Inside the box was (what seemed to my small hands) a huge remote control tank, loosely based on the Churchill. Named the Wildcat, it had a big clumsy looking wired handheld control which looked very much like an army field radio. The chunky, important looking switches had a very practical look to them and allowed the tank to move back and to and turn left and right. A grenade style pull ring activated the missiles. The whole control system had obviously been carefully designed to look and feel as militarily functional as possible and worked like a dream. I was able to hide about three feet away from the tank behind a barricade of cushions and slowly approach the target.
The target in question was a cool Anti Tank Gun, which being a Triang product, used the chunky rocket from the BattleSpace Rocket Launcher wagon. This used a powerful spring driven mechanism with a plastic missile with heavy rubber tip. The gun itself followed standard field gun lines, except for the missile and could be elevated and lowered by means of a small geared mechanism allowing very precise aiming. Precision was the order of the day as the idea of the game was to knock out your opponent before he did. With the antitank gun, this was achieved by taking a hit on the square shield on the front of the gun, which would then fall forward, disabling the rocket mechanism. The tank had a slightly upper hand in that it had three missiles at its disposal, again rubber tipped, but not quite as powerful.
Just beneath the row of missiles on the tank turret was a small rectangular plate that served as a switch. If the red rocket struck the plate, it pushed back a connection inside the body, releasing a sprung figure in the front of the tank and flipping off the front cover panel. The figure popped up, arms raised in surrender. The clever part of this arrangement was a metal contact on the drivers helmet which completed the electric circuit and when released, immobilised the tank.
My original tank was so well played with that it eventually gave up the ghost. The rubber tipped missiles perish easily and I have only managed to preserve one of the Anti Tank rockets along with most of the gun. However, the tanks do appear on ebay regularly and I bough a 'fixer-upper' recently, which had replaced the ring pull on the handset with a sliding switch. Again the tank featured the same logo as the Minic Missile Tank, a mushroom cloud with lightning bolt. The gun has a small logo with an exploding tank featured on it.
Incidentally, I know I have intentionally left the hyphen out of the word Tri-ang throughout this series of articles, this is out of pure laziness and reasons of ecomomy of time and not a typo!
The inner-box artwork is clever. It looks as if the tank is smashing its way through the front of a house ... from the inside! Puts me in mind of a scene from a James Bond film. Isn't there one where he uses a tank to chase someone through city streets?
ReplyDeleteNow, my question, if you please. Regarding the page in the Boy's World annual. Would you say that is a review? Or an advertisement in disguise? And if the latter, how do you think it might have worked? Would Tri-ang (I'm using one of the hypens Wote didn't have time to use. There's a whole pile of them, so I just helped myself to a couple. Hope no one minds? Hee hee) ... would Tri-ang have paid to have the page? I'd like to know how this sort of thing was handled, but am still completely in the dark.
And by the way, Wote ... good series of articles. Are there more Tri-ang to come?
ReplyDeletei think its what we would call an advertorial today. Tri-ang probably did pay for it, and it would have been intended to promote the toys. Early use of product placement and it shows how progressive Tri-ang were in there thinking.
ReplyDeleteand i used a hyphen!
Did ya get it from the same pile I did?
ReplyDeleteThere will always be room for more Tri-ang articles. The last in this sequence is scheduled for tomorrow, then Ill work up the next set.
ReplyDeleteI also had shoot and surrender. I found the gun usually won, but it depended on whether the gun was allowed to traverse to left and right, as well as elevating and depressing.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to have been a close connection between Boys World Annual 1967 and Tri-ang. Not only was there a Battle Space article, there was also one on Minic racing cars and one on railways (although the latter does not cite nay particular manufacturer). I don't know when Boys' World amalgamated with Eagle, but I wonder if this is an example of a Fleetway annual title being produced after the demise of the comic -Eagle Annuals were issued after the comic had folded.
ReplyDeleteThe 1967 Annual is a bit of a pot-boiler, with some illustrations which I suspect were originally in Look and Learn.
i never realised there was a Boys World comic! i thought the book was one of those odd annuals that turned up near xmas with a few text stories and a swathe of reprint. Interesting!
ReplyDeleteThe Tri-hyphen-ang [sorry Toadster! hee hee] and Boys World link extended to SpaceX as Toadster establsihed a couple of years ago - the design for the Pleasure Cruiser appears in the 1968 BW Annual. http://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2011/05/boys-world-and-pleasure-cruiser.html
ReplyDeleteWonder if there were more SpaceX concepts in the comics and annuals?
Boys World amalgamated with Eagle in 1964, and while there is a loose connection with the later Annuals (mainly the typeface on the cover) I reckon the Annual is just a way of collecting a miscellany of articles where Fleetway owned copyright, or I suspect low-cost commissioned articles, or semi-adverts such as the Tri-ang one.
ReplyDelete