The Case For Too Much: Multiple Products Set No. 1011 U.S. Air Force Astronauts Command Force 1964

It's 1964, the Space Race had been heating up since the October 1957 launch of Sputnik by the USSR. By 1958 NASA was formed and in April 1961 the USSR had another first when it sent Yuri Gagarin up to became the first person to orbit the Earth. We  followed shortly thereafter in May by sending up Alan Shephard. It was against this real world backdrop that toy comapnies found a way to interest kids in space and more and more space toys were being offered. Slowly-but-surely the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordenesque type toys were being supplanted by astronauts, Moon buggies and rovers, and hardware that looked a bit more like what kids were seeing on TV OR by the designs inspired by the likes of Werner von Braun.

Marx released their Astronauts (which I covered here on the blog a few weeks ago) in 1961 followed by Multiple Products. I'm not sure when Multiple released their first sculpts but this header bag is dated 1964. This set was produced in the pre-Miner Industries era of Multiple's history and the colors are a garish Halloween-ish orange and purple. I've mentioned before how UN-rare Multiple's astronauts are and we can see from this early glimpse of their product marketing that they pumped these out to the public like a fire hose sprays volumes of water on a conflagaration! It was a spacey time to live in and I suppose Multiple thought kids wanted more and more of these. We can look back and say it was too much but I would be interested to know just how well these sold. If they sold well, then that would be justification enough to keep pumping them out. In any case, when some Schyster tries giving you a line that these things are rare - spit in their eye and tell 'em to get bent! Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Notice the date: 1964

Here's another good example. Looking at this objectively, this Space Control Center set really only has two small pods (or modules), plus two other small vehicles. Nice pieces mind you - great for setting up a Moon colony. But why the need for 50 astronauts?

This set is dated 1969 and we can see that Multiple moved on to other colors.

Here's a pic my Orbital Lab as I received it. Unfortunately mine didn't come with any original packaging or instruction sheet but it appeared complete and included an extra module and a bag of Multiple's astronauts. A bag of 155 astronauts! Obviously I can't prove how many came with this set but this is still a good indication of the volume of figures out available there.