A Piece of the Action

I like to find connections in the various strands of my collecting passions and sometimes its very easy to do so. The recent interest in the Motorix bloglet and the toys similarity to Lego called forth a more direct link to space toys in the form of the Airfix Betta Bilda Rocket.

As a boy, I was denied Lego and instead had to make do with Airfix poor substitute building blocks, Betta Bilda. Seeing the danish company churning out such a versatile and popular toy must have inspired Airfix to try to grab a little of the construction set market in the early sixties. Unfortunately, Betta Bilda was a contradiction in terms and the bricks were utterly useless. Besides being very limited in shape, the average base brick was a simple two stud affair, they only really came in red and white to begin with, offset by some rather nice green roof tiles. Id spend hours making little square houses or blocks of flats, only to have the whole lot crumble into a pile of bits when i attempted to move them, such was the nature of the 'building' technique. Whereas Lego bricks clung together firmly and securely, Betta Bilda sort of rested against each other briefly before collapsing in a white plastic heap.

It was only late in the toys run, probably the end of the sixties, did Betta Bilda begin to show promise with the introduction of a chunky wheeled motor unit and other coloured accessories. By them my limited childhood patience had evapourated and i'd gone off in search of other delights. Because of this, I missed out on an unusual and rare set which was designed to make one model only - the Rocket.

I managed to pick this one up via ebay from a dealer in Holland, and although it still suffers from the same lack of adhesion between the parts, just setting it up for the quick snap was a trial, the end result is quite pleasing. How on earth any child could derive any kind of satisfaction from trying to play with the finished rocket is beyond me, as soon as you lift it up either the nose cone topples off or the engines fall away. But it does serve as an interesting waypoint in the development of toys and as a nice way to draw a few disparate threads together in one place.