1977 REMCO Toys Catalog
Remco’s name was purchased in 1974 by Azrak Hamway, a successful manufacturer of rack toys. AHI used the Remco brand to sell a more upscale toy but one that still utilized the many licenses integral to their business.
1977 saw the introduction of Mickey Mouse to the fold and more Superhero related products which would eventually become the bread and butter of the company for the rest of the decade..
New this year was the Remco Disney Action Figures. The McDonalds characters were not the runaway sales hit that AHI expected them to be, according to sources they were a sales disappointment..
Utility belts were a big winner for Remco, this year’s assortment featured Space:1999, a big-budget science fiction series that hoped to rival Star Trek. Every year Remco released a Utility belt that made no sense, this year it was the Mickey Mouse, why am I disturbed at the sight of him in jeans?
The Batman Trik-Trak set harkened back to the 1960s Batman craze, Remco would continue to mine Superheroes for the next few years.
Batman and Spider-Man brandishing ray guns make no sense but ask a kid if he cared?.
Batman and Spider-Man brandishing ray guns make no sense but ask a kid if he cared?
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1977 was the year Disney produced a new Mickey Mouse Club. Note the MMC logo on the belt and box, but not on the Disney figures or their packaging. Hedging their bets? In any case, the new show was pretty cheesy and even this Disney fanatic gave up on it a few weeks.The new show’s animated bits put Mickey in a hip 70s jumpsuit, so I’d regard the jeans as a lesser offense.
A Mickey Mouse utility belt would have made a certain amount of sense in relation to comic books, where Mickey was having adventures when not puttering around the suburbs. Disney comics were bigger in other countries — were the utility belt and/or other Remco Disney marketed abroad?
As an almost-boomer I associated Remco with science kits in canisters labeled “The Thinking Boy’s Toy”; also with fancier stuff like the Jonny Reb cannon, the drive-in movie (which I desperately wanted until I saw an actual photo), and the Showboat (which I did have. Decades later was very distressed to see the Showboat classified as a girl’s toy). Also associated Remco with gold foil labels pressed onto the plastic — a sign of class. Then toys fell off my radar for a while.
I could never quite believe it was the same Remco making those McDonaldland figures. Those were not aimed at the Thinking Boy.