Growing up, I remember all the fun I had playing with a number of my favorite toys, like He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers and others, and I believe that every boy should have the experience of playing with action figure toys at some point in his childhood.
It may sound silly, but action figure toys helped me become a better man. The fact of the matter is that action figures are almost always based on comic book heroes, or they have a cartoon that kids can watch and learn from.
I still remember watching the G.I. Joe and He-Man cartoons as a child, thinking that their acts of heroism and bravery were really cool and wanting to be the same way when I grew up. I remember they always stood for what was right, and that is something that I realized years later helped me to develop my sense of right and wrong.
I would play with my G.I. Joe or He-Man action figure toys as a boy and would always have the good guys beat the bad guys. I remember as a young person feeling good about that. There was a sense of satisfaction from seeing good prevail over evil, and it carried over to the rest of my life.
Some of the action figure toys that my brother really liked were the superheroes, like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and so forth, and it was really the same thing for him. When you watched the cartoons or even the movies that were made about those characters, they were always on the side of truth and justice and there was a sense that one could depend on them.
I remember watching the movie Superman 3 as a child. There was a portion of the movie where Superman became evil, and I always had a feeling of despair when I knew the transformation was about to happen. Then, when he was transformed back into the good Superman, there was pure elation, and it would seem that all was right with the world once again.
I got the same sense from my son when we watched Spider-Man 3 together, and Peter Parker gets the black suit and becomes the sinister Spider-Man. My son was noticeably distressed throughout the entire duration of that sequence, and I was actually sort of happy to see that.
He plays with action figure toys these days, and I will hear the things he says for them and how he plays with them, and it reminds me a lot of myself when I was his age. My wife and I have tried to teach him right from wrong, and I feel like we have done a pretty good job, but there is no question that the action figures he so admires have played a part, too.