The white Nuclear Ferry seen at the start of the ITN film blogged recently is fascinating and its totally taxing the brains of SWORDnuts like Arto and me.
Why white when the handful of toys we know of in private collections are all blue?
A pre-production sample? A prototype?
White does make a lot of sense though! Virtually every Ferry ever illustrated - see below - appear to be white [except the SpaceX miniature]. The original Bob McCall illustrations in LIFE magazine and Look and Learn Comic are all white!
Most importantly, the original 1963 painting by Bob McCall, Earth to Moon Shuttle, shows a white Nuclear Ferry, where it hangs in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art - look here.
Similarly, the box art and Official Manual released with the 1967 Nuclear Ferry toy by Century 21 Toys both show a white Ferry.
So why the last minute change to a blue toy?
Was it to tie in with the blue Zero-X and the blue Dyna-Soar?
Was there excess blue plastic from the above that needed using?
What do you think?
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PS. Bill made this uber-cool white Nuclear Ferry model, which we blogged in 2008!
I believe you are on the right track there Woodsy. Either they wanted to go along with the same colour scheme or simply had too much excess SWORD blue in store. Either way, a good choice methinks.
ReplyDeleteYep, I think the original idea may have been to mirror the box art,but it probably came down to escalating production costs. Zero X cant have been cheap to produce, due to its complexity and the only other pure white toy is the Saturn, which ended up part blue too! From an aesthetic perspective id love to have seen a white ferry which mirrored the McCall painting, but the blue is a good colour, especially with red accents. its doubtful the white prototype survived though.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised its a not a registered design like the Zero X but then again the Ferry wasn't designed by anyone at Century 21/ TV21 was it. If it had been a patented toy I bet the photographs would have been of the white ferry. Did it get registered for Tri-ang SpaceX I wonder?
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