Hepcat

Marx produced a plethora of play sets from the fifties to seventies. Testament to their popularity with kids was not just the variety of these that Marx produced, but the fact that Marx didn't feel the need to advertise these play sets on television. There just seemed to be a ready market for this type of item at the price point Marx charged. Among the most popular play sets were the dinosaur ones. The Prehistoric Times play set Marx issued in 1957 was the first of these: Here's a picture of the contents from Bigbud's collection:Marx reissued somewhat smaller versions of this play set in various boxes until 1963: Marx reissued a variant of this play set with cliff terrain pieces in 1970 under the name One Million B.C.:I believe the Prehistoric Play Set then followed:And the Prehistoric Dinosaur Play Set:And then Prehistoric Mountain:And finally Giant Prehistoric Mountain with even taller cliff terrain pieces:

Here's a scan of the only comic I have in my collection cover dated May 1957: 107

This topic was intended to showcase specifically these titles : House of Mystery House of Secrets My Greatest Adventure Tales of the Unexpected Titles such as Mystery in Space, Strange Adventures, Flash, Green Lantern, Challengers of the Unknown and Metal Men simply don't belong here because they're either first string DC sci-fi titles or else they're not really sci-fi titles at all. Moreover all the titles I mentioned in my previous sentence have their own dedicated threads. Here's the Strange Adventures thread:

Here's a scan of the only comic from my collection cover dated April 1957:

Here in alphabetical order are scans of my favourite covers from the DC comics I have in my collection cover dated March 1967:

After the draconian law banning pinball machines in Canada was repealed in January 1976, two particular machines acted to set me on the path to permanent pinball degeneracy. These were both to be found at the York Hotel in downtown London directly across the street from the CNR passenger train station. The first was the Wizard released by Bally in 1975:A very well designed game, it sold over 10,000 units which smashed Bally's previous production record of 5254 for a pinball machine. I had the game completely mastered and built up a total of nineteen free games on a single quarter one afternoon before I succumbed to fatigue.The other game was in the other room by the old fashioned greasy spoon lunch counter attached to the York Hotel. (How I miss those greasy spoons now!) It was the Royal Flush machine which Gottlieb released in 1976:I had my best run ever on this machine late one afternoon. I'd hit everything and I had the machine lit up like a Xmas tree. I was already up to five or six free games but I wasn't even targeting the free game hole. My timing was so good that I was hitting the silver ball hard enough to propel it off the glass and I just wanted to keep hitting. And then believe it or not but a hippie watching me play with astonishment leaned on the machine so hard that he tilted it thus ending my best run of all time! I wanted to strangle him. So no, I've never needed drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc. Pinball and other assorted baby boomer kids' stuff including comic mags, bubble gum cards and monster and other model kits, muscle cars, and rock music and stereo equipment are all it took to set me on the path to ruin. And here I am today!

Stupid, yes, but ever so tasty as well!

I've always been a fan of Shari Lewis and her puppet characters with my two favourites being Wing Ding and Charlie Horse. Here are some pictures of Shari and friends:And here she is with Ed Sullivan and Topo Gigio:Here are some shots of my Shari Lewis and Friends thermos: And here are a couple of photos of my Shari Lewis & Friends Colorforms set:

Two of my favourites as well!

Great stuff! Charltons are boss.

The cover of Star Spangled War Stories 138 hitting newsstands fifty years ago this month: Hearkened right back to that of Showcase 57: The two covers are so similar in concept and design that I still mix them up.

Konga was also quite the ladies man himself:

Gorgo is so cosmopolitan. that he knows no national borders. He's truly a citizen of the world. There's no such thing as too much Gorgo.

Scans of my two favourite Gorgo covers from my collection:

I also have this one although I'm not sure it strictly fits into the romance genre:

My complete collection of romance comics: Pretty pathetic, eh?

Great looking little plane!

I've always loved the feral look Maurice Whitman imparted to the faces of the women he drew!

My experience is that they think whatever they have is "Near" Mint upon the premise that it's "close enough". They therefore think whatever they have is "worth" the highest price they see in any guide.

It was fifty years ago this month that the Creeper debuted in DC comics: An interesting detail was the mention of Commies in the very first panel of the story: To this point of the Silver Age at DC there had been considerable reluctance to finger Soviets or Communists as enemies. Julius Schwartz's titles in particular would very annoyingly label spies as being agents of an unnamed foreign power. "Why not name the foreign power, Julie?" Robert Kanigher though continued to be just as oblivious to what his fellow editors were doing on this subject as on every other. He did on occasion feature Reds as the enemy both in his war comics as well as in Wonder Woman: For once I'm with Robert Kanigher here. While Archie, Dell and then Gold Key were even more weak-kneed than DC when it came to portraying Commies as a menace, other comic companies were considerably less reticent. Ace for example published this Atomic War title just fifteen years earlier in 1952-53: 1 3 4 Fiction House, Standard and many others published a virtual riot of comics based on the Korean War: Atlas published war comics such as these as late as 1959: In fact Stan Lee showed no reluctance to portray the Reds as villains well into the sixties. Sue Reed's mention of beating the Commies in the space race features prominently in the origin tale of the Fantastic Four: Here are another couple of examples from 1962 and 1965 respectively: The war comics at Charlton continued to feature Americans battling Commies right through the sixties: 24 26 21 26 51 And this was not just in the war comics but throughout the entire line: 2 1 17 21 22 Here from Space Adventures 40 is a page that's a particularly good example: And over at Harvey they published this one in 1966: All very cool indeed in my opinion! (The larger scans above are all from my own collection.)

I'd say you're largely but not entirely correct. The Soviet plane on the cover of Fight Comics and at the bottom of the cover of Wings Comics 118 look like MiG 15s although the nose is off: The Soviet plane on the top right of the cover of Wings Comics 118 and on the cover of Wings Comics 119 do indeed resemble the non-existent Soviet plane that Aurora modelled. I noticed that the Aurora kit modelled a plane that wasn't at all like a MiG 19 back in 2011 when I was photographing my own Aurora "MiG 19".

Mick Taylor is actually my least favourite fifth Stone. Quite simply the only Stones' album on which he was fully featured that I really like was his first one, Sticky Fingers. I didn't like the next three from Exile to It's Only Rock 'n Roll at all. Here's how I rate the Stones' albums from the 20th century: 1. Flowers 2. December's Children 3. Rolling Stones Now 4. Sticky Fingers 5. Beggars' Banquet 6. Let It Bleed 7. Their Satanic Majesties Request 8. Some Girls 9. Steel Wheels 10. Between the Buttons (U.S. release) 11. Voodoo Lounge 12. Dirty Work 13. Out of Our Heads 14. Tattoo You 15. Black and Blue 16. Emotional Rescue 17. Aftermath (U.S. release) 18. Bridges to Babylon 18. England's Newest Hitmakers 19. 12 x 5 20. Exile on Main Street 21. Goat's Head Soup 22. It's Only Rock 'n Roll 23. Undercover

Ironically I bought my own Revell Dambuster over the 1966 Xmas holidays at McCormick's Hobbies on Oxford Street in London! Huh? The MiG 19 existed: It just didn't look anything like the model kit Aurora first issued in 1955. I must admit though that the Aurora model kit looked way cooler with the long tail section with the horizontal stabilizer at the top! Here then is another CGC friendly pic of the delectable Ms. Dorian: Coincidentally I just posted these two lists on another forum in the last couple of days: Favourite Bands 1. Rolling Stones 2. Doors 3. Animals (Eric Burdon and) 4. Beatles 5. Cream 6. Who 7. (Peter Green's) Fleetwood Mac 8. Jethro Tull 9. Kinks 10. Blondie 11. Butterfield Blues Band 12. Yardbirds 13. Led Zeppelin 14. Traffic 15. Ten Years After 16. Creedence Clearwater Revival 17. Jimi Hendrix Experience 18. Junior Walker & the All-Stars 19. Zombies 20. Spirit Favourite Kinks' Tracks 1. Days 2. All Day and All of the Night 3. I'm Not Like Everybody Else (1994 live version) 4. Don't Forget to Dance 5. Low Budget 6. Till the End of the Day 7. A Well Respected Man 8. (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman 9. Sunny Afternoon 10. You Really Got Me 11. Lola 12. Apeman I bought comics for only three months or so in 1972. It wasn't until 1979 that I returned to collecting the comics of my younger days full tilt. Until 2000 or so I bought a few new comics periodically as well as back issues but I don't think I've bought any new comics since 2000. My buying of even back issues has been at a low ebb in the last five years since I've had other financial demands recently. But I'll be back in a full accumulation mode sooner or later since my interest in comics has stayed keen.

The curtain coming down on the past year prompted me to look back at the "significant" events of my own life from the year that ended fifty years. I completed tenth grade in the spring of 1967, and it was a year of further refocusing away from the things of my childhood to the things that would occupy my interests in my early adult years. (And here I'm not talking about the girls aspect because that's the obvious one.) During the school year I maintained the study habits I'd developed at boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine the previous year. I was equally good at both number crunching and the humanities and I was put in the grade eleven "brain" class. That meant we were the class out of eight at the school "privileged" enough to take an extra credit, either Geography which I took or Spanish, in addition to English, French, Latin, History, Mathematics, Physics and Phys-Ed. My single minded focus was to get the best marks in the class (which I succeeded in doing in grade twelve). I was quite simply a bookish nerd and hung around at school with the other nerds. The prodigious feats of info absorption of which I was capable such as memorizing word-for-word several pages of definitions from the back of my science textbook now make me cringe when I think back on it. While I suppose my academic aptitude probably served me well into my adult life, I can't say it was a happy time in my life. It was simply nothing but a grind. One happy side effect of my devotion to my studies though was that I had all exemptions from my final exams meaning that I finished the school year in May a couple of weeks earlier than most students. Most of the summer I spent hanging out on the street or at Thames Park with the other neighbourhood kids including the girls. I had the best radio, a really large strap-held transistor radio with which we listened to CHLO in St. Thomas which was the local Top 40 radio station! By then of course I was much too old and sophisticated to play baseball like some little kid. The only comic I bought in 1967 was Doctor Solar 21 and that was the last comic I would buy until mid-1972. Nor did I renew my subscription to Warren's Eerie magazine when it expired. What I read in their place was the local London Free Press newspaper. And we had a subscription to Time magazine which I absolutely devoured from cover-to-cover. To this very day I know who the leaders of the countries in the news such as Vietnam, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Algeria were in 1967 and even many of Canada's cabinet ministers but by a few years later I'd completely lost track with all the changes. I continued to read for recreation. I can't recall what I was borrowing from the local library, but I took up buying and saving all the Pan James Bond paperbacks: I wanted to be like James Bond of course with all these gorgeous women draped all over me! I didn't realize at the time how troublesome that would likely prove. I'd lost interest in most of my other childhood pursuits although I still built the occasional model plane. I believe that the last three I built were in 1967: Both my Monogram Ferrari 330P/LM slot car and Cox Spitfire with the .049 Thimble Drome engine just sat gathering dust, however. TV still wasn't a big part of my life. I'd watch the televised games during the CFL season but there were no more than two or three per week and I'd watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I'd usually watch the reruns of Wild Wild West after school and often The Beverly Hillbillies and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and sometimes Bonanza or the Ed Sullivan Show Saturday and Sunday evenings but that was it. I did get to take the train to Montreal to visit Expo 67 in the company of twenty or so other Lithuanian kids from the London area. Everything about the trip was a thrill. I stayed at a grownup second cousin's house in the Montreal neighbourhood of Westmount and thoroughly enjoyed both the world's fair and the entire experience. The summer of 1967 also heralded the start of my working life when my father placed me on a tobacco farm just north of Delhi in late July for a five week stretch. My horizons were further expanded when I got my trembling hands on the September issue of Playboy in the bunkhouse: As the gatefold attraction the issue featured the luscious Angela Dorian, a.k.a. Victoria Vetri, who went on to become the Playmate of the Year: When I got back home just before Labour Day, I had $495 in my bank account and I was fully intent on buying some of the records to which I'd been grooving on the radio. I went ahead and made the new exotic Beatles' album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, my first purchase at Bluebird Records in downtown London. I quickly followed up this purchase by acquiring the Beatles' first three Canadian albums, Beatlemania, Twist and Shout and Long Tall Sally. I then stepped outside the box in October and bought Big Hits - High Tide and Green Grass by the Rolling Stones. I was floored! I found the Stones' record far edgier than the comparatively tame Beatles' albums. Then of course there was the innovative for the time booklet of their pictures included within the double sleeve: I wasn't entirely sure which Stone was which at the time but the brooding, mysterious Stones appealed to me in a way the Beatles did not. I went out and added Flowers to my swiftly growing record collection within a couple of weeks and then a few more Stones' LPs. By December I believe I'd bought these LP's by other groups as well: Note the absence of bands such as the Monkees whom I knew had been created to target pubescent girls. My intent was to buy the LPs of only those groups/artists that fit my category of "serious" rock musicians. I pursued my record buying, collecting and cataloguing with the same intensity and focus that I'd previously applied to my bubble gum card and comic collecting efforts. As a result within a year I had a shelf of records far exceeding that of any classmate or kid in the neighbourhood. I also immediately aspired to replace our family's little mono record player that had been bought used in 1962(?) with a Seabreeze stereo(!) record player with detachable speakers. But my father was adamantly opposed to such a profligate waste of money since we already had a "perfectly good" record player so I put that project on hold for the time being. It would be resurrected though! And now here I am today, still very much a fan of the Rolling Stones, blues-rock in general and hi-fi stereo components as well as comic mags and the other sundry kid stuff from my formative years!