Marvel-ous!

I'll conclude our mini arc on the various styrofoam flyers Topps issued in the 1960's and 70's with Marvel Flyers. The set was obviously designed to supplement the Marvel Super Heroes cartoon that debuted in the fall of 1966 and ran for thirteen weeks in its first run.

It's an extremely colorful set as these images from www.mycomicshop.com show:

You can see the plastic clip may have come attached already to the body of the plane.  Spiderman and Iron Man were one of five main, recurring characters on the cartoon.  The Incredible Hulk, Thor and the Prince Namor the Sub Mariner were the others.  I suppose Namor was added to provide a little variety, allowing the use of underwater adventures as the other superhreoes were air and land based essentially.

The wrapper shows the Human Torch:

As we'll see on the back though, not all of the Fantastic Four made it to styrofoam:

No Mr. Fantastic or Invisible Girl?  Yikes!  And Dr. Doom even made the cut:

I just wish they had included the Red Skull! Marvel novelties are quite popular right now, with all the movies and TV shows featuring their superheroes, so it's no surprise some of these go for pretty big bucks.

I'll leave you with this gallery shot; it shows all the plane bodies and as you can see, some were not really main characters:

You'll be forgiven if you don't recall The Angel or The Wasp. And the spelled Daredevil wrong!

Still, it's a very nice set commemorating a very bad cartoon. Even as a kid I could tell it was cheaply made.  Give my Bugs Bunny any day!