For the last few weeks, I've been doing some Ironman research in my spare time. Nice to see some of it is paying off.

New question time:

What was the name of the device used by Professor Marko to drain the Earth of it's atmosphere?

The first image I got was the big "Transformer/Vacuum Cleaner" from the movie "Space Balls" but I don't think that's it!

That was from an old Human Torch story I saw reprinted somewhere in the Seventies, but darned if I remember what the thing was called....I'm gonna go with the Super Flowbee.

Nope, not it at all.

I'm still surprised DiZo knew/knows the story.
Let's hear what CuCr's guess will be. I Honestly think he'd know.

An aerosol can?

(Seriously, I don't remember the name of the device either, but I did read the story. I'm surprised the Torch didn't offer him some Hostess Fruit Pies to forget the whole thing.)

And no, he didn't spray into the atmosphere, he was removing it. This device was like a hoover, removing the atmosphere.

A guy by the name of John Kaminski wrote about this story and said almost the same thing. He said "I almost expected to see the Human Torch offer him some Twinkies instead."
He went on to say that he refused to believe it happened on Earth-616 and thinks it should be confsigned to Earth-Hostess".

But Hostess didn't exist back then, did it? It'd have to be grape NeHi.....

Actually, Twinkies were introduced in 1930, and the Hostess brand name was definitely in play well before the 1940's-1950's Human Torch stories.

Good point! I always forget that Twinkies used to be banana-flavored way back when, but they switched to vanilla filling due to wartime rationing and stuck with that flavor even afterwards. Of course, thinking about that now makes me want to go find a Banana Flip

That's one on me, then. I forget that a lot of these brands were actually around back then; we just heard more about them in the postwar advertising blitz, appealing to all those baby-boom kids.

Twinkies brought back the banana flavor a couple of years ago, as a promotional tie-in to Peter Jackson's King Kong. I tried them and found them unappealing, much like Jackson's film.

That's how I felt about it and the other remake from the 70's. People have got to learn that they should never monkey around with success.

As for BananaTwinkies, the reason they didn't taste so good was bacause they couldn't make them with the original ingriedients. The gov't doesn't want certain things used in cooking anymore, like coconut oil and non-veggie oils, all that good stuff.
Kinda why I was surprised this summer with Pepsi releasing "Throwback", made with cane sugar syrup instead of Corn Syrup. Been awhile since they did that in the USA.