About the archive

Studio Remarkable was founded in Minneapolis in April 2005, in the kind of neighborhood where you're never more than a few blocks from a lake. And, yes, that sounds more poetic than it was.

The original vision was broad: short films, writing, photography. A wide creative footprint. Over the following years the focus shifted. Writing became the center. Screenplays first, then novels. By 2011 our imprint Studio Remarkable Books launched its first title, and the endeavor had become something different from what I originally imagined. But it had found its footing.

My uncle, Alan Christensen, died in the spring of 2006.

Al was a southern Minnesota truck driver, born in the late 1950s. I'm not sure which of my relatives added the line to his obituary, but someone referred to him as "impish," and that was quite a word to choose. That word shouldn't make you think of a small man, as Al was physically large but not imposing. Rather, he was curious and had a wink of mischief to his demeanor. He was also kind in a way that came through easily, even to the many strangers he'd meet.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, I'd periodically go to a movie on a Saturday or Sunday with Al and, if I was lucky, twist his arm into getting me an action figure at the local department store. Fans of the era knew that the 1980s was a boom time for action figures and I had plenty of options to choose from. Agents of C.H.A.O.S. wasn't my only love but it was one that frequently caught my eye. Al would remember my preferences or something I'd looked at when it came time for birthdays or Christmas gifts. He wasn't a fan of the toy lines himself, but I'd planted seeds in his head that were enough for him to recognize what they were.

Agents of C.H.A.O.S. may not have been at the top of the 1980s toy mountain, but it wasn't a footnote either. If you ran into a fellow fan at a convention decades later, it was an "if you know, you know" kind of thing.

The property came out of Remarkable Toyworks, Inc., a Minnesota toy company with roots going back to 1919. The company started as a machine shop called Harmon Metal Works, founded by a man named August Harmon in Hopkins, Minnesota. His son Howard turned it toward toys after the war. The public brand, and what anyone ever called it, was Remarkable Toys.

Howard died in a tragic boating accident in 1980. That turn of events left his only child, Dale Harmon, to become president of Remarkable Toyworks at age twenty-five, much younger than he or anyone else expected.

At the time, Dale was only two years removed from having studied cinema at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a school that Howard had only allowed him to attend after insisting that he actually major in business.

Dale came back to Minnesota carrying that unique education with him and the immediate mandate to modernize the Remarkable Toys lineup. The first half of the 1980s would involve cashing in with a smart pivot into the small vehicle toy craze, with monster trucks and modular systems breaking out. The second half would be about riding the action figure wave.

C.H.A.O.S. was really where Dale tried to go next level, reaching back to his world-building instincts from a decade prior. The toy industry was evolving into universes of characters and long-running animated series. Even animated and live-action film adaptations. Dale may well have been the perfect person to have in charge of a major toy company in the mid-1980s.

The concept for C.H.A.O.S. was rich, deep, and just a little different from anything else on the market. It's probably overused to say something was ahead of its time, but anyone who studies this property will have a hard time arguing with that claim. The characters and the mythology were more complicated than most toy properties attempted. An adventure team, a dynastic enemy, an intriguing third faction, and mysterious ancient technology running underneath all of it. For a while, it worked. The line found a real audience as kids aged up and appreciated the sophistication. People who encountered Agents of C.H.A.O.S. tended to remember it clearly.

A toy line, an animated series, a movie, and a mythology that outgrew the business behind it.

Wave 1 launched in 1985, and Dale would ultimately oversee multiple toy waves, a 65-episode animated series, a direct-to-video movie, and a final abandoned development phase.

Wave 2 in 1987 made the future look possible. But by Wave 3 in 1988, animation costs, movie commitments, retailer caution, and a changing toy aisle all arrived at the same time. The Starwatch Command System, which was probably the most ambitious product Remarkable ever made, proved how thin the margins really were. The company was undone by too many delayed consequences coming due at the same time.

By 1989, Dale had lost control of the company. By 1990, Remarkable Toyworks was effectively gone.

Most of Remarkable's intellectual property was bought up and some of its legacy lines still pop up from time to time on store shelves via other toy makers.

C.H.A.O.S. was the one major property that fell through the cracks. Unclear rights at the time, amid a dispute over the animated series and the changing toy trends of the era, meant that the property simply faded away over the following decades. Again, it was an "if you know, you know" line.

Studio Remarkable. Remarkable Toys.

People probably assume that in 2005 I was naming my venture in honor of the toy company. It's less exciting to admit that the naming was just coincidence. Although some might say it was providence.

As Al's belongings were sorted through, I found myself having returned to me some gifts that I'd given Al, along with a few mementos that relatives thought would be meaningful. The most unexpected item was something that seemed entirely out of place in Al's belongings: an animation cel.

There was a note on the back. "For your Nephew." It was signed by someone whose name I didn't recognize. After some trial and error searching the internet, I realized that the note and art seemed to have come from Dale Harmon himself.

An animation cel from the 1989 movie, signed by Dale Harmon, found in a truck driver's belongings.

I eventually traced the cel as being an original from the production of the 1989 C.H.A.O.S. movie. Figuring out what it was only led to more questions. Why would Al have ever come across such a thing, to say nothing of why a notable figure like Dale would have been involved?

It was clear that at some point Al had obtained the art and perhaps forgotten about it, intending to pass it along to me and then not getting the chance.

At the time, I felt like there were any number of questions around the art, but trying to solve them was not at the forefront of my mind.

I wouldn't know it for years, but there were some odd echoes between my life and Dale's.

No, I didn't happen to have been born into a toy-making dynasty or a family with old money ties to the western Minneapolis suburbs.

What I did have in common with Dale was that I'd gone to the University of Southern California and then found myself back in Minnesota afterward. I'd lived in the Los Angeles area in the later 2000s, getting an MBA and completing a program in association with the USC Cinematic Arts school. I'd scratched an itch by having had a chance to work in and around real productions in Hollywood, an experience that confirmed to me that my passion was in writing and the construction of ideas.

I kept going back to my old toy collection from the 1980s. The pieces from C.H.A.O.S. kept jumping out to me.

Things changed in 2011, but I maybe didn't realize it at the time. I'd settled back in Minnesota and was preparing to get married. With time on my hands after years of juggling a job and education, I was in a nostalgic mood, cleaning and repairing old toys and shopping online for parts that were missing or broken.

Also jumping out to me was that random art that Al had somehow obtained. It was a complete mystery that I figured I would never solve. I would forget that I even owned it and when I'd run across it a year or two later in a box, it was like rediscovering this alien artifact all over again.

I was also working on my first novel, "Another Life," by 2011. It was a riff on body-switch teen stories from the 1980s, updated for its time and with the twist of the switch being between dimensions. Nothing about it screamed "toy line mythology," but I couldn't help myself. I wanted to plant seeds in that story pointing toward a bigger world. And that world was something that had stuck with me since childhood. Somewhere in the back of my mind I kept revisiting what Al's gift represented. I was vague about it, not knowing what the rights situation would be, but again, if you knew, you knew.

More books followed, each in different genres. Some completed and given limited publication releases. Several existed either in screenplay form or as detailed plots, with the intent to finish them as additional novels. Each had something underneath the surface, connecting to something larger than any single title suggested.

Life got in the way in the 2010s and early 2020s, though. Kids, a career. The work was still there but the time was short. My flame of interest never went out.

In early 2026, I did something that I should have done a decade or two sooner: I started digging into finding Dale Harmon.

I'd assumed that he was long since dead, not realizing how young he had been in the 1980s.

Powering me was a mix of curiosity and paranoia. I wanted to finally move forward seriously with the books I'd either written or still wanted to write. Frankly, though, I didn't want to get sued when I released them, and I figured that someone in the Harmon family could help me.

I imagined that my quest would take me through lawyers or some grandchild in a trust fund with grand ideas that I might run up against.

Instead, the path was much simpler. It turned out that Dale was still alive and quite healthy in his early seventies.

And the even bigger punchline? He lived less than five miles from my house.

Dale had had decades of quiet life behind him, and the few boxes from the company that he'd kept had sat longer than he probably intended. By this point, he had lived a couple of full lives. He had carried his family legacy through the 1980s. Then in the 1990s, he started his own family and began a new era. He had focused on his wife's plans for a business of her own while raising two children with her. Suddenly thirty years went by for him.

While I was quickly able to solve the mystery of how Dale had connected with Al, that was only the very beginning of the road ahead.

When I connected with Dale in 2026, he wasn't looking for someone to tell his story. But he was willing to talk about it. He had been carrying the weight of his story inside for a long time and was open to setting it down when I came along.

This site is the first serious effort to compile and present the surviving record of Agents of C.H.A.O.S.

Some of what appears here comes from production material that surfaced through other channels: collectors, former employees, and people who worked near Remarkable during the production years.

Above all, though, Dale has been a primary source for what this archive contains beyond what was already publicly known. Production details, internal history, character development records, vehicle concepts, animation notes, business context. Most of what you see in the archive came from his cooperation and fact-checking. The trivia that we've woven into this site was largely him connecting dots that no one else could have done.

C.H.A.O.S. always had more story than it got to tell.

With Dale's blessing, I've stopped pretending that the boundary between preservation and continuation needed to remain clean. The original company is gone. The ownership trail is complicated and likely never to be fully resolved beyond the Harmon family still having a primary claim to it.

As you've likely already gathered, new fiction set within the Agents of C.H.A.O.S. universe is in active development. The novels that I previously wrote will be polished and re-released. The stories that had not yet been completed will finally be finished.

And perhaps just as significant, a nonfiction book will finally tell the story of Dale Harmon and Remarkable Toyworks. The family, the company, the people who built it, and what lived on after it was gone.

This archive is where those paths meet.

We hope you'll join us.