Tuesday, 24 July 2012

ALIEN ATTACK!

Playsets have always been a staple of toy marketing. All your favourites bundled together in a cool box. Swordies like me dream of the re-emergence of the Project SWORD Moonbase playset. In the meantime there are lots of fine space sets to keep us amused. Of particular interest to SpaceXers is this ALIEN ATTACK playset by those Seventies toymeisters HG TOYS, who also gave us the legendary Godzilla Playset and Alien Target Sets.


ALIEN ATTACK is a hotch-potch of Buck Rogers and other stuff packaged up to doubtless cash-in on the success of Star Wars. The SpaceX interest comes in the form of the silver/grey spaceship centre-right in the top picture, which is a simple clone of Tri-ang's SpaceX Pleasure Cruiser pictured on its card below. Looking at the HG box art I see that there's also a gold coloured cruiser too. It shows two cruisers. Were there two of them in a set? I keep looking out on feebay for a loose one as the shipping for a whole set is astronomical from the States to the UK.
The delta design is a popular one for space toys and here's another cruiser-like miniature from Japan. Probably a Glico or Morinaga candy premium.

Pictures: Ebay and Noppin

4 comments:

  1. Woodsy, this is a real neat set and would look good co-mingles with any number of space toys. I know how you feel about overseas postage but I've learned that if I want something (AND have the funds) then I just have to suck it up and go for it! Too often, the only source for our toys lay outside our borders.

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  2. Amazing to see this again... my dad bought me this playset when I was little... I can't remember how many of which spaceship it came with, but although the gold and silver spaceships were part of the set, mine definitely did not come with the maroon coloured spacecraft in the first picture. They look like Buck Rogers "Marauder" ships. I would heve remembered those. They were not depicted on the package. PS I still have the blue and red robots. Looking at them today, they are knockoffs of venerable mangaka Go Nagai's "Mazinger" and "Groizer".

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    1. Hi OPMT, welcome aboard. There were other versions of this HG set. Have a look here at Space Wars http://www.plaidstallions.com/hgtoys/playset.html

      Must have been a great set to get. Not sure if it was available here in the UK.

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  3. My sons played this set to pieces. Very cool silver soft plastic figures, tho a bit small. But, hey! Any scale is good in space!

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