WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT

You can never keep a good idea down. This maxim is best illustrated by the Hong Kong toy companies, especially in the sixties, when companies were less inclined to pursue small copyright infringements. A favourite example of mine is a small rocket launcher, which I first came across around '66/67 when I got some Lone Star Modern Army vehicles. These hard wearing diecast trailers had a variety of weapons mounted on the back, but the one I always played with was the rocket launcher, which fired a metal rocket, some considerable distance, bowling over countless battalions of plastic soldiers.

Shortly after, during my army phase, I found the same rocket launcher on the back of a jeep, by SL toys.

A little later, while on holiday in Wales, it appeared again on the back of a small series of space tractors, made by LP.

After this, it popped up on the back of a Moon Bus, which I saw in a shop window, but was never able to own until very recently, when I was given the model by the unstintingly generous Arto.

At around the same time, Delamare, a US company produced a boxed space toy which included a scaled down version of a Remco toy.

 I do love the way they saw fit to point out on the front of the box 'THIS IS A TOY' which whoever had received the set that xmas, has scribbled out!

Between the two launchers on the right is a crane, which is again lifted from the Remco set, which also appears on the back of an LP Space Tractor.

But the latest addition to my collection is he simplest of all. A typical 'dime store' toy of the kind I would have bought with my pocket money, back in the day.

This lovely little toys is very fragile and had suffered a knock in its long wait to be enjoyed, which took a little bit of repairing on the base. But the design is every bit identical to the Lone Star version, even down to the tension on the spring, which is so strong I haven't dared to test it for fear of losing the missile, or worse still my eye!