Of Heroes and Villains
A look at the Ideal Batman Justice League Playset
By Art Cloos
On January 12 1966 Batman debuted on a Wednesday night at 7:30 on the then-struggling ABC television network. For millions of Americans this was their first exposure to a character who had been appearing in the comics since 1939. The show was an immediate success and it spawned a wave of Batmania related madness that swept across the country. Seemingly out of nowhere store shelves became filled with toys, clothes, food items and indeed every conceivable product that you could put a bat on. Batman related songs filled the airwaves. Suddenly pop art was cool.
It was a true Golden Age for collectors of Batman items since licensing for him prior to 1966 was almost non existent. Among all of the Bat items that appeared in the US market the ones from the Ideal Toy Company tend to stand out and among those toys the Batman Justice League Play Set is among the best. It was a beautifully crafted boxed set that featured painted figures of Batman, Robin, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Aquaman. It had a Batplane, a Batplane Launcher and a Batmobile. Of course there were villains for the heroes to fight, six in total and they were The Mouse Man, the Key, The Joker, Kaltor, Brainstorm and The Thunderbolt. Therein lies a mystery that I have always wondered about, that being why Johnny Thunder's thunderbolt was used as a villain in that playset given he and his master Johnny were hero (sort of) members of the Golden Age Justice Society of America in All Star Comics? I decided that I had to find out.
It took a while until a light bulb went off and I realized that I had the answer in my collection that showed him as a bad guy. It was because someone at the Ideal company had to have been looking at comic books in mid to late 1965, either off the stands or given to them by DC/National comics at some point. For on the cover of issue #37 of Justice League of America from August 1965 was the thunderbolt fighting the Justice Society in the first part of what had become the annual JLA/JSA team up. The story centered around the Earth-2 Johnny Thunder meeting up with his Earth-1 counterpart who takes control of the thunderbolt and under the command of the Earth-1 Johnny becomes a bad guy. It is obvious that the Ideal people did not really read the 2 books very carefully and certainly did not know or care about Johnny’s back story or otherwise they might have thought twice about using the poor Thunderbolt as a bad guy. So once the mystery of the thunderbolt was solved I began thinking where did some of the other choices for villains come from? So I started doing some research and have come up with some possible answers to the choices made.
First up lets look at the Key and he was an easy one to figure out. He is cover featured in Justice League #41 from Dec. 1965, just a few issues after the thunderbolt cover. He used a psycho-chemical on the JLA which caused them to break up and become unable to see his henchmen commit robberies. However, they are returned to normal when Hawkgirl discovers the situation, and the JLA then go on to defeat The Key. This issue would have been on sale in Oct 1965 so we can begin to gage when the playset was being worked on, certainly after the publication of the book in late August 1965. There is a pattern developing here as well. The two villains looked at so far were cover featured from the Justice League books which makes sense since its called the Official Batman Justice League Playset.
That pattern continues with Brainstorm who appeared on the cover of JLA #32 from Dec. 1964. This issue featured his origin and first appearance. In it he tries to kill the Green Lantern for murdering his brother.
Now the Joker is of course the most (and really only) famous villain in this group and we know he had appeared on many Detective and Batman covers going into 1965 so did the Ideal designers use him from one of them? It is very possible of course however he had his own cover appearance on the cover of JLA #34 from March 1965. In it he appeared in Batman's dream in the story. So four out of the first six villains we have looked at were cover featured in Justice League. This makes it even more clear that someone gave Ideal a bunch of Justice League books to look at. So does the pattern continue with the remaining two bad guys?
Of the two left, let's look first at the Mouse Man, a villain not exactly a household name, who first appeared in Wonder Woman #141 Oct. 1963. He was one of three villains in the story, Angle Man, The Human Fireworks and Mouse Man who were part of The Academy Of Villains out to destroy Wonder Woman. His other two appearances in Wonder Woman being #143 from Jan. 1963 and #171 from July/Aug. 1967. It would seem that the first two of these books has to be where Ideal got him from for the JLA playset as I can find no appearance of him in Justice League, at least not prior to the release of the playset which would rule out issue #171.
What is also both interesting and a mystery is if this is where Ideal found Mousse how did they decide to pick him and not one of the other two? I am not sure that one will ever be solved. Also one has to ask did Wonder Woman not have any stories from 1965 with a villain worthy enough to go into that set? I had to have read this story way back when it came out but I totally forgot about him until I looked him up for this article. Given that these books were published at least two years before Ideal began to design the playset and that they would not have bought them off the stands it is a fair assumption that DC/National had given Ideal the books they would have had to use in the set design and perhaps suggested Mouse Man as a likely candidate. So apparently the pattern was broken with this bad guy.
The last of our evil six is Kaltor and yes he is another one of those villains who make you say who? Well his first and only appearance was in Aquaman #20 from March/April 1965 in a story called “The Sea King's Double Doom.” He was a mentor to Aquaman and heroic warrior of the sea who had passed his work ethic to his "little minnow." But his risk-taking ended up costing him dearly. He was rescuing trapped Atlanteans from a collapsed mine when exposed to a gas of unknown origins. Kaltor started to periodically change into a two-headed monster of giant proportions. In this form he had no control of his actions. He would go on mindless rampages and ultimately would be killed by Aquaman but was "reborn" after his monster form was killed. Given the cover date of the issue it seems very likely this is where Idea got this guy from.
It is interesting to note that each of the heroes in the set had their own villain to fight except for the Flash. Given the rather impressive rogues gallery he had been given by late 1965 in his own title none of them appearing in the playset does seem a little odd and creates another mystery that also may never be solved.
The Batman Justice League Playset is considered one of several Holy Grails for people who collect vintage Batman toys and for it to have so many questions associated with it for me only adds to its allure and attraction.
