Yeah. And I bet in real life it wouldn’t even do half of that stuff!
Is this the archetype in anybody else’s mind when they think leering pervy dude?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure this baby wasn’t capable of taking down Russky subs, but the lines are nice. (but $6.98 back then? holy cow that’s a lot of money)
Even as a kid I knew it was just a toy-- an awesome sounding toy you could play with from the inside with a friend.
But looking back as a 21st century adult, jeez-- “hours of imaginative fun playing nuclear war! Pretend to take out Moscow in a first strike and prevent retaliation in kind!” 
That actually doesn’t look half bad! I kinda pictured a simple corrugated box with some vague submarine-like markings printed on the sides.
Fun fact: According to an online inflation calculator, $6.98 in 1972 is $48.28 in 2022 dollars.
Did anyone ever send off for Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero?
It got a (tongue-in-cheek) good review here
I was the oldest, with one brother and one sister. When I saw something I thought would be cool, I’d tell my brother and sister about it, exaggerating just enough to make them really interested.
Eventually one of them would buy it, or they’d pool their resources and buy it. Sea Monkeys were one of the items, also all kinds of models and games. I don’t think they ever caught on.
I had Sea Monkeys.
They smelled bad.
One day, while dusted, furniture polish spray accidentally finished them off.
Here is a related thread in FQ
I had one once (not from a comic ad). It was a black tube, I think 10 feet long? Came with two twist ties. You tied off on end, then ran with the other “mouth” to open and partially fill it with air, then quickly tied off that end. Then you waited for the sun to heat the air inside to expand and lower the density. IIRC, mine did heat up and float away, so that was that.
When I was in high school in the late 1970s, another guy had a t-shirt that had “WE PRINT ANYTHING” on it. I was amused by that.
I was a voracious comic book reader and the math never added up for me: Was a pair of $1.00 X-Ray Specs in 8 weeks really worth 5 more comic books now?
I had two friends who ordered stuff, though. A whole Roman army with working catapults was probably worth $2, but Grit was just the worst kind of child exploitation.
Do you remember how tall a typical soldier was? A standard plastic green army man back in the day I would guess was maybe two inches.
I bought a bar of soap with a lady on it. I think it was a comic ad or one of the True Detective pulp magazines.
It revealed printed layers as it is used. The last layer was the skeleton.
I thought it was cool at 11. None of the art work went beyond pinup art.
I was lucky that the product wasn’t a rip off. It was under whelming but worked as advertised.
The Roman soldiers were about an inch high, I think, but actually 3 dimensional. The catapults were more substantial and worked as advertised.
I had my eye on Grit but never pulled the trigger on that. I did get into a deal selling seeds door to door. Don’t remember how exactly I signed up, may have been through a comic book ad, or Boy’s Life, I don’t remember. But it was a lot of schlepping a box of seeds round the neighborhood for not much payoff. Think I made about a grand total of $6 before I quit.
Wild guess…was the layer between the clothing and the musculature the layer you were most interested in?
It’s taking longer than you might have thought… They’re still out there preying on the gullible, though I don’t know where they’re advertising now.
Yes. But in that regard it was a let down. Very basic black and white graphics. The pulp Detective mags sell had better pinup pics.
Pinup = provocative and non-nude
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I had the skeleton. It was totally worth the 99 cents.
I wanted to get the Charles Atlas program for building muscles, but my mother strictly forbade it, reasoning that it must be connected with taking some drugs or similar dangerous substance.
I did get the book second-hand when I was 24 (and skinny). From it I confirmed that it was NOT about buying any drugs, supplements, or what have you, but about establishing a rigorous physical exercise regimen and developing good habits (avoiding white bread, getting enough sleep, etc). I started doing the exercises, but gave up after what, a few weeks, a month, because it was just too demanding a regmen. The comic book ads promising that you would have an Atlas body in a month or what have you were simply promising too much.