WHO DID IT BEST? The Great DC vs. MARVEL LUNCHBOX WAR of 1976
A Bronze Age BACK TO SCHOOL showdown! By CHRIS FRANKLIN In late summer of 1980, I went school shopping for the first time. I was soon to enter kindergarten and in among the ritual of buying pants, shirts, shoes, a backpack (I chose a Peanuts model), there was the all-important selection of the lunchbox, or lunch kits as the manufacturers often called them. For kids, the lunchbox was essentially a metal billboard advertising your favorite characters, TV shows, and movies, designed to keep your bologna sandwich safe until lunch time. That year I chose Aladdin Industries’ Super Friends model, which had been in production since 1976. It was a hard decision, because sitting next to it on the shelf was their Superman: The Movie lunchbox. As much as I loved that film (it’s still my favorite movie of all time), I couldn’t argue that the SF box had MORE of the DC characters I loved from comics and TV. Most importantly, Batman and Robin. Years and several lunchboxes later, I came across something that blew my mind on several levels. Circa 1984, I was riding my bike down an alley near my home. There along the paved alley street, sitting in the grass was another lunchbox — a Marvel Super Heroes box with a similar design to my beloved Super Friends version (which I still owned), also produced by Aladdin. I had never considered stealing anything in my life, but this abandoned metal box tempted me. I rode past it several times. Went home, and came back, riding by again, thinking how easy it would be to make it mine. I even revisited it a few days later, and IT WAS STILL SITTING THERE! Whoever owned this clearly didn’t deserve it, treating it like this! But all those comics I read had given me a gushy moral center, and I couldn’t do it. So, it evaded me for another four decades until I bought it at a toy show just a few years ago. Now owning the two, and displaying the similarly designed boxes side by side, I began to wonder, what would I have done if I’d had to choose between them on that fateful day in August 1980, or perhaps a few years earlier? Would I have gone with the DC model, or the Marvel? What would...
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