Unidentified Found Objects: Marx space station and... tower... thingy???

 

For today's post, I have an acquisition I got not too long ago but still ended up backlogged for a while simply because it doesn't quite fit with my other material. I finally brought back a feature that went by the wayside almost a year ago, originally created for the Spiff ship and the immortal arcade prize fleet, and then dropped after the Diener Space Raiders. The present items were never as untraceable or obscure as the prize ships or as elusive as the Spiff ship, if only because I'm a bit too young to have had them new, but as we will see momentarily, there's still plenty of mystery and pure weirdness to go around. To start things off, here's a couple pics of the items, first prepared for the last space guys post, both from the 1960s heyday of space toys, and they sure are... plastic?

For once, the backstory on these is straightforward. These pieces first appeared in Marx's Operation Moon Base set in 1962, coinciding with the introduction of semi-realistic "transitional" astronaut figures. Evidently, the tower was intended as a base for a wire or rod to support an orbiting space craft, including but not necessarily limited to the second piece, sometimes simply called the "space platform". The two items reappeared during the last ride of Marx space toys, the Martian Landing, Star Station Seven and Galaxy Command playsets, the last of which was sold by Mego in 1980 after Marx's bankruptcy. While the Moon Base set accessories were red, all known copies from the '70s playsets are yellow as seen here. The later sets did not feature the orbiting gimmick, and may have removed a piece from the space station. 

As with many Marx items, the real difficulty with getting these is getting hold of one without buying a boxed vintage set outright. I got hold of these for a price on par with some of the rarer 6 inch Marx figures. What I absolutely wasn't prepared for was how big they really are, especially the space station.  Here's a lineup of the tower with some representative "space guys", a 60mm astronaut, the army man-scale and mini/ original Galaxy Laser Team Commander, the 70mm Space Guy Who Doesn't Care, the Timmee nuclear guy and for good measure 6-inch Scooper.

While I'm at it, here's a shot with the Truckstop Queen and the Duchess/ Connie. I think the tower is a little taller!

What obviously stands out about these is that the implied scale s wonky even for army-man vehicles and accessories. The tower could just about harmonize with figures on the low end of the scale, including Marx's own 35-45mm figures, at least if you don't worry too much about what the art on top is supposed to do. (Given the conspicuous gap between the first and second bulbs, the designers clearly didn't.) The space station, on the other hand, must clearly be much larger. What's far stranger is the contrast in style. The space station looks like something out of 2001 (or at least The Green Slime), while the tower would fit in with the Flash Gordon comic. (The Delaurentiis movie comes close.) One is ahead of its time, the other feels "retro" even for its time. Here's a few more pics to show what I mean.

While the tower is a fine bit of retrofuturism, it's the station that has kept me fascinated and at times frustrated. As with many space toys (see the Altair-3 Space Raiders ship), it makes more sense the bigger the scale one considers. What comes up for my "head canon" is that the jets on the outside are actually some kind of spacecraft in themselves, perhaps capsules to ferry people from Earth or larger ships, perhaps something much bigger. But, that makes it much harder to account for the upper part, which I just think of as the "basket". It looks like a railing, which would bring a measure of sense to the tower. Here, however, it just messes up the scale more, and on top of that, the protruding peg in the middle doesn't leave room for a figure to stand. Meanwhile, those three things on top- lights? instruments???- actually make sense for something a person could ride in, but less and less scaled up, And that brings us to the strangest part, the box art from one of the playsets (image credit 2 Warps to Neptune). It would have been just fine to show it in space overhead, but instead, they did this...

Of course, this is clearly overanalyzing the Marx crew never did. By the late '70s, the manufacturer was clearly down to reusing old molds without regard for whether it fit the original concept or made any sense whatsoever. Still, it was enough to get me to try something. I worked out that the basket doesn't have to be pushed down all the way, which gave me  an unbroken surface, Here's the result.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. It's been more random than usual, but it's one more thing out of my backlog, plus it brings me back to a feature I meant to do a lot more with. That's all, more to come!