The sixties were a great era to grow up in. Space travel was everywhere and on everything. I wanted to be an astronaut at age 5 (still waiting at 47) and my imagination soared. I collected space books voraciously alongside the toys, and chief among my favourites was the British Ladybird book, Exploring Space. Printed in 1964 with fabulous colour illustrations by a B. Knight, this and 'How Rockets Work' fired my enthusiasm for space with gorgeous pictures of streamlined rockets and space stations. When it was re-issued some years later in the wake of Apollo, the Mercury capsule was replaced by a LEM and all the futuristic rockets had gone in favour of Saturn Vs. Recently I spotted a nice space diorama set made by Marx on Ebay US (pictured). The set has a small copy of the larger battery Moon Grabber toys and a handful of blobby space rocks and a couple of wayward astronauts. The box states 'hand painted by artists' and looking at the sloppy way the vehicle has been decorated, I wonder if the artist was actually in zero g conditions at the time! What caught my eye though was the clearly stolen box artwork - the three main rocket and space station pictures had been lifted directly out of the Ladybird book (pictured)! Not content to subtly alter the pics and avoid any copyright issues as is the case with the Nuclear Ferry and the plagiarism of Bob McCalls art, Marx clearly decided these inexpensive items would not be around long enough to draw the lawyers attentions. Even so, its a very clear indication that toy designers and their respective companies obviously used contemporary literature as their sources of inspiration.Nice one WOTAN.
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