THUNDERBIRDS TRANSCONTINENTAL SPANISH TOY BUS FOR SALE

I don't usually flag up auctions on my blog but so many people have asked over the years about this particular toy I thought I would this time.

This is the Spanish toy version of the Transcontinental Bus, which appeared in Thunderbirds.

This Spanish variant is by Jyesa.

You can go directly to it here, a Buy It Now.

[ I am in no way connected to this sale nor is this blog ]

http://www.todocoleccion.net/juguetes-antiguos-jyesa/j-c-muy-raro-autobus-diseno-panoramico-jyesa-made-in-spain-anos-50-finales~x61505007

Best Wishes from Paul Vreede

Moonbase's latest recruit

As of 8am this morning I am a proud Grandfather!

Junior was in a rush to get Earthside. He's 9 weeks early!

He came after the starriest night I've seen in years.

I can't wait to go to a toy shop together and get him whatever he wants!

the green slime rifle and the starcruiser mission toy kit

Whilst browsing for GiFs I saw this one from the movie Green Slime, the movie which included a spaceship which likely inspired the toy SpaceX LT10. When I saw the space gun I thought - I've seen that before! Its clunky shape reminded me of a toy rifle.

This is it, the rifle shown below in this boxed Gerry Anderson's Starcruiser Mission Kit by Thomas Salter Toys. Now I don't have this toy so I can't be certain of its size. Its sort of similar but not quite the same. 

Can anyone do a comparison of the movie rifle and the toy itself if you own one?

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There's a similar toy water pistol by, the Tommy Gun, by Maks. It was used in the film Barbarella! See the amazing Alphadrome for more information.

our thoughts are with hoboken

A train has crashed in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. I know we have readers in New Jersey. I so hope everyone is OK and all our thoughts are with all those caught up in this tragic rail disaster.

flamin' blue jeans

Just doodling whilst waiting for news.

Your jet packs welcomed.

jet packs to work?

The daily drive to works beckons. I wonder when the car will be replaced by some new transportation? Is the car here forever?

Will we ever get jet packs like they had in Thunderbirds?

What do you think?

the discarded decade: nineteen eighties plastic toys lurked beneath the car boot stalls in crumpled boxes

I used to love going to car boot sales. I went every Sunday morning for years during the 1990's in particular. It was the high point of the week. I'm not sure why I stopped.

Anyway, some of the small nuggets of fun I often found for some reason have formed links in my aging brain. They're not linked really but I suppose they tell a basic story of space toy design in the Nineteen Eighties, toys that became the unwanted detritus tossed beneath boot sale stalls in the Nineties.

First up I regularly found the cheeky little T-Bob from M.A.S.K. from Kenner's 1986 range.

The little fella was clearly inspired by Star Wars' R2D2 and his stiff little fingers reminded me of my dear old Minibot from the Sixties like this one.

I often confused the black wheels of T-Bob with another wheeled Star Wars vehicle at Car Boots, the MTV 7 Mini Rig like this one also by Kenner from 1981.

Another larger version of R2D2, at least in my eyes, regularly nestling at the bottom of junk boxes were the Roboforce robots by Ideal from 1984. You know the ones, they had a large rubber suction cup base and concertina arms like the one shown. I imagine that these form the basis of some collections nowadays eh?

Even more soft rubbery plastic was deployed to create another resident of the discarded piles beneath the stalls, the Trendmasters 1992 Space Trooper seen below. I think it reflects the emergence of gaming in toy design and the influence of Warhammer. But are they collectable at all?

My final installment in this disparate tale is a toy which I often wish I'd bought but for some reason didn't. It had everything I like - size, monstrous looks, alien style - and came out in the 1990's when I used to go up town toy hunting. There were stacks of these boxed critters in a discount toy shop and I looked, handled and just walked on by. I never saw the toy again. They must be collectable now?

I give you the awesome Alien Space Hunter from Trendmasters 1993.

What did you regularly find at sales and markets readers?

spanish flights

I noticed these Spanish SpaceX clones on a Spanish auction site earlier this year. 

There's the Hawk and the Nuclear Freighter from the Aviones Cosmicos line by Bullycan.

BIRTHDAY TOY COMP: WE HAVE A WINNER!

The Birthday toy competition has been won after I received a full and completely correct set of ten answers by a reader.

More details to follow including the list of correct answers!

Thanks to everyone who took part.

echoes of an angel interceptor

Noticed this in Japanese cyberspace, a carded rocket launcher toy set with two jets.

The card art looks as if its inspired by Ultraman but the light brown one looks like a sort of Angel Interceptor from Captain Scarlet.

What do you think?

amidst the boats and carts sat a blue cricket

I stumbled across this bundle of joy online. Its an old Ebay photo of a long-since ended auction.

What first caught my eye was the Apollo Moon Exploring red and white rocket among the tractors and trains, together with what looks like the red space glider from the same series by Imperial.

But then I noticed the BLUE Cricket P-1 [minus its canon] to the left. What the? 

Aren't they usually purple?

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Postscript:

Found this close up of the very same cricket! It does look blue!

and by way of elimination, its not the SpaceX cricket knockoff from The Futuristic Space Vehicle series, pictured below, which is clearly metallic green paint.

None of these either!

or any of the other ones we've featured here over the years as seen in the post Cricket Team.

dyna soar delivers...

a bit of fun using Paint on this dark damp night!

anyone else remember raving bonkers robots?

RIP ARNOLD PALMER: HE GAVE US TOY GOLF TOO

Golf legend Arnold Palmer sadly passed away today at the grand old age of 87. An icon of the game of golf his influence was even felt on my childhood in remotest Lancashire during the Sixties, when one Christmas I received a huge golf toy.

It wasn't any old thing either. It was the Arnold Palmer Pro Shot golf set by Marx. An amazing toy, it has a miniature Arnold at the end of a golf club contraption. By turning the handle you could get mini Arnold to play shots for you! It was a stroke of genius.

You can get an idea of what it was like to use on this You Tube clip.

Did you have this set readers?

Arnold Palmer RIP.

i wanna be ejected: the space 1999 para toy by helm toys

I do love coming across toys new to me.

This is just such a one. Now I'm not a Space 1999 fan. Alas, the TV series completely passed me by. But I'm aware of many of the toys - but this one is definitely new to me:

the Space 1999 Eagle Para Toy by Helm Toys of the USA released in 1976!

This is an old photo from an Ebay auction. 

I just love those garish bright colours. At first I couldn't fathom what it did but on googling further I found a carded example on the fabulous Catacombs Space 1999 site here.

Its a parachute toy and Commander Koenig himself gets ejected into sky, whereupon he floats down to the ground on his red and white plastic chute.

How neat is that!

Anyone got one of these beauties?

The Fastest Guy Alive

Well it took a while to find it, but here's my response to The Stars for a Shilling - me at Southport fair in the mid sixties, grudgingly riding a 'super-thunder-sting-car' on a carousel time ride with hydraulic arms. Having been terrified by the Caterpillar ride some years earlier, when a racing coaster unexpectedly folded over a green canvas cover across the cars to make a caterpillar shape, leaving me howling in terror in the dark, I was never keen on rides after that.

Still, this was a nice green Nuclear Freighter shaped ship, so I gritted my teeth and thoughtof Spacex!

thunderbirds tv21 monster okuropachi toy surfaces from the depths!

Cancelled before it was released for sale, this handsome plastic devil which featured on the covers of TV21 and known in Japan as the Okuropachi or Okloparchi has surfaced on the Japanese online site Mandarake.

I've blogged this toy before complete with its header and baggy in a post in 2014 and Scoop has covered the TV21 appearances too in his post in 2015.

Thanks to Rev. Orsonzilla for the Mandarake link.

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The Okuropachi also graces this masthead of a Facebook page too!

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For some reason it's mouth always reminded me of the toothy Morlocks in George Pal's brilliant Time Machine movie.

AURORA 'SPINDRIFT' RESTORATION

Spurred on by the re-showing of Land of the Giants on TV , I thought I'd have a go at restoring my old Aurora 'Spindrift' kit, which I've had since the early seventies. 

I got it second hand from a friend at school who'd painted it bright yellow for some reason. 

I set to work hand painting it a deep red. And that's how it's stayed for the past forty odd years, until now.

This week I carefully took it all apart and and left it overnight in a 50/50 solution of 'Dettol' antiseptic disinfectent. This works fine with plastic and doesn't make it brittle.This broke down most of the old paint, Leaving it for a further 24 hours in the solution did the trick.

 The only paint left on it now is mixed with the original plastic cement, which will need to be removed by scraping and sanding.

There's still a lot of fiddly work to do, trying to make the parts fit back together with all the old glue needing to be removed. The base is in pretty bad shape as it has an indentation and crack caused by an excessive amount of glue when it was originally put together, and as well as that both the two  top sections have large cracks in the plastic.

Even so, I'm looking forward to completing the project. I'm obviously not expecting the restoration to produce something mint, but if I can cheer it up and make it reasonably decent I'll be happy. 

pesto from goodfeathers: the original angry bird!

Way back in 1990 Martin Scorsese directed his searing cinematic canvas of American mafiosi, Goodfellas. 

It became one of the definitive mobster movies and contained one of the most electrically charged scenes of psychopathic conversation ever put on film, the Joe Pesci tirade known universally as 'Funny How?'.

So it always amazed me that from this violent cauldren of adult vice there came one of the funniest kids' cartoons I ever saw, the Goodfellas parody Goodfeathers.

Part of the Animaniacs brand, Goodfeathers aired in 1993 and starred Squit, Bobby and the the Joe Pesci clone Pesto. 

Here's a fabulous You Tube medley I found showing scenes involving Pesto's incredibly short fuse delivered in that unmistakable Pesci Funny How style. 

Funny how? hilarious!

That's it!

Do you like Goodfeathers readers?

VULCAN

The Vulcan's final flying display at Southport Air Show. last year.

 

MYSTERY BEARDED CARTOON CHARACTER

I recently had to watch Macbeth The Animated Tale at work.

This is he, the dark tormented Macbeth.

His swarthy bearded looks reminded me of another villain in an old cartoon I saw as a kid. But who?

Maybe someone in the brilliant Rocket Robin Hood?  Can't find anyone like it.

Maybe Theyer David in the film Journey to the Centre of the Earth? 

I don't think so.

The character is in an old cartoon I'm sure but I'm at a loss as to which.

Anyone help?

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Postscript:

Mr. Iguana was right. I WAS thinking of Prince John from Rocket Robin Hood after all!

THE GIANTS HAVE LANDED

I'm sure I'm not alone in enjoying the long awaited repeats of Irwin Allen's  LAND OF THE GIANTS TV series which started this week in the UK on The Horror Channel. I believe MeTV has already started re-showing them in the States,

My first encounter with Land of the Giants was in the pages of JOE 90 TOP SECRET comic in 1969, prior to it's screening on British TV.

One notable aspect of the comic strip, drawn by Gerry Haylock, was the script never named the little people's Spindrift spacecraft until well into the comic's run when it then began to refer to it  as The Spendthrift!

This error would continue when the strip moved to TV21 in 1970.

I feel a few 'Giant' blogging's might be in the pipeline.

TO THE STARS FOR A SHILLING: FUNFAIR SPACE RIDES

There's an evening fairground in town and it got me thinking about how I was always drawn to the rockets and spaceships when I was a kid. If there was a supercar or a Thunderbird 1 on a carousel then I'd be in it!

Beyond the funfairs there were always coin-operated rockets to be boarded allover the place: in town, at petrol stations, outside shops and of course Blackpool Pleasure Beach. I recall there were always some along the coast's piers as well. They were everywhere! 


Wondering if there are any space rocket rides or coin-operated spaceships at fairs or town centres anymore I thought I'd ask you readers if you have any nearby or whether you enjoyed getting in or on them as a kid too?

WESTLAND SCOUT

A couple of shots of the Westland Scout Army helicopter. I have fond memories of making model  Airfix kits of this during the sixties. It was 1/72 scale and quite small. I reckon there was more glue than plastic when I'd finished.

TUDOR ROSE SPACE CLIPPER

Hi Woodsy

I've attached some pictures of my Tudor Rose Space Clipper. The box was covered in tape when I got it. I removed 95% of it.

The Kleeware version is moulded in two tone plastic and has small wheels with no friction drive.

I've also attached pic of a Hong Kong knock off Space Cruiser.

And one of a Tudor Rose Friction X-400 that had the wings smashed off and bad fin damage when I acquired it. I had to give it a paint job to cover up the repairs.

Ferryman