Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Mystery on Cloudbase

Hi Paul, I've attached photo that might be of interest - it's from the letter page of TV21 # 196 cover date October 19th 2068 (1968!). As you can see the lucky lad has excellent taste with his Dyna-Soar in pride of place and Probe Force 2 lurking to the far right of the photo.

There's also the Dinky SPV and the J.R. TB1 and TB3, but what has always puzzled me is the Spectrum Cloudbase that dominates the photo. As far as I know the only Cloudbase models of this era were the Bandai friction drive version and the Imai Model kit both of which would be far to small to fit in the scale of the other toys pictured. My only solution is that it was a home made model, but the quality seems too high for that (note the Spectrum writing on the bottom of the command tower and the overall detail).


So does anyone have a better answer ? Is this a lost Anderson toy ? Did a Vivid Imaginations Cloudbase from the early 1990's drop back in time ? Or did he just have very talented parents who built it for him ? This photo has puzzled me since I first saw it "live" when I was six years old, so if anyone can identify it I'd love to know !


Hope the 2nd part of the SCAPEGOAT Sword story helps, and keep up the great work with the Blog !
Best wishes
John Croot

4 comments:

  1. It's from the 'Make a Model of Cloudbase' book, printed in Holland. the book contains a story and a punch-out-and-assemble card model to build a 434mm Cloudbase.

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  2. I had that as a kid- the real holy grail of Scarlet Merchandise for me!

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  3. Space Mutt is there too. Roughly middle of pic, behind Thunderbird 3. That's Moon McDare's dog.

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  4. Well spotted anonymous and Toad! Wonder if that young man from Crawley ever became an astronaut?

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