Sunday, November 08, 2015

At Flashbak: Navarone Playset (Marx; Mego)


Also at Flashbak this week, I revisited the Navarone Mountain Playset of the mid-1970s.

In "Add an Extra Dimension to Play: The Famous World War II Battle of Navarone Giant Playset," I looked back at a toy from my youth.




"One of the greatest non sci-fi playsets of my childhood was this impressive “Famous World War II Battle of Navarone Giant Playset.”

This Marx Toy was distantly related to Alistair Maclean’s 1957 novel The Guns of Navarone, a narrative that focused on a team of Allied soldiers launching an assault on a German fortress on the (fictional) Greek island of Navarone. 

The novel was made into a movie as “the Greatest High Adventure Ever Filmed!” in 1961, by director J. Lee Thompson, and it spawned a filmed sequel: Force 10 from Navarone.  That 1978 movie starred Harrison Ford and was directed by Guy Hamilton.


In real life, there was no Battle of Navarone (and no island of Navarone, either…), but such inconvenient truths did not prevent Marx Toy Company, in 1976, from producing this multi-level mountain fortress, replete with two armies..."


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