During the space age of toys, rubber monsters were popular as a pocketmoney collectable. Among these, I found as a boy a range of six space creatures. These were apparently sold in the US as 'Moon Goons' or similar and in the UK alongside the 'Teachers Pets' mosnters. Each one had a suction cup under it and was generally molded in a browny gold coloured silicone, and painted greens and blues and yellows on top. Among these six was one large 'bell shaped' alien that I as a kid alway thought would be the boss!
As more and more space toys hit the market, i began to find these same aliens in other guises, as tiny chrome coloured figures to threaten the golden astronauts in Apollo Moon Exploring sets and also on keyrings and other knock off rubber toys. Recently, i decided to immortalise my favourite alien in a painting, the classic space creature of my childhood. Having so many different versions of the same toy, I wonder if he appears anywhere else - maybe as a cereal premium ? Picture shows Painting above and original alien on far left, silver Apollo set aliens and various copies. Large yellow figure is a solid plastic keyring.
Posted by Wotan
1 comment:
Yeah, that's a great figure and the set of six he's found with do turn u in a lot of other toy packaging. The packaged rubber ones were called "Moon Platoon" in the U.S. and have a great graphic to go with them. Another box display from Australia calls them Moon Men. It has line art on the display box.
The yellow one you show (key chain) also comes in green and red from a bagged set just called "Space Aliens" on the header card. (I'll post pics on Flickr)
Have the original small chrome and grey plastic ones from Space Exploration set too. But the strangest variation I have seen are clear plastic figures, don't know the size.
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