Many of the weirdest decisions in toy history were inspired by losing out on a license. Sometimes, it led to a company like Mego chasing the “next best thing,” trying to find a license like the one they turned down. Other times, it led to a toy like Mattel’s Pulsar, which tried to capture the appeal of the competitor product. Pulsar, the “Ultimate Man of Adventure,” was Mattel’s answer to Kenner’s 12″ action figure based off of The Six Million Dollar Man. Kenner’s Six Million Dollar Man was the hottest toy of 1976, boasting exciting bionic action features like a see-through bionic eye, peel-back skin with bionic components underneath, and “super strength” that used internal levers to allow the figure to lift up to two pounds. Pulsar’s action feature? Tear open the figure’s velcro shirt and you can see through his clear plastic torso, which contained an anatomically-accurate circulatory system. Press a button on his back and the figure’s heart will beat and lungs will respire as fake blood pumps through Pulsar’s veins.
Mattel hoped Pulsar would be a hit to rival Kenner’s Six Million Dollar Man line, but only ended up producing three Pulsar items (along with a Halloween costume by Ben Cooper). Despite this, the toy looms large in the memory and the imagination of many seventies kids, who can’t shake the fascinating, disturbing image of Pulsar’s bizarre, one-of-a-kind action feature. Those memories translate to a strong secondary market for the figure, which although relatively common, never fails to attract excitement or attention when one comes up for sale — especially when paired against his nemesis, Hypnos. Much rarer than Pulsar, Hypnos only saw limited production before Mattel’s Pulsar line was discontinued, and is worth two or three times as much as his rival. This Heritage Auction gives fans the chance to own both, mint-in-box, their still-working action features on full display.
Even stranger than Pulsar himself is how little information Mattel gave kids about him. Unlike some of his better-remembered contemporaries, there was no Pulsar tie-in comic, and federal regulations prevented children’s television series that were explicitly promoting a product (the workaround for many manufacturers was the tie-in comic, which they could argue was the basis for the series instead of the toy). All that kids had to go on was the box’s description that Pulsar was “the Ultimate Man of Adventure,” that “No Mission is Impossible for Him,” and that he and Hypnos were “Cosmic titans, Mighty Rivals!” What, exactly, any of this meant was up to the individual’s imagination — and that was likely exactly what the appeal of Pulsar was to kids then and collectors today. He was a colorful, outlandishly strange super-hero whose origins, powers, and world were yours to decide. Was he an alien? An android? A freak accident of mad science? That was in the hands of Pulsar’s owner.
Even the line’s playset, the “Life Systems Center” wasn’t much help. The toy came with a lab table that Pulsar could be strapped to, along with diodes and wires to attach to the figure. With this, kids could image Pulsar on the toy’s included “x-ray,” or activate his “pulsatronic,” “biologic,” and “power” systems. We know from his action figure that Pulsar has a “computer brain,” represented through his secondary action feature: a lifting faceplate with a “mission disk” that can clip to the inside of his head. With the Life Systems Center, kids can “program his computer brain,” imagining themselves encoding missions onto the disk for Pulsar to carry out. The Life Systems Center bears a more than passing resemblance to Kenner’s “Bionic Transport and Repair Station,” the signature playset of their Six Million Dollar Man line. Similarly, the Bionic Repair Station includes a lab table, wires, and panels to monitor the Bionic Man’s vitals signs and make repairs.
Hypnos, the “Ultimate Enemy,” has even less backstory attached to him. He is also sculpted with a translucent plastic chest, but instead of working organs, Hypnos comes with a spinning disk. “All foes fear his powers,” according to Hypnos’ box, and those powers included the hypnotic effect of the spinning, multi-colored disk, activated by a hidden button in the figure’s side. The packaging also calls out “Sparks! Sound!” activated by friction (a once-common action feature gradually phased out by changing safety regulations). Pull an additional lever on Hypnos, and he will throw sparks. The product line was rounded out by a licensed, very rare Halloween costume produced by Ben Cooper. In the seventies, Ben Cooper and rival manufacturer Collegeville were notorious for taking a shot at virtually any license that came through their door, and Pulsar is certainly one of the strangest — tied at least with the Incredible Melting Man from Collegeville.
Toys weren’t built with collectors in mind. When Pulsar was designed, sculpted, and manufactured, no one at Mattel was asking themselves whether the figure would still be displayable fifty years later. The materials used worked at the time, and it was not a consideration whether they’d degrade with time. As a consequence, most loose Pulsars have dried up: the “blood” in their veins has turned to powder, and no longer pumps. Collectors will pay two or three times more for a Pulsar with working blood, even if the rest of the figure is in worse condition. Similarly, the mission disk was incredibly easy to lose, and loose samples are almost always without theirs. Like pumping blood, an intact mission disk will add significant value to a loose Pulsar figure, sometimes up to a hundred dollars.
As the Pulsar and Hypnos on auction through Heritage are mint-in-box, their condition is (largely) assured. Hypnos’ hypnotic disk is just as easily lost as Pulsar’s mission disk, and it is on full display in the plastic window of the boxed sample at Heritage. It’s difficult to verify whether Pulsar’s blood still pumps without removing the figure from package, but the mint condition of his see-through plastic means that his signature action feature is on full display. The packaging enhances the overall effect of both figures immensely, announcing the characters with groovy logos that practically carbon-date them to 1977. They’re backed by bright, clashing, psychedelic colors; even if these toys failed to capture the attention of many kids back in the day, it’s easy to see why they continue to hold the interest of their dedicated cult fandom today. Pulsar is a relic of a pre-Star Wars toy collecting era, when Mego was still the standard to beat, and when science fiction came with a healthy dose of pastels and camp.
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