Pyro Mania

Ed 'Ice' Bergs fabulous golden age space fleet is a welcome change to the modern style ships we feature on the blog usually. Nuclear engines and bulky fuselages make way for elegant, streamlined ships with an art deco grace about them. I never really encountered any of these toys as a child, although I did have one or two Tudor Rose spacemen. When I posted the first part of Eds article here, it sparked a short debate about the Pyro X 200 ships at the rear of the shot. Arto queried whether the belly of the ships was made to fit onto another toy, the Tudor Rose Space City Control Tower, seen here, courtesy of Vectis.

Ive never seen a toy like this and neither had Ed! Presumably, the wire rods fit into the yellow section on top and the clockwork motor rotates them around the tower. (Arto feel free to corrrect this assumption!). The box artwork is stunning! Eds X-200 ships are made by Pyro and lack the square box arrangement beneath the ships and have standard undercarriage as he shows here:

 So can we assume that Tudor Rose re-tooled the original Pyro ship moulds to accommodate the box that holds the wire in place ? Does anyone have one of these fabulous Tower toys ? If you are interested in the golden age toys of Pyro and Tudor Rose, you could do no better than to invest in Mark Youngs wonderful book, Blast Off! A colourful and informative tour of early space toys such as Marx, Pyro, Tudor Rose etc and covering Giant, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon models.

Stop Press: Spurred on by all this talk of Pyro, I had a look in my copy of Blast Off! and there was a nice picture of the Space Control Tower, with ships in place!