Hey I love the oven mitts even though those were the first things lost when you played with them. I don't know anyone as a kid who had these whose figures eventually had bare hands and marker drawn on emblems.
The mitts got lost, the emblems fell off pretty much immediately (sometimes still in the box), the boots split down the seams, the capes frayed at the edges and eventually unraveled entirely, and if you were lucky, you got in a year or so of play before the elastic bands holding the things together broke. But in the meantime you had fun figures that couldn't stand up or (with the mitts on) hold anything. Whee.
I'm as nostalgic as the next guy but let's face it, at Mego, the "control" part of "Quality Control" meant the same as it did for "fire control": stamp it out early before it can spread!
We removed the bodysuit, cut the sleeves off and put it on Robin, so he had flesh-coloured tights like the '66 TV series.
That's pretty clever! I can't remember my first figure to have the elastic band break but whoever it was I swapped his head out for the Riddler's, so the Prince of Puzzlers was stuck with that shattered body. His tight-fitting one-piece bodysuit with the footies could more or less hold him together until he "fell" from the top of the Wayne Foundation...or got run over by the Batmobile, or had something dropped on him...and then he made for an impressive spectacle with his mutilated form lying there at crazy angles. "Poor Riddler, guess he never learned that crime doesn't pay."
The Star Trek figures were harder to swap with other lines thanks to those "boot" lower legs, so Captain Kirk had to soldier on with his injuries: his left arm cracked and broke at the shoulder "ring" that the elastic band went through, so it wouldn't stay on. You can't imagine how hard it is to deliver an intimidating speech to Kang the Klingon when your arm keeps sliding out of its sleeve and landing at your feet.
"You were right again, Batman. We might have been killed."
"Or worse. Let's go..."