Milk Ferry Way,
a custom Tarheelised bit of Woodsy box art wishful thinking.
Wonder why Tarheel in the US never did any of the bigger C21 SWORD toys like this, the Apollo Saturn, Scramble Bug or Zero-X. Come to think of it, you'd have thought that the smaller Dyna Soar and the boxed Cape Kennedy set were eminently marketable as they would have been instantly recognisable to kids Stateside in the late Sixties. What do you think Swordies?
Just speculation on my part, but…the bigger items probably would have been too expensive in manufacturing costs, given that they would be sold here as generic "space toys" without any marketing campaign or media tie-in like a comic strip pushing them. The Tarheel stuff was never advertised anywhere, you'd just see them at the stores randomly. In addition, the more fact-based stuff like the Cape Kennedy set may simply have run into the tragic circumstance that just when the SWORD knockoff items would have been reaching to US market, we had a post-moon landing loss of interest in realistic space toys. They didn't sell anymore and pretty soon they disappeared from the shelves altogether. :-(
ReplyDeleteVery interesting indded Richard. Isn't it strange that as soon as the Moonlanding took place interest in space toys dwindled. I suppose it had peaked.I'm still surprised that their doesn't appear to be many, if any, other plastic Dyna Soar toys in the US besides the various kits like Anagrand. The Dyna Soar started early for NASA. Maybe I've got it wrong and US kids just weren't that aware of the Dyna Soar. That's not to say that UK kids were any more aware, although there were lots of little pics of the X plane in comics and mags. It is odd that we got a toy Dyna Soar from C21 and the US,its home, didn't have one much earlier. Maybe there is one! That'd be great!
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