I had all the MMM stuff also. The XL-5 toy I had was almost 3 feet long and you could open the hatches and seperate the front section and fly your own missions!
Damn!
Did you have those little hard back MMM books also? My mom still has those little books!
Now I am jealous...growing up in the 70s but reading my brothers 60s comics I wanted that toy,which of course was long OOP.The first time I saw one in person I was almost 30,a bit old to bother lol
I didn't have the Matt Mason books, but I had the crawlers - both legged and tracked, the space station, the bubble...and a host of other stuff I can't even begin to list out. My uncle worked on Apollo, and my grandfather made sure I never missed a launch (or an episode of Star Trek) and consequently Matt Mason was a staple gift-toy for me. Ma gave it all away to a kid across the street (under protest...) during my teen years...got to spend that summer watching it all get ripped to shreds. But I still got all my redline Hot Wheels...even ma knows the value of those now.
Though - another one I had was a big, red, GI Joe scale Electra 225 convertable with a wired remote control. Yeah...Joe got his groove on with sis's Barbies in that hog on a regular basis...
We must have led parallel childhoods. My dad worked for Grumman and installed the instrumentation in the LEM for Apollo 11, 12 and 13! I too never missed a launch! Did you ever have one of those cardboard submarines that you could sit inside and fire plastic torpedoes at passerby? It even had a working periscope! Whoo hooo!
Nope - but I had a plastic one that fired plastic torpedoes that I could play with in the tub! It was grey, and the torpedoes and some of the stuff on the conning tower was red. Sort of U-boat like, I think...maybe more like a GATO...
OTOH, I also built lots of paper models of subs that I would sketch from time to time...I must have been about 5 or 6 at the time. I liked to use plastic tops for hatches, attached with paper hinges. And I recall making periscopes out of Glad Wrap boxes...and subs out of refrigerator boxes...which were also good for crawling treads - get inside the cardboard tube with a bud and you could crawl over just about anything.
My uncle worked for Rockwell and was into turbomachinery, so I have to speculate that he worked on the engines for the Saturn series...I was young enough at the time that I didn't grasp entirely just what he did at Rockwell, and I only saw him about once a year or so when he would visit. When Apollo wound down he went to GE and worked steam turbines and later retired from GE.
I scored a T-bird #2 a couple of years ago in a trashbin. Always thought I'd accurize it but haven't gotten around to it. No cargo pods, but "landing gear" (those four stalks) are there, as well as a couple of marienette-style plastic action figures (look like they're from "Captain Scarlet" TV show) in "about"
1:20 scale that I could throw in. Any takers? Make an offer.....
-- John The history of things that didn't happen has never been written. . - - - Henry Kissinger
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