*Since my separate thread on Louis Marx' playsets has already disappeared, I'll post the relevant parts of it here as well:
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This time of year always reminds me of my very favorite November birthday and December Christmas presents - the wonderful playsets made by the Louis Marx Company in west Virginia! The "historical" ones were always my favorite, though I also had Prehistoric dinosaurs, a gas station (with working elevator!), freight terminal (my dad was a truck driver),
Captain Space Solar Port (the space stuff was all in the future in the 1950's), etc., etc. But of course my most treasured were
The Battle of the Blue and the Gray,
Fort Apache, and
Davy Crockett at the Alamo, in no particular order. As you can see, I also saved the relevant pages from the Sears & Roebuck Wish Book, reproduced here. Both pages above and below are from after Christmas 1960 when there were *NEW* figures added for the Civil War Centennial. (I had one from 1959 so just HAD to have one with the new figures too!)
Note the inevitable increase in prices for these, plus the fact they were merchandised differently over the years - in 1956 when Walt Disney's
Davy Crockett - King of the Wild Frontier was all the rage on television, there were "official" Marx sets bearing the names of both Walt and his gold mine; later, it was enough to have simply
Alamo sets so as to not have to pay those pesky licensing fees! I'm sure that many older members here remember these and like myself were inspired by them to actually want to learn about the war and other historical events - I owe them a great deal of gratitude.
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Sadly, the backlash and protests against the Vietnam War caused the decline and eventual fall of these so-called "war toys", but for a time Marx through Sears and their chief competitor Montgomery Ward's found a way around that by emphasizing their "historical" value; above and below are pages touting Sears'
Heritage Play Sets from the 1970's. In the descriptions for some reason they've confused the figure of
Jefferson Davis, instead describing him as
Sherman, no doubt to his posthumous dismay!
For
completionists like myself, here are some additional Sears ads that do not include
Battle of the Blue and the Gray; the one below is the oldest, dating from the 1950's:
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Marx was always updating the sets, adding new figures and/or accessories; note the difference in the cavalrymen and Indians in these two different
Fort Apache sets; the one below dates from 1972 and shows more of their
Heritage line, including a plastic White House and all the Presidents to date:
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