Today we feature more Big Tin - the Marx Strategic Air Command (S.A.C.) B-52 hangar. There's one thing Marx wasn't shy about and that was making big tin toys. I like to refer to these as a Big Hunk O' Tin. A good example was their large tin-litho service stations, the Freight Station we featured last week, and today's featured Big Hunk O' Tin - the S.A.C. hangar.
The hangar is a good example of how Marx cross-utilized parts from different toys to help make other toys. The base of the hangar we'll look at today is the same stamping used for many of Marx's tin-litho service stations and Marx used the same wall/roof stampings (with slightly different lithography) to make other large hangars. Being a Strategic Air Command hangar it would have housed B-52 bombers, but being a toy approximately sized for 30mm figures it would be woefully undersized to fit a scale B-52 bomber in its bay as B-52s are BIG! But that's OK cuz it's a cool toy. It has a red soft plastic control tower and orange soft plastic radar arrays. The two different colors are correct for this hangar. One of the things I find surprising is the lack of interior detail lithography. Marx was usually pretty good at detailing the interiors of its tin-litho buildings and this hangar has a lot of interior space to show - but no detail. That's a real shame because hangars are not sterile environments, they have office spaces, maintenance areas, their interiors have exposed bracing and beams, and so forth. Yet when looking inside the Marx hangar there's nothing, nada, zilch, bubkis!! What a shame. In any case, it's still a really cool Big Hunk O' Tin - Enjoy!
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