Miner Industries Playset No. 1753 Army Action Squadron Task Force - Set #3

Here's the third unopened Army Action Squadron playset I bought over this past year-&-half or so and, like the one posted yesterday, this has the later Payton casts. The figure/vehicle count is sightly different but they are all the same type. The photos don't show it that well, but these are a very light mint green and with the darker casts from yesterday's set the two make great opposing forces. Those Batman style "POW", "BAM" graphics are a bit corny but, ummm but - give me time, I'm trying to think of something positive to say here - but they're, ummm colorful! Yeah, that's it - they're colorful! 

Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Miner Industries Playset No. 1753 Army Action Squadron Task Force - Set #2

Back on March 2nd, I posted a Miner Industries Army Action Squadron playset. Over the past year and half I tried my luck and actually bought three of these MIB, still sealed sets. Two of the sets were sealed in clear plastic wrap while the third simply had been taped. That first set posted in March hit the jackpot with it's VHTF all white Mobile Missile Launcher and set contents that matched up well enough with the box cover photo. These next sets aren't nearly as exciting but are still cool in their own way. Nothing in the next two sets I'll be posting match up with the box cover photo. Well, lets just have the photos speak for themselves. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

After some discussion on the facebook groups, it was concluded that the figures and vehicles are original Payton - not repos. However they are later castings than the ones we normally associate as being from the 1960s.

This reply is from noted plastic and playset collector Kent Owen Sprecher which explains how Payton pieces ended up in a Miner Industries box (quote used with permission):

Miner Industry Playsets

Kent Owen Sprecher

Those are actual Payton. About 1972/3 Payton and Premier were taken over by a group of investors who set up a shell corporation WINNECO to run things. They failed and t all ended up in court. HG Toys ended up buying both companies in the later 1970s. In the 1980s, HG, Miner (MPC), DFC and Helm all made playsets to grab the market share after Marx went under. It seems some stuff was shared and a bunch of figures and empty boxes were found in warehouses. In the late 1980s a man whose name I forget got a lot of Miner Industries boxes and filled them up with what he could find. Excalibur got a bunch of these sets. I show the contents of three "Miner" photo box prehistoric sets I got at my website. None of them contained any Miner (MPC) dinosaurs but had Ajax & Nabisco animals and a mix of DFC, Marx reissue & MPC reissue cavemen. https://www.angelfire.com/biz/toysoldierhq/MPCanc.html

Done with Dino's (For Now) and Miner Industries Playset No. 1753 Army Action Squadron Task Force

Wellll, what will be the next chapter in the on-going adventures of Toys and Stuff? I had wanted to continue the dinosaur theme with MPC but quite frankly, at the moment, my MPC dinosaur collection is a tad anemic. I don't expect it would take a whole lot to beef it up but until then I'll have to search around for another series to work on. 

In the meantime, I have been adding to the overall MPC / Multiple Toymakers / Miner Industries playset world and taking photos of a few sets that haven't been featured here before, like the two Multiple Toymakers Fire and Emergency playsets shown here in the past couple of weeks. Today we have a low-end '70s era military set from Miner Industries - another iteration of the MPC/Multiple Toymakers world. Personally, I think these sets were an excuse to toss any left-over stock into a box and call it a day. The two cheap vacu-form mountains shown on the box photo are rarely what's actually in the box from photos I've seen. My set has one of them in gray but has two smaller hills instead of that second large mountain. The cannon is an oddball: instead of the cannon with beefed up pneumatic tires you get the Civil War style piece with spoked wheels. The Jeep with utility trailer is nice  as is the personnel carrier but the real treat is the all-white missile launcher - a very difficult piece to acquire. Instead of including MPC's plastic barbed wire fences you got these two printed cards with graphics of fences, battlefield terrain, and of all things Batman style explosions with "Zap" and "Bam" printed on them. Holy Crap Batman! really? Good grief. The soldier set includes a handful of MPC's 54mm figures instead of the ringhands normally associated with the included vehicles - with the excption of the two ubiquitous blue ringhand drivers. Overall, it's really a nice set that gives you the basic ingredients for a wonderful Saturday morning playing with Little Green Army Men. Well, until our next set review - Enjoy! Opa Fritz