FOUND IN SPACE - The LP Astronauts

Some of the most distinctive toy astronaut figures have been produced by the mysterious company LP. Guest blogger Maverick Collecting recently showcased an entire cohort of these wonderful figures on his own blog Small Scale World. To tie in with our Golden Astronaut and Project Spaceman articles, he's kindly written the following overview of the LP range.



Photo 1

What I consider to be the original version (oldest?) in both scales, hard (polystyrene) gunmetal silver plastic, 54mm painted on both sides, 25mm weapons only painted on ‘backs’, marked LP with the monster in a starburst.

Three grey and one gunmetal 54mm and gunmetal 25mm, all soft (polyethylene) plastic and painted and marked as last.

Some other colours, 54mm only, soft plastic, painted both sides and marked LP.

White, soft plastic, LP, painted on one side only (I think these are the ones found in Clifford packaging).




Photo 2

Other colours, unpainted, both sizes, LP mark. Going by the robots which I will cover next, there may also be pink and apple-green. LP also used orange and yellow for their divers and orangey-brown and pale-blue for their fishermen - that I know of.

This next row is the ‘Chromed’ finish. gold for the 25mm on Polystyrene and silver for the 54mm on a nylon/propolene, the Fawn and Buff ones were chromed, but I tried to clean them with TFR and it took of the paint! Also while all the chromed ones have the LP mark, and the same base material the stripped ones don’t. However they were bought in a cake decorators/bakers only a year or two ago, so I am assuming they are either late production/post-LP, or a specific order that requested a blank plate, certainly; from the same moulds, same factory and through the same supply-chain that provided Culpitts with all the marked ones through the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Those in the large scale were supplied as mentioned for cake decorations and would also be found in boxes, in newsagents, joke shops, party shops and so on. In the small scale these are the ones this blog knows and loves from Spacex, Golden Astronaut etc...

Finally in 25mm only, matt-white, undercoated hard plastic with the LP mark



Photo 3

This bit of my ‘living graph’ looks a mess, but there is order, first, off to the left, are the MPC derived 25mm’s from the Spacex range. One being unpainted and made form a mottled mix of granules, I suspect he suffered the same ailment as the buff/fawn 54mm’s above, but he might have escaped the factory unpainted, a ‘Friday afternoon’ product! They all have unmarked bases - I’ve never seen them with a marked base.

The next row proper are 50mm, unmarked, flat based, soft ethylene, these being the same size and colour as the divers, leads me to suspect they are LP factory, for lucky-bags or Christmas Crackers.

The silver 50mm’s are the same as above, however I know these were sold in carded bags as rack-toys/pocket-money toys.

The two suspended between the rows of 50mm’s are both about 53mm, soft plastic, one has a good attempt at the LP colour scheme, the other is unpainted. Neither is likely to be LP, detail loss being the best clue. Bases are higher and more hollowed out than LP and are marked HONG KONG. Having said they are not LP, they do have similarities to the white astronauts that accompanied the robots in 25mm (which I will cover with together next time) in the way the base is hollowed-out with a bevelled ‘shoulder’.

The 25mm’s on the silver row (blues and greens) and between the two rows of 50mm’s (reds, oranges and yellows), are very similar to the 50mm’s colour wise, but have a loss of detail and are clearly from two sources, the reds having a curving HONG KONG like two small bananas, the others are unmarked and from a modern, low grade, slightly tinny recycled/cheap polythene. and were just your bog standard HK copy of a copy...Crackers, carded sets, gum-ball gifts, lucky bags, whatever! [As a result - of course - they’re by far the hardest to find...lots of colour variants, 99% of all know production already in landfill...]

The last of our tour, are chunky 25mm’s, all hard styrene, one silver-grey the rest chromed, They have eaten all the pies compared to the LP originals, but may still be LP due to the paper residue glued to the bases, like the very first row?!

Robots Next!