I hope this will be useful, although there's a fundamental and unavoidable source of error involved. I can fiddle with the tint, color saturation, contrast and brightness of the JPEG images so that on my monitor they look much like the plastic figures, but there's no practical way I can force them to appear that way on your monitor. (Try complaining to the management if you want your money back). That having been said, we will press on regardless. The above are approximations to the colors of the original issue and reissue Marx figures. At top left are the original light green and light gray, as used from 1955 to 1964. At bottom left are the brown used from 1958 to 1964, and the tan used from 1960 or '61 through 1964. Reports from the field suggest that some variations in the exact shade of the brown plastic have been seen, but I have no samples available to show here. The only other colors for Marx dinos of the original production period are four relatively rare ones - green with black marbling, gray with black marbling, metallic green, and metallic silver-gray. Unfortunately I don't at present have any figures in the green marble or either of the metallic colors, so I can't show any color samples of those. Above right are the light green, light gray, and reddish brown in which the reissue figures were molded. The green is notably paler than the original shade, and the gray is closer to an off-white than gray. The red-brown is actually fairly cheerful. There may have been other reissue colors - I don't have all that much reissued material, but all that I have is in one of these three colors. UPDATE (12.6.02) - I have seen some reissue figures in bright yellow, and a mildly metallic blue suspiciously like an MPC color. However I have not examined the figures closely and can't yet verify that they're real Marx. 
Here's an interesting peculiarity of original Marx production. Occasionally Marx turned out some "marbled" figures, usually gray with black streaks, but figures in green with black streaks have been reported too. The above is a modest example, an original-production Dimetrodon, one of the two from the "small" mold. It is in the standard Marx light gray with some black marbling in the sail. An injection-molding machine is loaded with pellets of thermoplastic resin. The pellets are fairly small, pea-sized or not much larger. They fall down a hopper and into a long rotating screw which drives them along a heated tube. As they travel along the tube they get hot and melt into a thick, viscous fluid. The screw continues to drive the melted resin into the mold. When the mold is filled the screw is stopped and the mold is cooled, allowing the resin to harden. If a few pellets of contrasting color resin are put into the hopper, they will, of course, melt along with the other pellets, but the rotating screw is a feeding device and not an efficient mixer. So, the colored pellets will appear as long streaks of different-colored resin. These streaks will fold in random ways when the resin is forced into the mold, and - voilą - a marble pattern is visible in the finished part. |