Some of the Fantastic Four’s flying vehicles were less fanciful than others. Their pogo plane was one of the former.
A 1950s experimental U.S. Navy “tailsitter,” the Convair XFY-1 Pogo was designed for vertical takeoffs and landings on small ships.
Having made its first flight on Aug. 1, 1954, the plane was scrapped by 1956 due to landing difficulties and other performance issues.
The vehicle would live on, however, in the pages of Marvel Comics. One way or another, most superheroes need to fly, and they need to do it in style.
Another of the FF’s flying vehicles was redundant the very moment it was created.
“Among the many vehicles used by the Fantastic Four over the years, the Fantasti-Copter is by far the most useless,” observed T.J. Pistilli. “The Fantastic Four seemed to think so as well, as the vehicle appeared in Fantastic Four 3 (1961) and was permanently shelved in the Baxter Building. Not only is the Fantasti-Copter just a normal helicopter, but it debuted in the same issue as the Fantasticar, which also flies, rendering the copter even more pointless.”
The first and best-known of the FF’s vehicles was indeed the Fantasticar, introduced in the third issue along with their blue uniforms.
“Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four (they of the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Comic Magazine) took off on their adventures not in a Wagon Queen Family Truckster but in the Fantasticar,” wrote Dan Greenfield. “And when tempers flared, they’d just push a button, and the vehicle would split four ways. To each his own!”
Readers complained that the original Fantasticar looked like a flying bathtub, so by the 12th issue, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had it redesigned into a more complex and glamorous form.
What a motorcycle is to a car, the Fantastic Four’s Airjet-Cycle was to the Fantasticar. Seating all four of the superheroes, the Airjet-Cycle flew with the aid of both VTOL jets and a rocket engine.
Reed Richards also had an actual intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tucked away in its silo behind an anti-vibration wall in a corner of the FF’s Baxter Building headquarters.
That must have rattled a few windows in midtown Manhattan.
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