I've long believed that the Remco Incredible Hulk Utility belt is the most ridiculous piece of Hulk merchandising produced, I mean the guy doesn't have gadgets and generally, his pants are held up by a rope or possibly a toaster cord.
It appears, however, that Remco sold a bunch of these because there are two versions, my Corey LeChat sent me these photos recently of the two, distinctly different Hulk Utility belts, more after the jump:
I believe the example above is the original version, it's filled with recycled nonsense from other more sensible Superhero Utility belts like Decoder glasses, the Gamma radiation detector (wouldn't that just go off all the time?), Green wrist gauntlets, a decoder map (for the glasses), Bruce Banner's lab pass(?) and "mystery action radiation badge".
Yup folks, the Hulk is really hard to merchandise, we're a long way from Batman here....
I should mention that this version is never featured in any Remco catalog to my knowledge.
This is the more commonly found version of the belt albeit this one is in a Canadian box. This was featured in the 1979 and 1980 Remco Catalogs.
It's contents are similar but gone are the ID badges replaced with a "Hulk Voice Modulator" AKA a Kazoo.
I used to get my Remco Utility belts from Dominion Playworld as a kid, they eventually ran out of ever style but this one, they had stacks of them right next to the unsold Mego Mr. Myxlpltzk dolls.
The box for this toy doesn't mention Remco but their parent company AHI, I believe I know why that is.
In Canada, most Remco toys were distributed by a company called Irwin toys, while Grand Toys (also a distributor for Mego in Canada) carried AHI branded items. Irwin likely passed on carrying this, so Grand stepped in and they just removed the Remco logo to avoid confusion.
So there you have it, more than you ever needed to know about Remco Incredible Hulk Utility Belts.
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The post title got my hopes up that they'd finally produced a Hulk utility belt I could wear into the office. Alas, I'll just have to stick with my conservative leather belt for the forseeable future.
ReplyDeleteHulk smash, Hulk bash. Hulk no accessorize!
ReplyDeleteHulk smash. Hulk bash. Hulk no accessorize.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure, but I have had that original Hulk utility belt. It looks so familiar. I'll check with my siblings.
ReplyDelete