Toy Bender

For this special Toy Ads That Time Forgot we’ve got a television commercial AND a comic book print ad. Can you handle all of that in one sitting? I hope so, because the toy being advertised is perhaps the lamest I’ve ever seen. I present to you: The Amazing Energized Spiderman.

Here’s what this toy does best:

1. It moves up a string very slowly.

Now let’s make a list of everything else it does well:

1. Nothing.

Amazing? I think they were a little liberal with the use of the word amazing back in 1978. This is amazing in the same way that driftwood is utterly captivating. To its credit however, the Amazing Energized Spiderman does have a flashlight and nothing else says amazing like a flashlight. You know, I bet that not once in the forty odd year history of Spiderman does Spiderman use a flashlight (comic book nerds please prove me wrong), except to maybe find a lost shoe under his bed or to find some candles during a temporary power outage. Now, that’s adventure and excitement the MIGHTY MARVEL WAY!

The toy also excels with its many non-points of articulation. Go nuts and count all the places where he doesn’t move. It’s mind boggling! No movable head, legs, or arms. This thing barely even qualifies in the encyclopedic definition as a toy. It’s best classified as a piece of plastic molded to look like Spiderman with a crappy winch inside. You’d need some mighty incredible, nay Amazing imagination to play with this thing for more than five minutes. How would Spiderman punch someone? By launching himself like a wooden plank at enemies? You could basically paint a brick red and blue and it would almost approximate the myriad of play possibilities this thing offers.

Even the toy company that made this hunk of crap has a lame name. Remco. It sounds like the name of a company that would be better off making nondescript grey boxes with no practical use. The box Remco would make wouldn’t be able to be opened so you couldn’t store anything in it. It wouldn’t be sturdy enough to stand on. It’s only function would be to exist and be grey. That’s the kind of quality that Remco should be known for, and almost is because of sheer crappiness of The Amazing Energized Spiderman.

The ads point out that you can get a Spidercopter for your horrible Spiderman “toy”. A Spidercopter. The Spidercopter is five times dumber than the Spidermobile and that’s saying a lot. Spiderman should never have a themed vehicle. Ever. His only mode of transportation is swinging on an unending series of similar looking buildings with flag poles that are impossibly and insanely high. Just the very idea of a Spidercopter is an exercise in absurdity. How would Peter Parker afford the flying lessons, much less the parts needed to build his own custom helicopter? Is Peter Parker really smart enough to build his own helicopter? Could he get F.A.A. clearance for a helicopter built by a teenager? And where would he keep it? On the roof of his Aunt May’s house? That seems hardly possible, much less plausible. The weight alone would be enough to crush her house like Fatty Arbuckle crushed young starlets. Imagine how hard it would be to land a helicopter on an angled surface like that without it sliding off and ruining some unlucky bastard’s day.

And how about this for ridiculous? Spiderman comes with a ray-gun. You know, for all those Martians he’s always fighting.

This toy is so bad it makes me ill.

Toys, toy collecting, toy ads, commercials, Spiderman, comic books