I guess I became aware of the world (~65?) after this nifty item was out of the stores. Never saw the commercials, never saw one at another kid’s house.
It is really cool that it is made of tin. There were still some tin toys around when I was a kid, but they were more “cheap Japanese stuff” than high-end commercial product like Marx. (I’m now recalling a tin litho steam engine I got for Christmas; my grandmother was worried that it would shred her carpets and bent the sharp bottom edges in.)
A few years ago I bought, in a fit of Maker ambition, a little wooden house at a craft store. I think it might have been intended as a bird house. It had little windows and a thatched roof. My plans were to open it up and turn it into amounts to an Arduino controlled, servo-operated version of this Hootin Hollow house. I never got beyond the planning stage, and asking around the old Make forums about how I could make windows selectively transparent.
Bobba Fett did not exist as a character until the late 1970s. You must have another character in a space-type outfit in mind.
See Wikipedia: “Boba Fett first appeared at the September 20, 1978, San Anselmo Country Fair parade.[2] The character appeared on television two months later, animated by Nelvana Studios for Star Wars Holiday Special as a mysterious figure who betrays Luke Skywalker after saving him, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 from a giant monster, only to be revealed as a bounty hunter working for Darth Vader.”
I can’t remember if it was our family or a neighbor who had the Marx tin haunted house with typewriter-like keys, but I definitely remember the commercials and the excitement of finally getting to play with one. It stopped being so exciting after awhile but it was definitely cool. There was quite a horror and monster craze during the Sixties and I never got over it.
Santa Claus is definitely real. I remember seeing him hurry out the window just after delivering my Creeple People Thingmaker on Christmas Eve one year.
