One thing my parents were great at was buying us wonderful toys. Sometimes, though, I had to endure the agony of one of my brothers owning a particularly cool toy instead of me. Why did my older brother own the Major Matt Mason action figure (and the super-cool Space Crawler) and not me? It's not fair! It's not!
Well, at least I owned the Major Matt Mason "Big Little Book." That was pretty cool. (And I had the satisfaction of seeing Ed take his battery-operated Space Crawler to the beach, where sand got into the works and it stopped working. But it would be petty to mention that years later, so... um... forget I mentioned it, okay?)
That Big Little Book, titled Moon Mission (1968), tells us more about the moon than those darn Apollo astronauts ever did. Did you know there are giant rabbits and giant worms on the moon? I'll bet you didn't. By golly, it's enough to make you believe in conspiracy theories!
I loved this story as a kid. Revisiting it as an adult, I still enjoyed it. The story, written by George S. Elrick, is silly but fun. And I think that I can appreciale the Dan Spiegle art even more now. The Big Little Books were formated with a page of text always facing a page of art. So the book has dozens of great Spiegle illustations.
The tale picks up with Major Matt Mason leading the second expedition to the Moon, where his men are busy constructing a permanent base. But there's a problem. The first expedition had left a man behind to study the long-term effects of living on the moon. This man--Major Otto "Squeak" Harvey--had done well at first, but soon his audio-visual reports showed him getting more and more agitated as he complained about an incessant "cooing" sound coming from outside his habitat. Then all communication is cut off.
Mason and Harvey's sister, a doctor named Jo Ann, travel by jet pack to Squeak's habitat, only to find him missing and the habitat itself wrecked. Then they find a hole in the ground leading into a maze of tunnels. Tunnels dug by.... giant moon worms!
Another astronaut ends up in the tunnel (which, for obscure reasons, maintains Earth-normal atmophere and temperature. He runs across Squeak, who is irrational and speaks only in cooing sounds.
Oh, I mentioned giant rabbits as well, didn't I? These are genetically altered rabbits brought to the moon to eventually be (as the prose cold-bloodedly tells us) "ground up into protein powder." Though the big bunnies normally live in pressurized enclosers, they to have oxygen and temperature-control pills inserted into their skin, so can live on the moon's surface for a time. These leads to a sub plot in which another astronaut pursues an escaped rabbit with a tranquilizer gun.
Anyway, it turns out that alien parasites are inhabiting the worms and one of them has also gotten into Squeak. The parasite briefly jumps into Jo Ann, but the astronauts get it to eventually move into one of the rabbits. It's not unfriendly, so as long as it has a body to inhabit, it's happy. I don't know what happens when the time to grind up the rabbit arrives.
It's probably Spiegle's wonderful art more than the silly story that sells it to me as an adult. That and an element of nostalgia. After all, Ed might have owned the Major Matt Mason action figure and the Space Crawler and the Jet Pack (which travelled along a string you stretched across the room) and the Moon Base, but I owned the Big Little Book. NO ONE CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!
My younger brother Jeff, by the way, claims the Big Little Book was his. We can discount this, of course. Can you believe someone being jealous of stuff we owned as kids? It's sad. And, after all, THE BOOK WAS MINE! (And so was the big fire truck with working hose, by the way. But that's another story.)
My only real complaint about the book is the trademark notice on the title page. "Major Matt Mason is the registered trademark of Mattel, Inc. for its DOLL." Gee whiz. He wasn't a doll. He was an action figure. Why can't anyone get that right?
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