Martian
Landing
A “Giant” playset
The box title and the art can be a little confusing. It’s a
“Giant” playset of a landing on Mars. So named because of the size of the playmat,
the fragile plastic mountain, and all the goodies that came in the box.
There is no Giant Martian, but the box art will give you that
impression. If you got him I guess you could throw in Big Loo
as your “Giant Martian”. Just kidding. Big Loo is a toy robot by Marx about 3 feet tall and uglier
than my twin sister!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Loo
To my knowledge it was the last playset
by Marx to use the Tom Corbett Aliens and the only one to use the aliens with
the Apollo type Astronauts. It was minted about 1972 but the box says 1977.
The art on the playmat and
especially the vac-u-formed mountain, were very ugly
in comparison to the other space playsets. They do,
however, appear to be on par with the playmats of the
other military and civil war sets.
What makes it good is the vehicles,
accessories (Tom Corbett and Operation Moonbase
combined again) and the 6 poses of green minted aliens.
Martian, Ro-man, Cyber-Man, Martian, Dobby, and
another Martian. At least that’s what I call them.
The Cyber-Man type robot came out before Dr. Who, about 1952.
Dr. Who came out about 1963.
Dobby came out in 1952 but I named him after the Harry Potter
Elf due to the similarities.
Ro-man is from the hilariously bad sci-fi horror movie “Robot
Monster”. The bad guy is a fellow in a gorilla suit and a space helmet.
This helmeted creature is an amphibian, however, not a
monkey. The Amphibian came out about 1952 in the Tom Corbett set and Robot
Monster was on the drive-in screens about 1953. Hmm. No
comment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Monster
The mountain in the set was very fragile and prone to damage
from what I have heard. It had a kind of road that wound up to the peak where
the space station tower was placed. It was a pretty good size terrain piece,
judging from the pictures. Its reported to be 25” x
17” x 8.5”.
Pictures of the playmat that went
with this set are very hard to find. What I did find was one guy had his set
for sale and draped his large playmat over a table.
I was able to photoshop this into a
passable playmat.
This is what it looks like printed out, glued up, and with a lander in the center. This is a BIG playmat,
about 35” x 29”, based on other “giant” toy sets with playmats.
Not able to fabricate a mountain for it nor
find one on the net for a resonable price for a poor man, I took the
installations from Galaxy Command and re-made them for Martain Landing.
Command
Center downloads here:
Missile
installation downloads here:
They assemble the same way as the Galaxy Command sets do and
you can use the instructions on those pages. They look good on the mat, too.
One thing you can do if you can find it on one of the on-line
shops is to get this rather large mountain and put it in the playset. This is a lot sturdier that the vac-u-formed mountain, and quite imposing. Its also a really neat orange, so
it fits right in. Its about 19 inches high.
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