Marx Johnny West

 

The Marx line of toys were perhaps some of the greatest toys ever made, and many of them were so well-designed and constructed that they have stood the test of time... and they survived multiple generations of play. The Johnny West toys were durable, fairly realistic, and provided multi-cultural characters for boys and girls. Marx also manufactured a series of classic toy horses which still compete well with modern toy horse figures. As a kid I had the military version of these toys... the Stoney Smith “action figure,” which was a major contender with G.I. Joe. Stoney's rugged good looks, wearing his bad-ass beret, could tumble around all day in the yard with no serious injuries. His rubber hands actually held his weapons and other things quite well, unlike G. I. Joe, whose hard plastic hands could not hold anything. The only problem was that Stoney's accessories were grass green just like his uniform, and there must be millions of tiny plastic army rifles, pistols, canteens, bayonets etc. lost in the yards of mid-centuryAmerican homes.

Engineering was always the snag... or the cost of it. The more thoughtful the toy, the higher the production cost. Marx was king when it came to “bang for the buck,” but it always seemed like somebody went off to vacation during the last week of design and product development. So there were problems with the toys... but most of them a child would never recognize. And that is where AmerIkonTrader comes in.