M is for Marx Space - Moon Men & "Aliens'

So, to the aliens, known in the later (1970/80's) sets as Moon Men, and six of a possible seven poses. I've only ever seen the crawling alien in the gray PVC, and we've seen him, so he got left out!

 

The set of six, in a softish 'Airfix' polyethylene, a bit bright, but not as bright as the orange-red of some of the space stuff, and it's the whole slime-monster lagoon-radioactive-neon lighting trope of a lot of sci-fi - this colour was common on comic art and pulp-paperback jackets, spilling, radiating, blasting or dripping! Even the 'lobby-cards' and posters for black & white movies would have plenty of florescent green, lime green or yellow-green!

 

Compared with the Rex Mars set's versions, and as we'll see in a second, they are 'versions', all six were found in the Rex Mars set, with one or two also found in Tom Corbett or Space Patrol sets.

 

'Big Ears', the only one found in all four sets, and the similarities between this sculpt and the Fireball XL5 character 'Zooney the Lazoon' is almost certainly not a coincidence, as the Anderson's raided the entire 1950/60's toy oeuvre for their various TV series', the fact that they ended up with a character in a 1962 production, which resembles a 1950's space toy from the other side of the pond, is beyond accidental!

 

Note also, all the bases (and feet) are quite different, these are variants, not the same tool . . . with each being re-cut/finished as it was included in whatever set, the six 'ethylene Moon Men having their own tool, leaving the crawling guy in the Tom Corbett set, as the outlier, not included here.

 

I've seen a Tom Corbett Space Academy set, with all three PVC sets, so you got three Big Ears, but helmets for the Rex Mars sculpts only, it had pale-blue 'office furniture' and was dated 1952, ten years before Fireball XL5!! 

 

Likewise, the 'Frogman Assassin'; 

completely different bases on each of my three samples.

 

I already had four of them in a different shade of green, whom I had shot for the archive, and actually found the bag first, whilst putting the others away, then remembered I had shot them, and you can see in the lower image a clear colour variation between them! No accessories in this post; I'd run out of things to pose the figures with by the time I got to these chaps/chapesses/whatever's!

M is for Marx Space - Rex Mars

I don't know if the Corbett license had expired, or if its sales were dropping to a market saturation-point, which Marx would have recognised from other sets histories, but for some reason they 'invented' a non-TV/Movie, royalty-free property of their own, Rex Mars, with figures similar to both the Tom Corbett and the Space Patrol these were issued with in bigger sets (I haven't even tried to work out the sets, there are dozens of them, stretching over three decades). And that's what this post is looking at, with more of the scenic detritus from my two partial sets.

 

The family portrait! I seem to be missing one sculpt, a chap holding a walkie-talkie near his face, and again, paint is going to have to be removed at some point! 

  

The landing party helping a 'red shirt' back to the shuttle! This time I have the female sculpt, but it's unclear who's who, as it's a made-up set with no TV serial or Movie to help guide the eye, it's all down to the kid's imagination who's boss! I put the lady in charge, she's the tallest!

 

The slightly more active component, they have the same rubber-ducting on knees and elbows as the Space Patrol, but other details are closer to the Tom Corbett sculpts, but with circular helmet-collars, they take the bobbled helmets with a couple of protrusions in the clear-plastic, which turn-up in mixed lots from time to time; I have a few somewhere in the spares pile, so some will get protection!

 

The Aliens, six in total, and rather like Lik Be's robots, all completely different! Which is fine if you want them from six different planets, but not so logical when they are the 'Moon Men' of the Moonbase set? They have their own post, probably next in the sequence.

 

There were, again, two unpainted ones in my sample.

 

The quadruple sonic-death-ray-beam traginator weapon, or boring radar thingy, depending upon your propensity for war toys - there were lots of them in the box, in three colours, but most in the mustard yellow! And something which equated to the morse-signaller boards we saw in an earlier post, apparently it's a solar battery!

 

Three of the landing pads for the Mercury capsule, it has a little hole in the heat-shield! And a ribbed, domed building/laboratory/accommodation unit, which is so remarkably similar to a gold-chromed lid off a touristy bottle of plum-brandy (with the plums in it), from Spain or Portugal, which I've been carrying around for about 50-years, after the Christmas we polished it off, waiting for a chance to scratch build (Terry Wise and the rest told us to keep everything!), I can't wait to dig it out and compare it with this, as I suspect one is based upon the other? But I'll have to wait, won't I!

 

The space-station, which I think can be similarly stuck on the rocket-engine building in the previous post? It's hopelessly out of scale, but so are most of the vehicles, in both my/all the sets!

 

Welp . . . I don't know . . . on the left we have the closest thing to an infantry heavy weapon/death ray, but it's too tall for any of the figures in the three sets we've looked at so far! In the middle, we have an 18thC telescope drilled through a 1950's parking meter! ! While I can't work out if the thing on the right is a sightseeing glass, or a 'What The Butler Saw' peep-show! Cum'on, design department - you can do better than that!

 

Help needed here, what I do know - the two tripods and two bent legs are from the MPC space station, the triple-disc thing is a broken instrument we'll see in a later post, the basket (front, left) also returns (and is part of the thing I mentioned in an earlier post, with the TV desk thing), but that's it.

 

I think the blue loudspeaker, may be from a vehicle, possibly a Hong Kong plastic toy, but it could clip into a tinplate 'wall' of a building? While I have no clue on the bowl (front, centre) which is hollow, the red bit might be a 'sprulette' (my own word), but there's a better shot of a silver one in a later post, so it seems to be a feature of these sets? And the two 'mine detectors' would seem to be from a 3 or 4" action figure? Anyone got any ideas on any of these five?

M is for Marx Space - Intro.

A bit of a box-ticking exercise, I bought another Marx space set the other day, it was packed with stuff, but not necessarily the stuff which should have been in it, lots of figures, which is what I was after, so I was happy enough, though.

 

However, because it was all a bit mixed, and because there are better US sources for all this stuff, which can be quite complicated, especially when several long-running playsets all carried similar stuff, I'm going to look at the figures over a few posts, as a sort of conversational overview, and some of the other stuff will come along for the ride!

 

So, this was the set I got, a bit tatty, but all in one piece, and supposed to be a 'Captain Space' set, however the contents were more suited to a 'Moonbase' set, with the figures surviving from the Captain Space set, along with their tinplate compound.

 

Compared with the tin Cape Kennedy carry-case I bought a while back.

 

The stuff I've left out of the posts, the tin-plate compound is in a bag, there's a ton of rocketry, but some of it's in a poor state, so I'll need to track down some better stuff later, although I haven't sorted them with the stuff in the main pile, or the extras in the Kennedy set, so something will come together.

 

The orange version of the launching gantry we saw, in white, in the Canaveral set, is definitely a Moonbase item, not a Captain Space thing, while I think the big rocket is MPC. Weirdest is the quadruple ray-gun platforms, there's about nine and a bit in this shot, plus a couple missing which were with the photo-shoot stuff!

 

Bases/lauchers, or parts thereof, from several other sets, and another piece of tin-plate, and a couple of things which aren't Marx were also kicking-about in the bottom of the box! Somehow missing the shot, was the Gemini module, but with a silver pilot, not the colour-matched get-up, we saw here, but the capsule was in the same leery orange-red!

 

But all these guys, gals and Aliens, along with a robot or two and a near full set of the larger 54mm NASA types were included, so it's through them, that I'm going to look at some of the more interesting bits, over a series of posts.
 

The grey ones are the Tom Corbett figures, with uniforms matching the NBC TV serial, the blue ones Rex Mars (Marx's own property), and the orange ones the Space Patrol figures, a set used to pack out the other pairs' sets, while the green ones are a set of Aliens pulled from the Rex Set for later issues like the Moonbase set.

 

I'm assuming the paint is all home-added, I can't find others similarly painted, so one day I'll clean them all off.