Reader Andy B's Big Licks

"Paul, thought I'd strike while the iron is hot, or at least before the iced lolly has melted!

 

The first space-oriented iced lolly I recall was Zoom. Fireall XL5 was used to advertise it for a time, but there were no XL5 cards. Zoom did offer a model of Fireball, for which you needed several zoom wrappers and it was advertised in TV21, although the colour advert shown here is from another magazine (TV21’s was in black and white).

The first series of Zoom cards was Space Exploration like the V2 shown below, followed by cars, planes and “All Systems Go” on marvels of the future.

Sky Ray seems to have been issued to rival Zoom. It had a very good series of Space Exploration cards [cool spacex - like moonbase example shown below], with two albums to put them in. The first half of the series concerned itself with the then-current Apollo moon programme, the second half (in the second album) was looking farther into the future. This was issued around 1967.

A year or two later, Sky Ray had a series of Dr Who cards and produced an illustrated album for them. There's an example here 'Collision'.

Sky Ray also ran a half-page comic strip in Ranger and advertised the 'Moon Fleet Space Jacket' [anyone get one?], which was not well received (at least by me) as it meant that the excellently-drawn SF strip “The Trigan Empire” was reduced from two to one and a half pages!

Finally, before the lolly melt's completely, as far as I know FAB never issued any cards. For a time, Thunderbirds’ Lady Penelope was used to advertise it as you can see here.

Slurp!

Andy B.

PS. Woodsy says: nice one Andy! Very tasty! UK Readers, get down to Lidl and grab a box of Fab and Rocket Lollies before I get them all! More Lolly card pics welcomed!

FAB and Skyray comic strip: Andy B, Remaining pics: Ebay archive