Now you're in the Spacex Age

 

The summer of 1970 saw this beautifully illustrated advert plus variations in black & white appear in Striker, a magazine devoted to football and thus a good place to advertise to boy readers or their dads.

I obtained this page online from a cut-up merchant, and once I had it in my hands I wondered if there might be a second page. Reason was that the text mentions "over 30 action models" whereas the illustration only shows 16 of the original Spacex Stage 1 range of 18 toys, so to make up the numbers the text must have referred to the later Pippin-produced series as well.

However, our good friend Toad was most kind to look through the magazine at the British Library to find issues and dates, and confirmed this single page was all there was to it.

This now makes me wonder whether the illustration may not have been recycled from previous adverts introducing the original Stage 1 series. We so far haven't found these yet, but since we know the Moon Base was amongst the last toys to be available (shown as it is on card backs with the original Lockheed illustration) this could very well be possible since it isn't included here.

What is also interesting is the appeal to readers (shown in detail below) to write in with suggestions for a Spacex Club to be formed. I believe this never actually happened (there's no evidence to prove it did, and the next series of comic adverts two months later doesn't mention it any more either) but it's certainly a nice idea, and a good way of involving the target audience.

As a final note, I have no idea what that mysterious letter A next to the helicopter is doing there. It doesn't appear in any of the other ads.

And as an anniversary prezzy, here's a link to a better-quality pdf version of this advert, to print out yourself (this link should remain valid throughout this bloggiversary week - any latecomers can give me a shout afterwards to send it again here :)

Four cheers for the blog and hearty congratulations to Woods n Wote!

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Paul Vreede

P.S - Many thanks for discovering this beautiful piece Mr V - I suspect it may be the work of Mike Noble - can anyone confirm ? Wotan