Barn Find Marx Toys "Double Gun" 1950s Hard Plastic Spaceship

The crew from Ganymede Station pulling another wrecked spaceship out of the snow. Which is half frozen methane, so ... you gotta watch out.

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The full score in their "Barn Find" condition though I knoweth not the history of the pieces prior to opening the boxes.

What we were upgrading from, an often misunderstood recast of the Marx "Double Gun" ship in goofy but to me enjoyable soft nukeslime green plastic. Molds for the four Marx ships surfaced in Mexico during the 1990s, possibly unmarked clones using a leftover mold made for Marx's Mexican Plastimarx subsidiary. 

Colors vary, all bright and happy and the serious collectors frown upon them. I like how they are more or less indestructible and it's easy to change color when painting etc. All you need is the form to trace and these have served me admirably in that role. One can often find them at around $35 shipped for all four, often in a sealed bag. You know where to look.

The real thing, sixty five years of atmosphere settled onto it and missing starboard gun nacelle.

"Blast Off!"'s scant mention of the forms, unless I missed something. That red color is the one to score.

ToySoldierHQ's somewhat more helpful graphic shows all four ship designs. Best answer I've been able to wrangle out of those in the know is that the things were on sale during 1952 and likely remained so through the decade. Marx also entered into arrangements with companies like Kleeware (Britain) and  Moldex (Australia) who essentially made them under license for their markets. Plastimarx in Mexico also likely made them during the hard plastic era as well, and I have an unmarked hard plastic A-Wing ship (style B in the graphic above) which may have been produced by any of them.

A quirk of the design -- Tried to get "in flight" pix of the ship using a painted backdrop and this was the best I could manage, as it's only intended to be seen sitting on a surface. Try to get a from below Dutch angle and you end up looking at hollow space.

Reminds me of a B-25 Mitchell, WW2 twin engine attack craft.

The "Heavy Rescue 411" parody idea in a nutshell. My dad is obsessed with those shows and my aim is to parody it with a science fiction twist, just to help me cope with having to sit through them almost every day ... My original intention for this new arrival was as a new wrecked ship for them to have to pull out of the snow. That it was logo marked by Marx had slipped my attention until having it in my hand. Imagine the surprise! And no, this doesn't go into an artwork. No paint shall touch its noble hull by my brush.

Length measures about four inches in all.

Deadly. Perfect for shipping interdiction and tactical strikes.

You would get out of its way, see.

Glorious. There does appear to be a flaw on the fuselage at the base of the right stabilizer. It has the shape of the design and does not go through to the underside.

"A B-25 crossed with the Batplane."

Another flaw visible just at the corner of the right landing pod along the inner wing. It also does not go through the plastic & looks more like a scratch. We note it to be thorough: The ship is a magnificent unlooked for score! Helps set the universe back to rights.

Just to compare. There's an additional post or two about the recasts in the blog history, search via prior posts at right or click the tag.

Here's a detail collectors might find handy: The wheels on this one have little raised ridge details, but all of my recasts have plain smooth wheels. Something to look for when evaluating finds as the wheels are the only parts not integral to the casting.

Gets its own box with bubbles. Will take care of her, and I promise no paint. Just for makin pix ...

... Often involving a helicopter. The more archaic and obsolete looking, the better.

Marx Toys "Lunar Exploration Miniature Playset" Astronauts & Craters, 1970

I've latched onto the idea that this very brief production run of miniature space toy sets were Marx's reaction to the Golden Astronaut and Spacex toy lines. Both featured reduced size astronauts with some sort of space vehicle, Marx upping the ante with sculpted terrain pieces and a window box construction with impressive folding popup diecut diorama stage to get the imagination rolling. I'd be interested in learning what these sold for at retail in 1970.

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This particular set arrived with its Space Tank loose from its correct natural colored Marx factory twine, and all of the other toy pieces tied down with black sewing thread and, hideously, adhesive applied to glue them to the printed surface of the diorama stage. Marx did not use black sewing thread or adhesive to fix the pieces in place: Their concept for the sets had owners cutting them loose for play including on the diorama stage. So if you come across sets with the pieces glued down that was a prior owner and collector (or vendor) assembling the set to appear as-was.

I believe the figures stand at 30mm, on-scale with the Golden Astronaut figures for that toy line, which is what got me wondering if these were a response. Will look at that idea closer in another update.

Pilot figure with left arm extended outward in what I call the Werner Von Braun position, mimicking a famous picture of the German rocket scientist after a complicated surgery to repair a fractured arm.

Merkwuerdigliebe

The reduced sized cameraman is unique to this series. For whatever reason Marx did not downsize a cameraman for their Mystery Space Ship & Space Ranger sets, whose figures are somewhat larger but are still nicely reduced Operation Moon Base poses. But if you want a downsized cameraman you gotta go the LEMP route here.

Stamped "Marx Toys Made In Taiwan".

Same here. He'd been adhered to the surface of someone else's playset, which as we can see had to be ruinously marred to remove him. Obtained loose along with the pilot figure last fall.

Maybe even more exciting to have these freed. They feel like resin castings rather than formed plastic mold pieces. Very hard plastic.

Dunno if those are maker's marks or something related to the molding process.

And again on this one just below the white surface remnant.

Very odd, and worth the wait to finally get to look these over.

Space Tank had come loose prior to my obtaining the set and I was overjoyed. Soft plastic chassis with hard plastic dome & painted operator figure.

Also marked Made in Taiwan. Box inking states Made In Hong Kong, so perhaps the toy pieces were fabricated in Taiwan and then the sets assembled, painted and boxed in Hong Kong.

M-48 Patton tank chassis.

Marx Toys "Lunar Exploration" Miniature Playset, 1969 (?) Made In Hong Kong Space Toy Masterpiece

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Check earlier blog posts for a more detailed photo examination of the piece. A total instant game-changer in terms of acquisitions: It has been all vintage pieces since this came out of the shipping crate, and learning about it resulted in my "Operation Moon Base" addiction.

Rosevelt Dime to the right for scale, and I placed the Marx "Disneyland Playset" astronaut next to the miniaturized "Operation Moon Base" astronaut in the same pose to demonstrate the difference in scale. Space Tank derived from a white cast M-47 (or M-48) Patton tank with a dome canopy + silver cast antennae stuck on instead of gun turret. Fairly certain that the terrain forms are hand painted as well as the figures.

... Kind of a cool shot ... Huh.

Anyway, a point of pride! and a wish would be to find a second example specifically so I can deconstruct the lesser conditioned of the two and learn how the folded diorama stage was made. Am already working on my own terrain forms, 3d printer access awaits in the fall, and am researching Space Tanks for ideas on how to arrive at my own designs. Which fire off rockets. And have a spinning antenna dish. And FLOAT. Whoa ...

Marx Toys Space Ship Recast / Bootlegs from Mexico, Age + Maker Unknown

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OK, back to these things. Five Marx vehicles recast in fluorescent flexible plastic -- The kind that jeeps & tanks from your basic Army Man set would be cast in. Obtained to be utilized as subjects in photographic based Space Art, so their provenance was not an issue. Only how cool they look, and by the time I was ready to score had done my basic research, knew exactly what I was getting, and actually kind of like the day-glow colors. When queried the vendor stated they had been obtained from an old store which had gone out of business and was being liquidated, which sounds about right.  Cost was about $6/ship, which I count as a bargain.

The package was a loosely sealed bag surrounding the vehicles and a printed "card". More like a printed sheet which just happened to be on cardboard. Nobody ever hung this thing from any pegs, the bag was sealed though with a device using a hot wire to both sever and seal a two layer plastic form with closed sides. We used one in Rhino Records to seal used CDs as an anti-theft measure.

... The colors actually don't matter as the point of having them is to utilize as subjects in diorama pix which then get painted over in any color which strikes the fancy. Anyway I had to have em and here is what was discovered upon opening:

Here's the card after unsealing and it has nothing to do with space ships: Looks like a TinkerToy type building set. My translation came up with READY FOR PLAY / POLI-MAN / "VERSATILE MAN", with "Poli-Man" likely being the brand name of the toys and "Versatile Man" the name of the specific playset.

 All totally bogus, spuriously re-used, likely from a leftover stack which whomever was responsible for it there in Mexico didn't want to go to waste. Then they had these space ships and needed a package for them to be contained in. Since the figures on the kid's creation resembled spacemen well, there you go. Borrow a wire sealer from somebody and seal up a hundred to distribute locally to a network of stores who didn't ask a lot of questions and would stock anything that looks like it might sell. Nice painting.

The business corner. MADE IN MEXICO FOR / DYNAMIC TOYS OF MEXICO with their address. Right. Of more interest is the NET CONTENTS X PZS. on the side, with the number 24 X'd out. That would have been the number of pieces in Poli-Man's "Versatile Man" playset pictured on the card.

Which leaves us with this label (and the loose matchbook sized note about a guarantee of quality) mentioning HUNTER PLANES (which I guess would colloquially translate to FIGHTER PLANES, you'll see why) with 5 PIECES and a printed bin number. The printing on it does look modern, as in 1990s or since, and the vendor had stated that the set was packaged in the 90s but they didn't know how old the castings themselves were. I believe them.

Now for the ships. Delving around during the period between first finding the listing and making the buy -- quite a while, actually -- I was able to determine that these were recasts of Marx made spaceships from the 1950s, though not necessarily Flash Gordon spaceships as the vendor had claimed in their listing. Which makes sense as they do resemble the Flash Gordon ships made by Premiere and later Tootsie Toy, though to my knowledge Marx did not specifically market them as Flash Gordon merchandise. They may have hinted at it, and their original castings were done in a very hard plastic with metallic colors of varying hues. To learn more about them here is a link to the venerable Space Plastics database at the Alphadrome web hub of all things related to vintage space toys:

http://www.danefield.com/data/thumbnails-27.html

The four space ships unbagged. 

 NICE.

Right there at the top of the database page is this monster, identified as a recast A WING SPACESHIP #4 in lemon.

That actually does look like something which might have been proposed as a functioning design, and the USAF emblem is strangely fitting -- Never knew our Flyboys had any of these.

Now one bit that is fascinating is that these recasts all have the correct numbers on their bases but in reverse. All I can think is that they used originals as their mould-positives, obliterated the Marx logos and forgot to flip or remove the numbers. "Unauthorized Bootlegs" is what we'd call them if they were copies of CDs or DVDs.

But still way cool!

CLAMSHELL SPACE SHIP (#3), easily the most visually striking of the bunch, and I like how they put the Japanese emblem for a Mitsubishi Zero on its wing.

Gorgeous, whatever its origin.

My favorite touch is the ladder leading across the wing, which helps fix a sense of scale in the mind's eye. I'd bid on a metallic plastic casting of one and gave up at the forty dollar mark, which was one of the things which prompted me to just put these in the cart and make it happen. Brought home one of each for about 1/2 the cost. And as for the originals, to conjure up Chico Marx from "The Coconuts" once again "We'll find time for both."

#3 reversed with what could possibly be a defaced Marx stamping.

On the opposite wheel hub, and again I detect a defaced or removed logo stamp. Also note the uber-simplistic wheel/axle design.

... Thing does kind of look Japanese. Like a Baaka bomb.

DOUBLE GUN SPACE SHIP (#1) in Key Lime green.

The most Flash Gordonish of the batch, I'd say.

Yeah, go strafe somebody with those things. Totally badass space plane.

My favorite of them all, the TWIN FUSELAGE SPACE SHIP (#2). I've wanted a Manoil Blimp Car for the longest time and you know, this is kind of better. The blimp thing is just a car. This flies.

AWESOME.

Backwards #2 and what I am pretty sure is a scratched out Marx logo. Busted.

Six bucks was a bargain. That thing is cool, distinctive, unique, and not at all like anything you can order off Amazon, Walmart, Target. Nope.

 

Also included to round out the group is this recast delta wing fighter which I believe to be based on either a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger (conceived 1953, entered service 1956) or a Convair F-106 Delta Dart (conceived 1956, entered service 1959) and am hedging on the F-102. Am fairly certain that it is a simplified re-casting of the basic body of another Marx delta jet which had firing missile launchers under each wing. And what is also very interesting is that its markings are not reversed.

Pretty sure that's an F-102. Am not up on my Cold War era fighter jets however and would be delighted to have someone in the know ID it for sure.

Some of the stickers had come loose in the packet over the years, will have fun marking em up! and I want more Zero emblems for the Clamshell. Very very cool.