CHRISTMAS DISCOVERY: NEW JAPANESE PROJECT SWORD ADVERTS INCLUDING THE NUCLEAR FERRY

Finding new SWORD pictures usually happens when you're looking for something else. Following up a Japanese Scout 2 name translation kindly given to me by Salim I chanced upon this. Its a SWORD page on an amazing Japanese website Hokutoichiro. Each year of Thunderbirds toys are covered in exhaustive detail. They may be a scanned pages from a book, I don't know. Its a super site and.....

Its certainly the first set of adverts of SWORD toys in Japanese I've EVER seen and a first for the blog for sure. The three adverts, two pages at the top and one at the bottom, are clearly advertising the toys to a Japanese marketin what was probably a kids comic like Shoenen King or something like that. The Official Manual, Annual and Zero X box shown are the UK releases but there are three items which are unusual on the Japanese adverts, one of which is truly amazing.

First are the small drawings of SWORD vehicles around the edges of the top adverts, which are really neat, Second is the mysterious vehicle in the centre of the bottom ad - is it a Moon Ranger at an odd angle? But most startling of all is this:

This is clearly a picture of the actual toy Nuclear Ferry, dated 1968 at the top of the page. As far as I know no actual photograph of the toy appeared in any UK or European adverts so this is a real turn-up for the book. It probably goes some way to explain why many of the known Ferries have turned up in Asia. They were available! Some were at least!

There'll be more on Nuclear Ferries this Christmas from Arto and myself, but in the meantime if you want to explore this Japanese site where the page comes from have a look here. It has loads of links at the bottom to more pages for each year of Thunderbirds toys so make sure you scroll down on the Japanese site. There's tons to look through. Let me know if you find any more SWORD! Ta! Anyone know if they are scans from a book?