Earthsearch

I've never heard of this this but Earthsearch sounds like it was classic radio Sci-Fi. In fact, it sounds very Project SWORD! Anyone know it?

MESSAGE FOR HANCOCK

 TV21 Issue 179, June 22nd 1968

Courtesy of Toad 2011



Sauron's Ring and The King of Elfland's Daughter

A couple fo years ago I wrote a post called The King of Elfland's Daughter. I thought I'd take up the fantasy reins again and discuss one of my favourite subjects, 1970's concept album art and prog rock. The King of Elfland's Daughter LP itself , by Bob Johnson and Pete Knight, was graced with beautiful cover art [above] by Jimmy Cauty, a gifted seventeen year old artist from Liverpool. I was far more familiar with the his cover than the music, as Athena International sold Jimmy's fabulous work as posters. They were everywhere at the time and included his similarly iconic renderings for the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

Another classic fantasy concept album was Bo Hanssen's Lord of the Rings pictured above. The cover art is instantly recognisable but I don't know the artist. The score is very moogy and trippy and very Seventies and reminded me a little of those progmeisters Camel. I love the artist's illustrations of the white city of Gondor and the swan-like formation of the Nine Nasgul flying. I've often pondered who exactly the buddha-like figure actually is, top right, as I have the corpse surrounded by what appear to be sea anenomes bottom left. Below is a later and more jagged re-interpretation of the album cover depicting one of the Nine, up close and horrible, by Seventies cover king Rodney Matthews. Does anyone have a different cover for Bo Hanssen's album?

Roger Dean also wore the cover King crown during the prog decade and was the album artist of choice for Yes. A classic cover is this gatefold spread for Tales from Topographic Oceans [below], which is easilly one of my top ten albums of all time. The first rather lengthy song takes me straight back to Christmas 1974, when I first got the LP and played it on the family music centre. Like Dean and the album cover,Yes perfected the artform of the concept album; artistry, which Punk Rock was to deconstruct with safety pins at the end of the decade. Fortuitously I liked Punk and New Wave but I was a hippy and my heart was forever Prog's!

Besides concept albums from great prog bands the likes of Yes, Camel, Genesis and Floyd, I loved more traditional rockers too. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Wishbone Ash, PFM, Montrose and Quo all had space in my stack of vinyl. My favourites were Free, Jethro Tull, Rush and the cream of the bunch, Budgie. Jethro Tull specialised in rural rock and made many great albums including Heavy Horses and Aqualung. But for me their best album and album cover was Stand Up pictured below. I've always loved woodcuts and still do and the cover's rustic style really appealed to me. Every song is brilliant but personally the stand out tune is the wistful ballad Look Into The Sun. Have a listen!

Inevitably as the Seventies faded I entered my twenties and slowly but surely I stopped buying albums. There are many that I remember seeing at friends' houses but never got round to buying. Two, whose cover art is really memorable and returns us back to the fantasy art genre this post started with, are pictured below: Red Queen to Gryphon Three by Gryphon and Olias of Sunhillow by Yes's Jon Anderson. Which are your favourite posters, album or book covers?

Our Moon

Yesterday I heard reference to the Moon as being equal to a continent of Earth. Surely its more than a continent? However, the analogy sort of works in terms of it's confused status, rather like that of the continent of Antarctica. I suppose words like colony, annex, oblast, canton or state may one day seem relevent but not yet. The word Moon perhaps says it all. What do you think?

Whilst you ponder this have a listen to Pink Moon by the late great Nick Drake, the fantastically talented brother of UFO's Gabrielle Drake.

SABOTAGE!

TV21 #176

SWORD

Courtesy of Toad 2011

Sad Tidings

I've just read online that Gerry Anderson has Alzheimers. Such sad news as I know how it can rob a person of their personality over time. Like many of you, Gerry created my childhood's rocket-filled 'future', which is the very reason why I blog here today. I'm sure you will join me in wishing him and his family well at this difficult time.

Moonbase Mail Bag

Reader M Garrett recently emailed me:

Greetings, while browsing through Flickr, I found a user named Astronit, he has some really nice images of Space-X and Project SWORD toys, was uncertain you might have seen such before.

Thanks for the great blog !

M
http://www.flickr.com/photos/astronit/sets/72157601365618642/

TARHEEL SPACE GLIDER AND MOON BUS FOR SALE

Hi Paul,

Thank you so much for your quick reply! If you’re interested in posting them for sale on your site, that would be sincerely appreciated! I’m attaching 8 photos of what we have. We were mainly interested in selling them as a set, but I suppose we could separate them if absolutely necessary. We’re located in Sturgis, Michigan, USA, and willing to ship internationally.

We’ve tried to do some research on them to place a value, but it seems these Sword toys are pretty rare! So, we have no set price, but would be happy to consider all offers.

They appear to be in good working condition, but I can’t say for sure. The Space Glider worked great – it roams around and bumps into things, then takes off on a different path. The Moon Bus makes a lot of noise, and it seemed to spin around in circles, but I’m not sure if that’s what it’s supposed to do. My husband said it looked like one of the gears under the cap on the wheel mechanism had a very small crack in it. All the lights on both models are in working order. It appears that all stickers are still there. No yellowing to the plastic, but they might both benefit from a thorough cleaning. We got them at an estate sale.

I’m glad I was able to get in contact with you on these. I’d love to see them go to a collector who will appreciate them – they are certainly unique.

If we don’t have any responses within about a week or so, I’ll probably go ahead and list them on eBay.

Thanks so much for your help! Please direct any interested collectors to this email address.

Maranda

Space Racer 1950's Style

Just got time to post this before the Clash of the Iberian Titans gets underway in Euro 2012, Spain V Portugal! The Space racer thread has made me think of the craft on the cover of this magazine cover I have in my photo archives, Science Fiction Plus: A Preview of the Future, Can't read the date but it looks like the 1950's.

A NEED FOR SPEED

In his piece on the possibly-JR series of X-toys, Ferryman briefly mentioned the origin of the X-50 Racer. Which I fear I must've missed at the time, so I was pretty excited at discovering it all for myself the other day.

In what turned out to be a nice example of serendipity, I spotted a (recent) metal decorative piece representing a world-speed record car at a friend's house. Who had no idea that it was based on something real (and ditto for the rather nice (but also recent) deco-style Mosquito bomber on his desk). So coming home, I had a google for him to find it was close to Campbell's 1928 Bluebird record car.

Looking for a good picture I stumbled upon a slideshow at the Time Magazine archives, and had a look at the rest out of curiosity. To my amazement I then saw a blurry but very familiar shape in another picture, captioned as being Craig Breedlove's first Spirit of America of 1963. I had known of a later Breedlove car on four wheels, but this three-wheeled vehicle was a dead ringer for the X-50 Racer minus its wings.

Always interested in some documentation, I ended up getting the October 1963 issue of Hot Rod magazine, which has a good feature on the vehicle and its success, as well as an advert by Goodyear (one of the sponsors with Shell) that yielded the pictures shown here.

What I learned was that Breedlove wasn't the first to try jet power in a record car, or on three wheels for that matter. But he was the first to try and get his record officially recognised in some way. "In some way", because the FIA (International Automobile Federation abbreviated in French) wouldn't recognise any of these vehicles - first for only having three wheels, but more importantly because the engine doesn't drive at least two of those wheels. Their motorcycling colleagues over at the FIM took a more imaginative view, and ratified the record while recognising the Spirit as a three-wheeled motorcycle and sidecar combination!

And so Breedlove's dream and hard work resulted in history being made. And as luck would have it, you can actually see him doing so on youtube (though without the original voice-over - that version has just been taken down due to copyright issues).

Article and research by Paul Vreede

From the Archive

Cool or what?

Moon Grab

Does anyone have any experience of these schemes where part of the Moon's surface can be bought for a fee? Sounds like a handful of dust, if you'll excuse the pun. Surely it's bogus. Or is it?

Search for Spock - ends here...

Fellow Star Trek fans: On April 23, 2010, Spock visited 'home', or rather his Earth home of Vulcan, Alberta (Canada) to dedicate this bronze bust of Spock during their annual 'Spock Days' festival. 

Vulcan is a small town on the Canadian prairie which I have been to many times (mostly stopping for fuel). The name of the town (early 1900's named after the Roman deity) was not lost on them and like so many small towns across North America searching for a tourist attraction (ie. Giant Easter Egg -seen in X-Files, World's Largest Ball of Yarn, etc.) they found the 'logical' solution.

I have often stopped to admire the enormous 'Enterprise' sculpture and now have even more reason to stop and see the bronze bust of Spock (the Vulcan salute hand print on the sculpture apparently is enlarged version of Leonard Nimoy's own).

http://www.vulcantourism.com/

Article courtesy of our man in Canada, CS.

So Near Yet So Far

The distances between stars are huge. The distance from the Sun to Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years which is equal to forty trillion kilometres. To walk this distance would take you about one billion years. Even our fastest space probes would take sixty thousand years to travel this distance.

 

Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, stated “At least 100 times the total energy output of the entire world would be required for the voyage to Alpha Centauri."

I read these two statements earlier tonight on Wiki and was flabergasted. Seeing the numbers invloved, of both the time and energy required, I can't see how we'll ever reach even the nearest Star system. Do you?

Phased by Phase 2

Continuing our discussion about SWORD's Phase 2, it pretty clear to us that it refers to the transition from the SOLO to TV21 strips. GACCH backs this up too. The question remains, however, as to which toys where Phase 2. It's easy for SpaceX, it says on the backing cards whether they're I or II.

For SWORD, only the Nuclear Ferry is clearly marked Phase 2 [thanks Wote] so why is there an Apollo Saturn Rocket pictured on the Phase 2 advert as we saw on the blog last week? To confuse matters even more, why does the Nuclear Ferry appear on a SWORD toys advert  in TV21, shown below [TV21 #145, 28/10/1967], before the Phase 2 toys advert posted last week dated 27/01/1968? Similarly intriguing is the reference to Zero X being a Phase 2 toy on GACCH [start of paragraph 2]. Perhaps we need a time line of SWORD adverts to help shed some light on things?

Eagle One to Base

Recent posts ive made have talked about Mattel toys and how in some ways they got some things wrong. Current toys are formulaic and uninspiring. The Battlestar Galactica action figure line was appalling and Hot Wheels cars are now a shadow of their former selves. After Major Matt Mason folded in about 1970, all seemed lost. But what amazes me is the absolutely fabulous toy they managed to sneak by in 1976, a full twelve months before Star Wars changed the toy industry forever.

The Mattel Eagle One playset is a giant of a toy, easily over two feet long. When Star Wars appeared with its range of action figures, the ships were largely deformed in shape and scale to accomodate the figures, resulting in fat X-Wings and stubby Falcons. Mattel didn't make this mistake and created smaller figures in a larger ship. As you can see in the catalogue example shown here with kind permission from Plaidstallions.com, the figures were streets ahead of their time.

The central 'pod' wasn't detachable, but featured two large clamshell doors, giving full access to the interior, which had seats, equipment bay and lots of room for cargo. To further expand playability, it has a winch fitted and a hatch in the base to allow astronauts to be lowered down on cable.

 Detailing overall is consistent with the actual vehicle, including small Moonbase Alpha stickers. The main body is sturdy plastic and the feet and other accessories are a softer, slightly flexible silver plastic. The cabin features an opening hatch in the roof, to allow the figures into the cockpit.

 The cockpit and engine array are detachable and able to join together to make a smaller probe ship, not unlike the pod from the Ultra Probe in the episode 'Dragons Domain'.

Special thanks go to Charles for the magnificent Eagle model and to Plaidstallions for use of the catalogue - click on the link to see more Space 1999 toys on their fabulous site!

KEEP YOUR STICKERS ON

I've always loved stickers. When I was a kid I covered my bike in cool metallic ones [but what where they?] and my books in a range of glossy, puffed-up and Letraset stickers. Is it a lost art form I wonder? Well, I've recently come across a few interesting stickers online for this blog, kicking off with some vintage THUNDERBIRDS sets from Japan pictured above. Some of the images seem to be taken from either the TV shows or TV21 - can anyone tell? I particularly like the Zero-X, which is again of a very particular style. Is it a TV or comic version? [image coutesy of Yahoo Japan].

As I've said many times one of my favourite SWORD box art covers is Rollout by Robert McCall on the lid of the Cape Kennedy Set. So I was chuffed when I came across these old Kennedy Space Centre stickers online and especially the top right graphic of a moonlit Saturn V leaving the Vehicle Assembly Biulding one dark night. The inclusion of a boat on water is another attractive and unusual feature [is that realistic?] [picture courtesy of Ebay USA].

Here's the C21 boxart compared to the above Saturn V - VAB sticker placed side by side for easier viewing.

Yet another sticker depicting the Saturn V and the VAB is this beautiful picture below. The sun is shining, the sky's blue and the gulls are flying. It's such a gorgeous image I reckon it would have been a fine replacement for McCall's Rollout on the C21 box. The sticker appears via Flickr with kind permission from Jason Liebig. Jason has a cool photostream of amazing vintage packaging and was an X-Men artist over at Marvel no less. FOOM!

This final sticker has appeared before on the blog via Wotan. Made by Letraset it features a whole fleet of NASA vehicles. The two which really caught my eye are the moon car in the botton right corner, which, with its lampshade wheels is clearly related to the SpaceX toy Moon Buggy. Less obvious is the moon bus-type vehicle just above it. It appears to have bendix wheels like the SpaceX MEV2. Is it a real NASA concept I wonder?

So SWORDIES, anymore stickers that you'd like to share with us would be most welcome. Thanks.

Normal Service Interrupted

Normal blogging is interrupted tonight as I have recieved an excellent TV signal up here on Moonbase, which means I can watch the Euro 2012 footbal [soccer] match between England and Italy without static from those pesky Mysterons. We dare to dream. C'mon England!

SWORD ILLUSTRATIONS NEW TO THE BLOG

TV21 had a different SWORD illustration every week during it's run.

Many of them are new to me, new to the blog and maybe new to you!

Watch this Space!

TV21 SWORD TEXT STORIES COMING!

Watch this Space!

Comics Everywhere!

What, with the Avengers and Spidy at the cinema again, comic Super Heroes and Villains are everywhere nowadays, but when I was a wee Superboy you had to go to the newsagents for a dose of your favourite characters. Fortunately I had brothers [still have!] who read comics too, so the house was full of 'em. To be honest it was some of the less obvious US titles, which I loved to lie down with on the floor and read [why did we do that and not get on the settee?].

I particularly loved 'Sad Sack', about a dopey soldier in the army. I also loved 'Casper the Friendly Ghost' as well as 'Archie'. British comics I liked where anything with monsters in like Grimly Fiendish, but I forget the title. 'Fantastic' was a British marvel issue and often came with free gifts like an elastic band pistol. I remember there was always a cool poster on the back of 'Namor' or 'Thor' or some other fabulous person.

The distinction between a comic and a magazine is a fine one, but 'bigger' comics were in the house to be enjoyed too: the brilliant Creepy and Eerie by Warren, Psycho and Nightmare by Skywald [remember their Horror Mood!] and some truly gruesome- covered ones called Terror or Witches Tales [my Dad once threw some of these out all because of the covers!]. For light relief I read 'MAD', courtesy of my brothers too. I loved to fold the back cover, as shown by the arrows on it, to make a new crazy picture!

Later fare lying around the house got cerebral and manly and were definitely magazines: OMNI, Inside King Fu, Easy Riders [big shiny motorbikes], Disc and Sounds [music papers] and with access restricted to only big brothers [they thought!], Men Only and Mayfair.

And so, as our thoughts turned from Lady Penelope and Wonder Woman to the girls in the Sixth Form, as quick as a slick of grease through the hair, the comics, sadly, were well and truly gone!

What were your experiences with comics?

PLASTIC FANTASTIC: MIKE B'S CENTURY 21 ZERO X

Hi Woodsy,

Been rummaging through some old photos I took of the Zero X Century 21 toy on the Glenn Field diorama and thought you and the readers might like to see them.

Cheers
Mike B.

Un Phased

Further to Woodstocks poser as to where Phase 2 fitted into the SWORD scheme of things, heres the badge from the Nuclear Ferry box, possibly the flagship of a second round of models, which probably included the infamous Moonbase, that never saw production. But there again, we never thought the Ferry existed...

or maybe it was much more simple than that ....

and as always, my eternal thanks to Nuclear Terry for finding the beast in the first place!