When they were weird.

It’s hard to imagine now that both Star Wars and Marvel are multi-billion-dollar industries unto themselves, encompassing everything from theme parks to, well, travel mugs. Today, they’re the very model of modern entertainment franchises, imitated so widely that it hardly even registers as imitation anymore. Today, they’re not just mainstream: they define mainstream.

But what made these fictional worlds so interesting in the first place is that they were really weird. Superheroes were considered a quaint, dead genre in 1960, when comics were more likely to feature cowboys or funny animals. Nobody was making space action-adventures in 1976. No sensible professionals would have bet their creative careers on such wild gambles. When they appeared, people were like “Hey, what the hell is that?”

So we think it’s cool that these two mugs, probably by accident, capture these pop-culture megaliths in their formative weird phases. Check out that Star Wars design. It’s from the very first poster for the first movie, created by the then-hot fantasy illustrators the Hildebrandt Brothers.

If either brother had ever laid eyes on Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher, you wouldn’t know if from the faces on these characters. We don’t remember that syringe-like spire just over C3PO’s shoulder, either. Beyond the details, the whole thing just has more of a sword-and-sorcery fantasy feel than that unique Star Wars flavor. Because that Star Wars flavor didn’t exist yet.

Then there’s the Marvel one. OK, it’s kind of chintzy that, with hundreds of thousands of classic images to choose from, the design repeats the same six portraits over and over. But now that we’re used to the cinematic versions of these characters, the striking thing is how colorful the comic characters originally were. Iron Man’s eye-popping yellow, the Hulk’s verdant green, Thor’s golden locks and blue costume accents. Compared to the drab screen costumes, even the relatively unchanged Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Captain America sizzle with vivid color. There’s nothing “realistic” about any of it. That’s the point.

And we’ve always thought it was a crime to deprive the movie Thor of his winged helmet.

Point is, we’ve just talked for several paragraphs about the art, history, and meaning of a couple of travel mugs. We see a lot of travel mugs and a lot of branded merch. Believe us: they’re never this interesting.

Not that long ago, toting around a piece of Marvel or Star Wars merchandise meant you were a weirdo. Now that both canons are square in the mainstream, it’s nice that a couple of travel mugs can help us remember these characters as weird as they were meant to be.