You may well be familiar with the Mego action figures of the 1970s – they made dozens of superhero dolls approximately 8 inches tall. You can see my Batmobile and Captain Americar toys (all I have left from my Mego collection) in an earlier post. They also made figures for Planet of the Apes and tons of other licenses.
Other than the 8″ line, there were also a series of 3.75″ superhero figures, known Comic Action Heroes. These examples of this range of figures have been in my collection since the late 1970’s.
Originally I bought a Spiderman figure, from the sadly long gone Toy & Hobby in Chester, but he broke. This line of figures weren’t the most robust – a common problem was the legs breaking off. the body below the waist was made of rubber, and likely to give way.
So Spiderman was posted back to the Customer Service department. A few weeks later I received a parcel containing some replacement figures – these are the ones you see here. No Spiderman unfortunately, but I got a few others as compensation.
The Dynamic Duo of Batman and Robin was pretty cool to have. Strangely, Batman’s head was made out of soft rubber which was attached to his cape. As a result, you could pop off Batman’s head if you so desired. Also a bit bizarre, the Boy Wonder is actually taller than his pal!
The Joker was a nice figure, quite good facial detail. I remember also owning Superman in this batch, but he’s long since disappeared. And I think my sister had the Wonder Woman toy.
The final figure from this range is The Incredible Hulk. Raging green and mean, he wears traditional purple pants and also has a good face sculpt. However, Hulk’s left arm (not seen in the photo) fell off, and had to be reattached with glue. Like I said, not very robust.
A couple of years later, Mego made further superhero action figures, in the Pocket Super Heroes line. They were very similar to the earlier figures, but with straight legs rather than bent. My only figure from this line is Lex Luthor. Again Lex has a good (for the time) face sculpt – I’ve always thought there was a resemblance to Gene Hackman.
These Super Heroes were pretty cool figures that I loved. A shame that they weren’t very durable, and that Spidey isn’t in my toy box any more. Still, cool seventies toys that bring back loads of memories.
You can read more about this range of toys at Toymania here.
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