Toy Bender

If you were a comic fan in the 80s, it was impossible to escape Marvel’s biggest crossover event up until that point. It was called, “Secret Wars”.

Secret Wars featured some of the biggest heroes in the Marvel Universe slugging it out in another dimension against the biggest Marvel villains in a storyline that was light on characterization and drama, but heavy in the smashing department. Take for instance the normally morally upright Captain America’s plan of attack:

Now that’s brutal! Secret Wars was so over the top, that at one point a damn mountain was dropped on the superheroes. A mountain. With a rather simple plot line, it’s no wonder than the comic mega-event was created as a big commercial for the Secret Wars line of toys.

I plan on going into the whole Secret Wars toy line in more detail in the future, but it basically was a fairly decent line that offered kids a chance to get their hands on a few Marvel superheroes that weren’t available if they hadn’t grown up during the reign of Mego figures. The line featured pretty standard articulation, much less so than a G.I. Joe, but on par with Star Wars figures. They weren’t in the 3/4ths in scale, but kids were able to play with their Iron Man or Spider-man side by side with their G.I. Joes without much of a problem. I always thought it was cool that one hand of the heroes and villians was always a fist. It was much easier to simulate some super punching that way.

The main feature of the toys, aside from the appeal of owning your own Dr. Doom, was its secret decoding shields:

As a kid I was kind of split on these things. I don’t think anyone can argue that lenticular action isn’t cool, but having your secret identity or plan displayed on your shield was a little odd. It also robbed Captain America from having his actual shield. Is he really Captain America without his signature shield? No, not really.

The other thing that always bugged me about these figures is that the caped villains didn’t come with their capes. Look at that ad again and tell me that Doom doesn’t look a little odd with his green unitard and hood with no cape look. Even kids are smart enough to know that aint the right look for one of the baddest badasses of comicdom. Inexplicably, Dr. Doom is also laying down rhymes in this ad. If you can’t read it well here it is:

The secret decoding shield of Dr. Doom. Now commands my Doom Platoon –by land and sea, by gun and moon– to make the Earth a living toooooooomb!

Does any of that make sense? It’s like it was written by some eighty year old jingle vet that never read a comic in his life who went to town with his rhyming dictionary. Terrible. Let’s all pretend that never happened and move on.

toy, toy collecting, action figure, superhero, Secret Wars, comic book, marvel, advertisment, ad