Cavemen

Marx Cavemen

Marx reissue
Pretty much from the beginning, Marx issued caveman figures. I never paid too much attention to them, as even from an early age I realized the basic anachronism of cavemen mucking about with dinos. I seem to have had no trouble realizing that cavemen didn't commute to work in anything like Fred Flintstone's car, either, although Fred et al appeared just before I toddled off to kindergarten. I may not have realized the cultural significance of the first prime-time animated sitcom, but I knew a thing or two about cavemen. [Sure, you knew they didn't drive in Fred's car, they walked to work! -- Ed.]

The basic irrelevance of cavemen to the other Marx figures may have troubled the powers at Marx, as well. Sometimes they included cavemen with the Play Sets, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes two men would be paired in a blister on the Blister Packs, sometime not.

In any event, there were six different figures. I don't know the Marx mold number yet, but I doubt not that all six were from the same mold. The original colors were usually tan and a sort of creme, although they have also been reported in brownish-red and gray. They were reissued in the '70s in a mild brownish tan (pictured above) and a strange yellowish tan which I couldn't bring myself to photograph. They were actually rather well-sculpted figures, particularly the fellow second from the right (above) skinning the cave rabbit.

I will note without further comment that there were no Marx cavewomen. [Maybe those are the women? -- Ed.]

As is clear from that 1.5" diameter silver dollar thoughtfully included in the photo, these are fairly small figures, the standing ones just under 1 3/4" high. That makes them a tad too small for the nearest standard scale in ~~toy soldiers~~ military miniatures, 54mm. At about 41mm scale, a Marx caveman is too short to convincingly represent even a healthy H. sapiens neanderthalensis when in the company of 54mm figures and sets. And of course they're much too large for the scale of most of the animal figures.

These Marx originals don't seem to have been copied by the usual suspects - MPC, TimMee, Ja-Ru, etc. However I haven't seen 'em all, and there may be some knockoffs floating about.

UPDATE - MPC did make cavemen - I just don't happen to have any at present.

But .... just how serious is the anachronism problem, really? Let's look at the entire Marx dino/prehistoric lineup in geological context.

name/genus?	order?	period?	locale?

caveman	Mammalia	Upper Pleistocene	Europe, Asia Minor
Wolly Mammoth	Mammalia	Upper Pleistocene	North America, northern Europe, northern Asia
Smilodon	Mammalia	Upper Pliocene, Pleistocene	North America, South America
Megatherium	Mammalia	Pliocene, Pleistocene	South America, eastern USA
Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary ~ 65 m.y.a.
Ankylosaurus	Saurischia	Upper Cretaceous	western North America
Hadrosuarus	Ornithischia	Upper Cretaceous	Alberta, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico
Parasaurolophus	Ornithischia	Upper Cretaceous	Alberta, Utah, New Mexico
Pteranodon	Pterosauria	Upper Cretaceous	Delaware, Kansas, Texas, Japan
Struthiomimus	Saurischia	Upper Cretaceous	Alberta, New Jersey
Styracosaurus	Ornithischia	Upper Cretaceous	Alberta, Montana
Trachodon	Ornithischia	Upper Cretaceous	Montana
Triceratops	Ornithischia	Upper Cretaceous	western North America
Tyrannosaurus	Saurischia	Upper Cretaceous	North America, China
Iguanodon	Ornithischia	Lower Cretaceous	Europe, North Africa, USA, Mongolia
Kronosaurus	Plesiosauria	Lower Cretaceous	Australia
Jurassic - Cretaceous boundary ~ 144 m.y.a.
Allosaurus	Saurischia	Upper Jurassic	North America
Brontosaurus	Saurischia	Upper Jurassic	USA, Mexico?
Stegosaurus	Ornithischia	Upper Jurassic	USA
Triassic - Jurassic boundary ~ 208-213 m.y.a.
Plateosaurus	Saurischia	Upper Triassic	Western Europe
Cynognathus	Therapsida	Lower-"center" Triassic	South Africa, Argentina
Permian - Triassic boundary ~ 245-248 m.y.a.
Moschops	Therapsida	"center" Permian	South Africa
Dimetrodon	Pelycosauria	Lower-"center" Permian	Texas, Oklahoma
Sphenacodon	Pelycosauria	Lower Permian	New Mexico
Carboniferous - Permian boundary ~ 286 m.y.a.

Well, that's interesting. At the recent end of the geological column, the Tertiary and Quaternary, our Marx figures are all mammals - no big surprise there. But at the other end, for the entire Permian and most of the Triassic, our figures represent synapsids of one order or another - not a dino in sight. Synapsids are the "mammal-like reptiles." So the dinos are temporally bracketed by mammals or "mammal-likes."

The central portion of the geological column shown above is where both orders of dinosaur (Ornithischia and Saurischia) lurk, along with one representative each from the Plesiosauria and Pterosauria. The biggest cluster is in the Upper Cretaceous.

Now for the synchronism problem. Only animals from the same stratagraphic division can possibly be contemporaries, and they have to be contemporaries to interact in any useful way. Tyrannosaurus never ate a Plateosaurus simply because by the time Tyrannosaurus appeared, the last Plateosaurus was not only dead but already fossilized. From the chronic viewpoint it's no sillier to have our caveman and, say, Pteranodon in the same set than it is to have Allosaurus and Dimetrodon both in one set. The caveman and Pteranodon are separated by a mere 65 million years or so; something on the order of 100 million years lie between Allosaurus and Dimetrodon. And the caveman, as a contemporary of the mammoth or Smilodon, obviously belongs in the same sets they do.

Well, how 'bout that .... I take back everything I ever said about those Marx cavemen. Almost everything.

The last column of the table shows another problem, the spatial analog of anachronism (should I call it "anatopism"? Gr. ana, against + topos, a place) - even those creatures which were alive at the same time often didn't live anywhere near each other. They were all over the map (of course, in those days even the map was all over the map - damn continents kept moving around). Admittedly, anatopism isn't so severe in the case of these Marx figures, as so many of them were native to the Upper Cretaceous of the USA and so could conceivably have blundered into each other in real life. It's just a general consideration when dealing with conglomerations of Rubber Dinos.

Other Marx Cavemen
Marx made a few cavemen as part of an extensive line of plastic figures in the '60s, much larger (about 6" tall) than the cavemen pictured above.

The line started around 1964, as I recall, with military figures of the WW2 era. Initially there were only Wehrmacht troops in fairly classic poses (running man carrying an MG42, festooned with ammo belts for same, things like that), but others were soon added - US GIs, Soviet Russian troops (complete with the obligatory political commmissar) and Imperial Japanese troops (I remember the Japs as particularly well done, in good dynamic poses - the guy on one foot, winding up to throw a grenade, was terrific). The colors were generally appropriate, too - German feldgrau, GI olive drab, Japanese tan, and the Russians in a medium light green. French poilus in horizon blue would have been a nice colorful addition, but they'd be from the wrong World War. There were a half-dozen figures, more or less, in each series.

Marx soon added more series - Cowboys/Gunslingers (the guy getting shot was a big hit with the general public; somehow the guy with the arrow sticking out of his shoulder wasn't as good ... but maybe he wasn't in Cowboys, he might have been in coonskin-cap-type Pioneers ... ), Indians (no, children, they wouldn't morph into Native Americans until a few years later), Cavalry guys, and a series of very non-dynamic and horribly dated Fashion Models. Somewhere in there was a series of five or six cavemen, in a slightly reddish tan. They have nothing to do with the dinosaur figures of the dino Play Sets, I just mention them because they're perfectly legitimate Marx cavemen.

I'm sure I still have all these larger figures around somewhere, but although the Editor thinks he smells another web site in the offing, I think mine have acquired dents from BB firepower and pictures would require heroic efforts with Photoshop to look passable. My excuse for dodging all this is that I don't have Photoshop.

Still More Marx Cavemen
I suppose there's no real justification for leaving out the Flintstone Village, after all.

But it will have to wait until I grub up some pictures.