Thursday, 7 July 2011

A Little Local Colour

 Looking at various space toys recently it suddenly occurred to me that sixties toys seemed to adopt a particular colour theme. Apart from the NASA standard white - as all rockets tended to be mostly white or whitish - there was always a lot of red and blue in the mix, making a sort of standardisation across the board. Matt Masons Space Station was a great example and Billy Blast Off followed suit with a lot of the primary colours too.
 Tomy especially made use of the scheme in their series of 8 wheeled moon buggies and other related toys. Equally, submarines and similar toys tended to favour yellow - obviously there is a high visibility theme at great depths, yellow showing up well in the greenish depths.
 But it then occured to me after I looked at the Sears Americus Moon Buggy, that the colour theme relates directly to the old star spangled banner - red, white and blue to tie the toys directly to the american space programme and Old Glory itself. Obvious really...

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