon when you squeezed that little pump attached to a long tube. A yellow string would zip in and out of the gun when you did it, like a snake’s tongue.

Neato!

I never really knew if Callisto was supposed to be Matt’s friend or foe, but he sure looked like a foe, so I’d spend long Saturday afternoons concocting new ways for Matt to kill him. Understand, this was a full seven or eight years before “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” It never would have occurred to me to benignly smile at him and introduce him to Francois Truffaut.

If it was green and it had a gun, I gutted it.

My brother and I finally took our beaten-and-bent Callisto over to the foundation that was being poured for a new house across the street from us and buried him in the wet cement! I have no idea why we did it, but the house is still standing, and he’ll be in there until they tear it down, like Jimmy Hoffa in old Giants Stadium.

The only drawback to Major Matt Mason was that his limbs bent courtesy of a wire infrastructure that eventually snapped from overuse (picture your long-discarded Gumby and Pokey with arms and legs alarmingly akimbo). After a few months of me twisting him into Cirque du Soleil configurations, Matt developed a nasty compound fracture in his right arm.

A little piece of metal was poking out, and he was frozen in what can best be called a perpetual state of Heil Hitler. But I didn’t know from Hitler at the time, thankfully, and was able to leave that Nietzschean can of worms unopened.

Had Stanley Kubrick come to my house to play, though, he would have loved it.

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Tom Hanks, who knows a thing or two about astronauts, first mentioned wanting to make a Major Matt Mason movie in an “Entertainment Weekly” magazine interview way back in 1996—I remember when he did it—then he didn’t get around to actually trying to do anything about it until 2016, when it was announced the movie would soon be going into production with Bob Zemeckis lined up to direct. Then nothing happened again.

Welcome to Hollywood.

I just googled the whole mess and found an article from July of last year that says Paramount is now ready to get going with it for real because of the whopping box office success of “Barbie,” which is kind of a dumb reason to make the movie when you consider Mattel quit manufacturing Matt Mason around the time Bruce Springsteen released “Born to Run” and only aged astro-toy connoisseurs like myself remember him.

But whatever.

I don’t know if Hanks realizes he’s pushing 70 years old now, and Matt appears to be about 35 at most. But I’m sure digital technicians can put dots all over his face and de-age him the way they did Robert De Niro in “The Irishman,” which is to say not very successfully.

But whatever again. I still have my memories, and so far nobody’s trying to screw up Billy Blastoff.

I hope Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t read this.