Its a slow day on Mars as a seasonal storm obscures the view across the
plains. Having seen a few robots and also a couple of Kinder toys grace
the moonbase blog, I was reminded of the small store of similar toys in
the Cydonia archives. I may have blogged these in passing relative to
similar toys but i felt they merited a closer look.
The four robots are made by Giodi, a company that makes a lot of the Kinder toys and similar novelties. They share a lot of the parts of the blue and white space model series of spacecraft and moon buggies. As far as I am aware there are only four, but i would be interested to see if there are others. At the time I bought them at retail in the eighties, there were just these available. Each has lever operated arms.
Ive always loved little toys like this and miss finding premiums in
cereal and inside xmas crackers. Nowadays the safety police have clamped
down on small novelties in kids cereal and its rare to find anything
with 'small parts' falling out of a packet. Kinder Eggs occasionally
reveal a real treat of a novelty gift, although the best items appear
on the continent rather than in the UK, where we seem to get the single
piece cartoon figures of penguins, hippos and other tat.
Kinder released a great series of models for the FerreroAir series, which transformed the plastic pods into planes and added a series of support vehicles.
I picked up a small selection of the vehicles on Ebay Germany a while back including the tiny fururistic tanker, crash tender, van and cargo handler.
Along with the tanker came another version of the truck with a really neat mini-sub on the back.
Less than an inch long the detachable sub even floats! Long before I found Kinder eggs I got a couple of odd kit based premiums, most of which have long gone, but one still survives - this odd looking Moon Bus type vehicle. Made of plastic and quite roughly molded, it has opening doors and rolling wheels. The other models I had included a space train and a rocket. Anyone recognise it ?
Oh my, that Moon Bus thing in the last picture is one of the nicest little space toys to be seen in a long time. Puts me in mind of jig-toys (probably cos of the scale) ... but is much, much better.
ReplyDeleteWhen did you get this, Wote?
great bloglet Wote. That moonbus has got me thinking - were the Japanese SWORD mini toys you have actually premiums of some kind?
ReplyDeletei came across the bus - there were two of them at the time, a saucer and another toy - in the very late seventies. As I recall, they were unmade in a small baggy. Very like the small key ring puzzle toys, but thin plastic and very ill fitting.
ReplyDeleteI love the word baggy! At one time solely used to describe trousers of the Ska type, then a form of acid-funk in Manchester and latterly snaffled by the Star Wars brigade to describe the small bag some Kenner figures came in - the baggy!
ReplyDeleteThese are really cool! My favorite pieces are the tanker trailer, the submersible, the crash tender (which looks very much like a Matchbox crash tender except I think for the color) and the airport cargo handler.
ReplyDeleteThis is the second time I've seen Kinder stuff and gotten hooked in the last month or so. Wish those companies that make the toys would sell them in the US, even without the chocolate. They are awesome and would do really well selling to collectors, like the Beanie Babies did some years ago.
Here's a Baggies brand sandwich bag commercial from the mid-60s in the US. Not sure how much farther back that brand goes, but Baggies is a household and generic name like Band-Aids for bandages in the US. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sthVWjCLFYg
Gordon Long