The Mego Mystery Vehicle & Its Identity!!!
Long
before it became commonplace, there were some great toy tie-ins to comics and
movies going back to the 1920s, with the 1960s and 1970s being a particular
golden era of such production. The
biggest toy company of the 1970s became a huge innovator in action figure
production. They were Mego.
Though
they went under in the early 1980s, they invented the nearly 4-inch action
figure in 1975 that Star Wars made
the new standard and their line of 8-inch and 9-inch figures were
revolutionary, highly imitated and are now some of the most valuable and
sought-after toys ever made. However,
there are also a bunch of toys they and many other companies never produced and
past history pieces can be so incomplete that some go unexplained.
One such
piece is the picture of the vehicle in the upper right hand corner. I found it on a great, now-defunct site on
Mego which may have been MegoHeadToys.com, but that has been absorbed by
MegoMuseum.com (www.MegoMuseum.com) and
I was confident I had seen it somewhere before when I first saw the picture in
late 2004. That is why I saved the
picture. It looked like a dune buggy and
Mego had produced some for other lines like other companies, and it is based on
Volkswagen designs as I thought. This is
a color glossy found in Mego’s files unmarked as one of many priceless pieces
of their history, intended as a starter for the vehicle’s design. No prototype has turned up yet, but we are
hopeful.
At first,
since they thought it was a motion picture, we considered that it might be
something from the wacky 20th Century Fox film Damnation Alley (1977, the film they thought was going to do better
than Star Wars) and Dean Jeffries did
design the vehicle on this page as he
did The Landmaster from Damnation Alley. It is still not from that film. So where is it from?
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