Friday, June 30, 2006
Batman And Robin IN ACTION
Check out this Mego commercial from the early 70s, it's a hoot! I love the "play area", it's like a movie set. Also note how tiny the Batmobile is when the charaters are riding in it. If I drove my Mego Batmobile off the cliff like they do in this spot I would've had a Mego mess - those things were really cheaply made.
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4 comments:
That's hilarious! My god, I only discovered Youtube less than a month ago and I can't remember life without it! I love a) how the kids are so into it, they look genuinely scared, b) Penguin's nose squishing into the ground at the end. There is no c). You should throw up a modern Batman figure commercial up there to compare.
I like Robin sliding down the puny pole.
Wow, you know when you're looking at Egyptian art and the people are all looking sideways and it's because of the incredible fact that, as a species, humans hadn't figured out how to make realistic images yet. If you showed them a photograph they'd probably think you had a box of tiny frozen people (Mmmm...tiny frozen people Ghhaaaagghhaghah).
I find that truly fascinating.
Now, with the Mego stuff we have a toy culture juuuust on the verge of figuring out action figures, but they haven't quite got it yet. These things are dolls -- they have the exact same bodies with different outfits and heads. They're too big to have any vehicles or accessories, because they'd cost too much money to make and parents wouldn't want these giant, expensive toys. That's why we have the Bat-Clown Car and the midget pole.
There were a handful of small-scale figs around at the time, like the Fisher Price Adventure people, but while they had jeeps and boats and ambulances, those vehicles don't have character. We didn't see them zoom down the Death Star trench.
So I'm watching the Penguin get his face pushed into gray oatmeal and I'm thinking about Star Wars and the genius of the Tie-In and then I thought "wait a second, this is Batman. The toy company didn't make this up, this is a tie-in right here."
So how come it took Star Wars to make the market take off like it did? Was it the formula of tie-in plus scale, or was it seeing a movie of Star Wars vs. reading a Batman comic book? Or, if you care to consider Superfriends etc., was it because Star Wars ruled and Superfriends learned stuff?
Also:
Was that Adam West's voice anywhere in that spot?
I love that the Batmobile just got left in some canyon with the keys in it, and that the computer's "strategy" is a picture of the Joker.
I had a Mego Iron Man once. Within less than a week the rubber band that held him together broke and all his parts drifted away from each other forever. My parents unsuccessfully tried to fix it and I recall crying when I threw the pieces away. Goddammit.
Oh so true, those Mego "dolls" were so cheaply made! I had a handful of them and every one of them broke. I also remember crying when my Hulk shattered after I stupidly threw him in the air and he landed on concrete.
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