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Monday, October 27, 2008

Rubb'rniks - 1968

sgSometime last year, I posted this, a 3"-high rubber figurine. As you can see, its a very sad toy(I even titled the post "Sad, Sad Rubber Figurine").

Pity the poor child you had to find a way to play with this thing--while its obviously Aquaman (what with the scales, scalloped gloves, and "A" belt), its such a crude little piece I had assumed, having no better information, that it was some sort of bootleg or knockoff. Poor Arthur doesn't even have any feet!

Little did I know, that this figurine is actually an officially licensed product:
sg
...Great Neptune, how did the manufacturer (Multiple Toymakers) ever get approval for this from DC?

Having stock shots of the four heroes below makes it even worse--by showing you the original versions, you know what you're missing. Wow.

The ultimate irony is, when this item shows up on eBay, it goes for like a thousand dollars because its so hard to find still in the package. Having originally retailed for 19 cents, that's a mark-up of, like, oh, a bajillion percent.

5 comments:

Diabolu Frank said...

Wow. Just... wow.

Anonymous said...

What's funny to me (besides the overall weirdness of it) is that these are the Super Friends, years before that term was coined. I think *that* is cool.

Anonymous said...

I hadn't thought about the SF angle. That is really cool.

I guess these are somewhat like the larger rubber "dangler" figures of the time that were pretty popular, just small sized. They look like they should be figural erasers or something. The packaging is much nicer than the figures themselves!

Chris

Luis said...

In spite of being in a package with the Justice League logo - albeit badly colored, I still think this is a bootleg product, not endorsed by DC.
And if it IS an official toy, then shame on DC for allowing such blatant misrepresentation of their characters. You think Aquaman is bad? Just look at the Superman figure!

Anonymous said...

It's official. Multiple Toymakers had the JLA license and issued figure sets at the same time. They look vastly inferior to the Ideal sets of just a few years earlier.

There is plenty of Batman paraphenelia from around the same time that is just as bad looking.

Chris