Make Mine Marvel Memorabilia 3

It’s been a while since we did one of these round-ups of vintage Marvel merchandise from years past, primarily the formative 1960s and 1970s. So what say we look at a few more pieces of this stuff?

This INCREDIBLE HULK/AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ADVENTURE CITY playset from 1978 features cardboard stand-ups of teh Green Goliath, the wall-crawler and their greatest foes along with a cityscape backdrop against which you can have them battle and adventure. This was produced at the point where both characters were being featured in live action television.

At about that same time in 1978, this 12 inch Mego figure of the Incredible Hulk was released, likely to cash in on his appearances on television. I love the fact that his weird top doesn’t look so much like a tattered shirt as it does a karate gi.

We covered the Ben Cooper Marvel Halloween costumes earlier, but here is a closer look at the Dr. Doom costume, still in its original boxes. The 1967 date coincides with when the Fantastic Four cartoon made its debut on ABC, which makes sense.

A cheepie toy produced in 1977, this Sgt. Fury Defense Force was in actuality a handful of those ubiquitous green army men, packaged with a bridge that they could defend or destroy depending on the mood of the child.

These Ohio Arts flying super hero toys were released in 1967, and could be launched into the sky. The sculpts were a bit crude, and there was no poseability to them, but in an age when finding any Marvel character sculpted in three dimensions was difficult, these served a need.

In 1966 Donruss released a series of Marvel Super Hero bubble gum cards. Like the later, well-remembered Topps sets from the 1970s, these cards pulled artwork from the Marvel books and added cute, funny captions and dialogue to them. Unlike the Topps set, though, these cards weren’t stickers.

Here’s a 1968 Spider-Man hand puppet from Ideal.

Colorforms released this AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ADVENTURE SET in the 1970s.

This INCREDIBLE HULK board game by Milton Bradley came out in 1978. It also featured the Fantastic Four, whose second cartoon series would soon be running. The objective of the game was for the FF to transform the Hulk back into Bruce Banner by completing a four-card face.

Here’s a 1966 Whitman CAPTAIN AMERICA coloring book, whose artwork was loosely based on a recent adventure Cap had with Nick Fury in TALES OF SUSPENSE. Jack Kirby’s design of THEM’s Alchemoid is featured prominently.

The View-Master was a popular toy in the 1970s when home use video recording was still an impossibility, and the line released a number of Marvel-centric releases. These View-Master reels pulled artwork from the characters’ respective cartoon series of years past in many cases.

This AMAZING SPIDER-MAN game was released by Milton Bradley in 1966 and also co-stars the heroes featured in the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series. My guess is that the license for this game was made during that period when Spider-man was going to be one of the features spotlighted in that cartoon, before the decision was made to hold the wall-crawler back to star in an animated show of his own.

And let’s close out with perhaps the most desirable Marvel item of its day, the AMSCO MARVEL WORLD ADVENTURE PLAYSET. This miraculous cardboard construction included the Baxter Building, Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum, Avengers Mansion, Peter Parker’s apartment and the Daily Bugle building, as well as a bevy of super hero stand-ups to array throughout it. Released in 1975, I’ve always wanted one and have never been able to lay hands on it.