For World's
Greatest Toys Digest (my quarterly magazine devoted to vintage
toys), I set out to write a companion piece to my book,
Mego 8" Super-Heroes: World's Greatest Toys! (2007, TwoMorrows). The book is a fairly thorough
examination of the company, but it tells only half the story—the American
half. I wanted to tell the other half of the story, i.e. the story of Lion
Rock, which began as Mego's asian trading agent and ultimately became Mego
Corp's Hong Kong manufacturing arm. I was able to track down the former
President of Lion Rock, who then put me in touch with all of Lion Rock's key
department heads; everyone from Engineering to sculpting to plastics, fabrics
and packaging design.
As a graphic designer myself, I was thrilled to befriend the supervisor of Lion
Rock's Art Department. Lead Engineer T.S. Wong described him to me as "the one
in charge of all works on the artwork and packaging in Lion Rock for Mego
products manufactured in Hong Kong".
During our discussions, he revealed that he personally did the character "bust"
illustrations for Mego's 2nd Series Apes (i.e. Burke, Verdon [sic], Galen,
Ursus and Urko). "The art was traced from the publicity photos submitted from
the U.S. office," he told me. "The illustration was coloured by Magic Markers,
it takes me about an hour but the result is not really satisfied."
I asked him why this particular packaging art was so rushed and unsatisfactory,
and he said, "Upper management feels that, the Planet of the Apes line may not
be as popular as the other items we are producing, as we are only keeping a
small art department in Hong Kong with handful number of artists, to achieve
effectiveness, we were told to rush the illustration so the artwork was
prepared in an unsatisfactory manner."
I set out to identify the source material he used to create the card art.
Burke, Verdon and Galen were easy to find, because they all came from a
widely-used publicity photo... countless newspapers published this photo of
the show's heroes in the weeks leading up to the September 1974 CBS-TV series
premiere. My Lion Rock contact wrote back to "confirm the attached publicity
photo was the original photo we used for the packaging illustration for Galen,
Burke, and Verdon."
As I suspected, illustrations for both Ursus and Urko were traced from
publicity photos of Urko. I found the first rather quickly; Marvel Comics used
it for their Issue #6 feature, "Urko Unleashed". But the General with the
helmet eluded me. Finally, last June, I found an auction for a photo of Urko on
horseback. The angle seemed correct, as did the helmet's telltale highlights
and shadows. But I was unable to locate a large, clear photo. Last week, I
asked for help from a Facebook POTA group, and a member pointed me to a large
scan on your incredible site (thank you, Hunter!).
Benjamin
Benjamin hopes to eventually publish an accurate and comprehensive history
of Mego's Planet of the Apes toy line. If he does, you'll see it here!
