Wanted
Have you seen something unique or heard a juicy rumor? Share it here for all to speculate on.Full of little known variations and growing all the time!
Good luck, and let me know if you've spotted something odd.
Here are a few rumors to whet your appetite: (I leave the name of the source out unless they specifically ask to be named.) My comments on the rumor / sighting are in yellow, normal font.
Green Jane West:
"I had NO idea they also made a Jane in that [green] color, but that ties in with a story I once heard from an old Marx employee. This guy used to set up in a flea market here in [Canadian city] back in the eighties (I think he actually went coast to coast, setting up his booth and telling his stories.). Anyways, he told me that many of the Canadian Marx figures were odd colors (before the MOD thing) because the U.S. plants always sent them their overstock plastic pellets (dye pellets?). Thats why one of the early Johnny's was Stony Smith Green....and apparently a Jane or two as well!"This makes sense to me as U.S. Marx would have wanted Canadian Marx to succeed and should have helped in any way possible. I do know that early figures were made (boxed and loose) in the US and shipped to Canada to be sold there.
Orange Juice Janice:
Extremely rare protoype version of Janice and a bright orange color with blue painted rivets Speculation abounds around this figure. Was it a test version for the Mod colors in the JWA line? Was it a preliminary Store Display figure like the non-QD sky blue Johnny?Whatever she is, one thing is certain, she is rare and commands a high price. I've only seen one of these on eBay since 1997 and she recently sold for more than $300!Blue Geronimo:
"Rumor has it that Canada produced a cavalry blue Geronimo too, but I have not been able to track one down no how, no way. I'm wondering if it was a PlastiMarx creation??? Who knows, there seems to be more and more stuff turning up everday!"I bought a 'Dark Blue Geronimo' off of eBay in 2002. I suspected the figure was a fake / forgery but I wanted to learn how the culprit did it, and it wasn't too expensive. The figure was a normal cream Geronimo dyed with Rit blue dye. I could tell right away as some of the dye had leached out and stained the neck and wrists. Also, it's quite easy to tell by drilling a small hole at the bottom of the neck hole (inside the torso) to see if the color is solid throughout the plastic. For customizing projects I've dyed figure parts but I've found that over time (weeks, months or years) the color will actually change. A dark blue Johnny I have is now a muddy OD green color - very ugly (it looks like you mixed carmel and blue together).
I do know there are a few dark green Geronimo's with white rivets out there - One is at the Official Marx Toy Museum in Glen Dale, WV and others are in private collections. These were actually made by Marx as either test shots or salesman samples.
The only Geronimo's I know made by Plastimarx are cream, red, rust or green. See my South of the Border section. But then again....
Navy Stony:
"Another color variant you might want to look into is White Stony Smiths(solid legs), sold in Canada. One of my relatives (a second cousin) used to have a white Marx figure that I used to think was an astronaut figure of some sort. I ran into this relative a few years back at a family event and asked him about it(....trying to buy it). Unfortunately his own son had thrown him (Stony, not my cousin) out of the barn and Stony came to a crashing end. He told me that it wasnt an astronaut, but a soldier...His memory (he's not a toy guy, and never really paid much attention to such things as a kid) of the figure pegged it as being sold as a Navy officer? Either way, it had to have been a Stony Smith figure. I thought it was an astronaut because it had a helmet...which he says belonged to GI JOE. Keep in mind, my cousin is a few years older than me, and I saw this figure when I was around three or four. "This is a great rumor! I'd love for this to be true - Any confirmations??? I have several of the white Stony's made by Plastimarx of Mexico , so this one is going to be pretty hard to prove unless we can come up with an instruction sheet or box.
White kid Accessories:
"Still on the Canadian front, the white colored accessories the MOD West boys came with, also came with the caramel bodied figures for a time. I had (and still have) three of them that came like this. This was in the early seventies. "Random Color Thoughts:
I read in a recent (Jan 06) Playset Magazine where a Marx employee stated that the factory did not stock pile large quantities of playset figures over time. They only tried to produce the quantity they needed for a particular run of that playset. My vision of bins and bins of Marx toys spread throughout the factory waiting to be packaged is just not true. And if you think about it, this just makes sense. I've been to the Glen Dale factory and it's just not that big - Not nearly big enough to maintain stocks of all the toys Marx produced over a year. I can really understand where they used the concept of 'Just In Time' production even if that term wasn't used back then. This would have been true for the accessories and figures of the 12 inch line too. No way to have thousands of figures laying around waiting for the assembly line to package them. So I surmise that the various factories would have made different mixed items like MOD Accessories with Non-MOD figures or JWA accessories with non-JWA figures as they were transitioning the accessory mold line and the figure mold lines. And then, if you throw in the transfer of figures or accessories from one plant to another the sequence could really get mixed up. But this also means that there shouldn't be too many of these factory 'mistakes' out there. Remember, they didn't store vast amounts of stock over time.It never ceases to amaze me that unique figure or accessory colors are still showing up. One collector has reported that he has 17 different original colored Johnny Wests (various countries). So, I believe that there are probably test shots, limited runs, salesman samples, etc. still out there that may be unique - go look in your attic and give me a call! ;-)
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