Gods and Rockets

 Back in the early seventies, it was a regular summer excursion with the family to a sunny place that I looked forward to. It wasn't so much the sun and sand I relished, but the little shops near the beaches. Usually, the favourite haunt was Wales, but later we got as far as Devon. Sometime about 1972, we stayed for a week in Dawlish, just a stretch from Torquay and commuted about by beachside railway to the neighbouring towns. Teignmouth and Paignton were quite memorable, as they had more than their share of shops and I was delighted to find many cool space toys. One large store had my first (and only) glimpse of the Sword Saturn rocket standing proud in the window and across from it was a small gift shop. In an effort to distract me from the rather expensive rocket in the window, my dad found me a small bagged space explorer set, chock full of plastic spacemen.

 As it turned out, it was quite a good set too as besides having a load of silver and bronze 'Giant' brand spacemen and a small Matt Mason Space Crawler as was found in the Apollo Moon Exploring sets, it had a mini version of one of the rockets from the Topper Cape Canaveral set. The 'Titan' rocket is a bit of a weird one as it has a pink ball shaped thing on the top, probably a safety device employed by Topper before the rubber caps were added to the rockets.  The miniature version stands about 15 cm high and is complete in almost all details, apart from four tiny vents near the nose on the original.

The full bagged set appeared on ebay recently, but I missed out. A few days later a loose rocket with a different paper collar and a team of Giant style spacemen popped up and I got lucky. When I was a kid and first got the Topper Cape Canaveral set, I was impressed by the way all the rockets had decals with mythological gods names such as Jupiter, Thor and Atlas. My original Topper set had the rocket with the ball on in white and it was named 'Thor'. But either way, i'm glad to add it back to my collection again.

My original version, sans ball disappeared in a trade to a collector in the states when I first discovered the joys of the internet, but prior to that it featured in a set of hasty photographs I sent to Woodstock over ten years ago, after I discovered his Project Sword Checklist online! The photo also shows the mini version of the Topper Rocket Transporter (13), the remains of the Hover Lunar Rover (7) and the elusive Apollo Moon Exploring Space Station (21). These now sit high on my list of items to be replaced in the Wotan Archive!