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| Bats with first replacement emblem, cape, belt, & bat-a-rang. Excuse the fuzziness, but this is enlarged from a tiny section of a bigger pic |
As you may recall me mentioning, around 30-odd years ago when I first acquired him, he was missing his utility belt, bat-a-rang, and chest emblem. He had his cape, but it was stained and grubby, so I made a replacement out of felt, using the original cape as a template. I made the first belt also from felt, the second was an actual utility belt from a different Batman figure, and the newest one is made from a card printout of a scan of an actual Marx belt.
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| Bats with third replacement emblem, second cape, and second belt |
My first bat emblem utilised the official DC bat symbol from the '80s and '90s (see first photo), the second was modelled after the moulded emblem on the Aurora Batman model kit (see photo below), and the latest (see fourth and final photo) is a copy of an original Marx symbol from a second (and recent) Marx Batman figure. So, more than 30 years after obtaining my first replacement, he now looks practically as he did when he was new back in the '60s.
For some reason his cape was always a tad darker than the blue of his cowl, gloves, and boots, so after quite a few years I made another one of a slightly lighter blue, though it was still darker than his plastic parts, but the contrast wasn't so pronounced. I still have his original stained and worn cape and seriously thought about restoring it to the figure, but it was just too tatty-looking so I abandoned the idea, though it would've been nice had it been good enough to use.
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| The Aurora emblem. I don't seem to have a pic of it on the Marx BM |
Oddly, there's a slight difference in the blue hue of the plastic between my first and second Batman figures, but I suppose that's just down to the vagaries of mass-produced items. Also, the second figure is a few millimetres taller than the first, but as they were hand-assembled in a factory in Hong Kong, it's likely quite a common divergence between the thousands or millions of them manufactured back in the day at the height of the 'bat-craze'.
Anyway, I thought I'd remind you of how he's looked down through the years via photos from previous posts and show you how he looks now. When you've perused them, you can leave a comment telling me what an incredibly gifted and talented individual I am. Hello... anyone there? (Yeah, I know you're not interested, McS, but force yourself.)
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| Finally... looking much more like he did when first made in the '60s |
9 comments:
What a talented man you are. (Er, I mean I am.) Saw a Marx Twistable Batman like this one go on eBay for several hundred pounds recently. And to think you (er, I mean I) have two of them. Wow!
He's very odd-looking and not at all realistic.
Not meant to be realistic, CJ, he's essentially a 'cartoon' version of Batman. To me, he looks like a Gerry Anderson puppet (Steve Zodiac) in a bat suit.
It's hard to know what the attraction is to such a strange toy?
It is a 3-D version of those drawings we all used to do at school, where you draw part of a figure, then fold the paper so the next person continues the lines but cannot see the prior section. Then so on over three or more sections.
The head is fine, then what the hell!
The attraction for me is that I had it as a child, T47, so pure nostalgia. Marx did a series of 'Twistable' toys, mainly Disney, I think, and I've got three of these (Geppetto, Pinocchio, and Jiminy Cricket). They all had oversized heads in relation to their bodies if i recall correctly. They were aimed at younger children and were designed to look 'cute'. I got my originals from a shop called 'Nurseryland - Everything for Baby'.
I remember, buying lots of affordable, weird and wonderful toys, from bendy jungle animals to colourful dinosaurs and soldiers. Even though they may have been unrealistic, they were immense fun and intriguing toys for the price. I would have definitely purchased this Kid, I just cannot remember ever seeing it on sale? 'My loss!'
Like you, I think it's a great wee toy, AAW, and I'm glad to have two of them back with me again. It depends what age you are in regard to why you perhaps never saw it, as it would only have been available around the time of the Batman craze, aside from old unsold stock at the beginning of the '70s maybe.
Unfortunately, I would have missed the first release in 1966, and also missed the very early 70s for going out toy shopping, but I made up for my lack of, 'made in hong kong' purchases later that decade. I do remember having Marx branded dinosaurs, along with Inpro dino's. I still have some stored away in the attic, along with the Mother-in-law, 'snigger'. Quirky little treasure you have there, nice restoration...
Thanks. A few posts prior is a photo of my new Twistable Batman, alongside this one before my recent adjustments.
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