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 - Tom Corbett

For years, I thought this was Tom Cobet, I guess you read what you see, and the dyslexia (now known to be Asperger's) may have been a part, but I think a lot of people probably read words, new words that is, or especially names, wrongly! As a kid I read tons of Sci-Fi, and rereading now, you realise how poorly you understood the made-up names of aliens or their planets, and I suspect lots of us do it! Also, some of my LotR/Hobbit name-readings were way off too!

 

Still missing a couple of poses, and I think all the paint's going to have to come off, as I said in the Introduction, Tom Corbett - Space Cadet was a TV serial (as they were called before they became series (UK) or seasons (US)), on all four main US Channels (not just the NBC of my notes), and these uniforms seem to tie-in well, with the costumes of the TV series. The crawling figure, middle left, is an Alien.

 

More here;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Corbett,_Space_Cadet_(TV_series)

 

I already had one of the missing chaps, with the mic, who I seem to have shot twice now, and there were two unpainted figures in the lot, which leaves two other blokes and the single female sculpt to find, I think, but that's the fun of collecting! Throwing money at complete sets, if/when you've got it, gets boring! All mine are PVC, aparently later ones were polyethylene, with bases added to earlier baseless figures.

 

These were pretty ubiquitous I think, and included in lots of the space sets, and while it looks a bit classroomy, they are all mean to be more 'control-room' than office! I think I got the small cabinet of component drawers on its side, without my glasses I thought it was a bookcase full of box-files!

 

Big important machine on the left and uppy-downy-side-to-side radar array to the right, there is a small hole in the top of the giant cash-register, which is for a mesh-cullender-dish type thing, missing from these two examples, but we'll see one in a later part.

 

Educational interactivity was provided by the morse signaler boards, which changed over time, with at least two versions of code sheet. On the right is one missing the code sheet slider-insert.

 

From behind, obviously by sliding them up or down, you can flash morse messages in either red or black, with the printed dots offset by just enough to allow for them all to go white on the push (red), or pull - black.

 

Close-ups of the two different sheets I have, there may be more?

Black includes numerals, red has letters only. 

 

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a big computer or a giant filing-cabinet, or should I lay it flat as a cargo-pod? The beauty of imagination in play! One thing I discovered while shooting all these was that the scenics/accessories were completely replaced over time, apparently by some pretty casual pantographing, resulting in the replacements being smaller all round.

 

Early versions were polystyrene, later stuff is in a tough polyethylene type polymer, with some (the red-orange stuff) having more of the feel of polypropylene?

 

Size difference is quite notable, and while I say I 'discovered' it, I couldn't find anything on the Internet about it, but I'm sure the experts in the defunct Plastic Figure & Playset Collector, or it's still extant offspring, Russel Kern's Playset Magazine will have highlighted such details at some point, and previous to my observations! The Americans take Marx as seriously as the Germans worry about the colour variations of Timpo Apache legs!

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.