harrogate new years eve 2016

Today me and Missus Moonbase had a classic winter's day drive to the old spa town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire. Its only about an hour away from us.

Having looked in on our sweet new baby Grandson and dropped our Daughter's doggy off at her house we were free to go mad.

Besides the grand spa architecture and quaint streets, what we like about Harrogate are all the charity shops! There are loads, which is odd as its such a well-to-do town. 

Oxfam is even divided into a book shop and a music store in two separate locations and it was in the bookshop that I made my one charity shop purchase of the day, which I was thrilled about.

I have blogged before about the horror books I still have from childhood and my favourite was always Ian Allen Film Album 2: Horror, so I was bowled over to see a copy in Oxfam's shop window.

My older Brother Ste got me my original copy Christmas 1972. I was 12.

In the window it was with some rare World of Horror magazines from the 1970's. I planned to look these up in my horror magazine guides.

I went inside the shop and thumbed through the lot. The book and the magazines were £7.99 each, which being an adopted Yorkshireman, I thought was a bit steep so we went for something to eat.

Inevitably that book wouldn't leave me alone as I ate my spaghetti. I still have my original copy bit its falling apart. This new copy was almost mint. By the time we'd paid the restaurant bill [now that was steep!] I'd decided to go back and get that book! 

The icing on the cake was that I'd read the price wrong. The shop assistant said it was just £2.99! A Yorkshire Bargain!

And so a lovely minty copy of Ian Allen's Horror will now sit next to my own battered childhood version, which will drop to bits one day soon!

Harrogate also boasts comic shops, a small vintage toy store and a huge retro furniture and objects shop. Among the vast array of pleasing items I clapped my eyes on were:

Vac Man, the arch enemy of Stretch Armstrong, a completely new Stretch toy to me; 

a ROM comic, which I immediately realised must have been the origin of the old ROM toy figure I know of 

and a load of loose mini Boglins, which our daughter used to love as a kid in the Eighties.

The final vintage experience of the trip was driving home through the old village of Follifoot near Harewood House. 

When I was a kid in the Seventies I used to watch Follyfoot Farm on UK TV and Missus Moonbase watched it on the Continent too! We both loved it and it was one of a number of horse-based kids' TV shows from around the world like Black Beauty, White Horses and Champion The Wonder Horse.

Follyfoot Farm was filmed near the village of Follifoot and it brought back memories of those brilliant afternoon television programmes for kids in the early Seventies.

Follyfoot always reminds me of a mint boxed Aurora model kit I found at a car boot sale about 20 years ago. It was called Black Fury, King of the Wild Horses, which always made me think of Black Beauty.

In turn that kit always makes me think of another Aurora kit, Confederate Raider.

Both were featured in one of the first vintage toy catalogues I got through the post from a guy called Andy Foley who ran the brilliant mail order company TV Toy Zone.

The Black Fury kit ended up on the models section of my toy fair stall in the late 90's, along with the Wolfman and the Airfix Monkeemobile!

Its funny what you think of driving to Harrogate! Have you got a favourite town for charity shops readers?

random vintage toys from 2016 cyberspace

Telsada Dolphin Cruiser [far left] the same as the T in a Circle one.

Mego Roto-Lite Copter more or less the same design as my Tarheel version

Silverhawks [comic characters] pistol styled on the Steve Zodiac Fireball XL5 water gun.

Japanese shop display including what appears to be a spare Johnny Seven green armour piercing missile

Japanese Glico toys featuring a blue Nuclear ferry front passenger jet lookalike [bottom left]

Fairylite Road Construction Set with a small yellow land rover which looks like the JR21 land rover from the side. I used to love sets like this as a kid, mostly Blue Box I think.

A New Tears Eve look back, do you like any of these toys readers?

MATTEL EAGLE 1

 The Mattel Eagle 1 has got to be my favourite Space 1999 toy

It's got everything an ageing 1999 fan could want.

Action figures

Ray guns

A nicely detailed passenger module, not like it is on screen but still great fun.

Commander Koenig

Doctor Russell

Professor Bergman

 A winch and gun rack

And it's BIG!

FUJIMI TIME TUNNEL KIT

The Time Tunnel, unlike Irwin Allen’s other TV series had no vehicle to exploit as a kit. The only regular piece of futuristic technology seen on screen was the Time Tunnel itself.  Exciting dioramas from several American kit companies showing scenes from Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and Star Trek for example were produced but no Time Tunnel diorama.

However, a little known model kit was produced by Fugimi  Mokei Co. in 1967, which would have been hard to get hold of at the time.

While it’s still pretty difficult to find, at least these days, there’s plenty of Irwin Allen web sites, which show the kit and give lots of information about it.

From what I can gather reading about the kit it was a bit of a disappointment, with very little in the way of diorama, and rather cheap.

The tunnel itself was just a just an elliptical tube with black paper decals to create the receding black and white strips seen in the show.

It was more or less a slide projector, with a film strip showing scenes fed into the back which is illuminated from behind.

Lunar Models did do a limited run of the kit using resin rather than plastic.The Lunar Models kit is sadly now no longer available

morley toy fair new years eve 1990

Back at the start of my collecting bug I used to visit a local toy fair on New Years Eve.

It was the Morley Toy Fair near Leeds in Northern England and it would be the early 1990's. I went along there for a good few years.

My first trip, with Missus Moonbase and our six year old and some friends and their kids, was very memorable.

I made the biggest single purchase on collectables to date at the time. Sixty pounds! Wow! Well it was a lot of dosh to me in 1990. We had just moved house but I'd saved up a few quid for the fair having got excited after reading my first issues of Model and Collectors Mart magazine the preceding few months. 

It was in Model and Collectors Mart where I found out about Morley Toy Fair and in indeed all other fairs for years to come. No internet in those days!

So what did I spend my hard earned £60 on I hear you ask. Well, it wasn't Project SWORD believe it or not, it was Major Matt Mason!

When I say Major Matt Mason I mean a HUGE cardboard box full of loose toys.! It was hiding in the shadows under the table and not really like anything else on the stall, which was mostly mint boxed JR21 and all outside my price range.

There were figures, helmets, space tracs, Gama ray guard, crawler, bubble, tent, Callisto figure and tons more in that box!

Best of all though was the space station! I'd adored it as a kid. Being reunited was quite emotional especially when I built it up for the first time in 22 years. I couldn't believe it when the lamp at the top actually worked! It was Christmas 1969 all over again and I was nine years old once more!

The box of stuff was a fantastic purchase and one of the most exciting personally I ever made. It was particularly exciting as I was just starting out as a collector and only just working out that examples of all the toys I had in the Sixties were probably still around at toy fairs like these! I was hooked!

I've been trying to recall who I bought the Matt Mason Mason box off. I remember that the chap was a big friendly fella and he specialised in mint boxed JR21 Thunderbirds toys and had loads of them on his stall. He told me that he'd recently bought the dead stock from an old toy shop in Micklegate in York. 

I think he lived in North Yorkshire and I remember that he said that he regularly traveled north to stand at toy fairs in Scotland as well.  He may have been called Peter but I forget. In 2009 Vectis sold off the Peter J Leonard collection and it may have been him but I can't be sure anymore.

That box of Matt Mason goodies stayed under the Christmas tree that year until we took all the decorations down on the 6th January. In those days our daughter was only six so we had a real tree so the needles had begun to fall. 

I remember when I retrieved the box as the tree was coming down it was full of fir tree needles, which took ages to get out of some of the toys! Still it felt festive for ages as I winnowed them out over the coming weeks.

Alas, none of those Matt Mason goodies are in my possession anymore. We've moved house again and I too got the toy fair selling bug later on and the lot went on my own vintage toy stand. They were fun to sell to fellow collectors but nothing compared to the day I found them 27 years ago on that cold New Years Eve back in 1990!

Do you have any toy fair or New Years Eve memories readers?

fading ancestors peer .....

at the silver Xmas tree on our family photo shelf for another passing year.

Thunderbird Xmas

Following our chat on the cast about toys at Xmas, its appropriate to blog one of my gifts this year, the fantastic Thunderbird 5. As part of a triple pack including Thunderbird S and Fab 1 (or whatever its referred to now), it completes my set of new Thunderbirds. I cant say im a huge fan of the sound FX, which although accurate, are just annoying, but the moulding is good - the roller is pretty basic by comparison.

Scoop has posted about the model previously, so theres no need to go into detail about its features, but suffice to say, its a cracker!

OUR RADIO SHOW TONIGHT

DECEMBER'S

OPERATION

SWORDCAST

TWENTY MINUTES OF TOYS, NOSTALGIA AND TALL TALES

ON

THE RADIO

NOW!

Celtica Radio

were on the radio tonight!

New SWORDcast on Celtica Radio

Tonight

6PM

UK Time

Toy chatter, vintage banter, Mystery action!

Its all there!

Will you be?

*

Link to be posted asap.

FOCUS ON THE HEROCLIX BATMOBILE

My good friend and fellow Batman fan, Will Schwartz was kind enough to send me this Batgift for Christmas this year.

As you can see it's a super looking model of the sixties Batmobile, similar in size to the Corgi or Eaglemoss versions.

Although it's a great looking display item, its primary function is to be used as part of a game, using other characters in the range.

The display stand has a dials at either end showing what powers can be used, depending what character cards you've got, and what you get on the throw of a dice!?

Actually, I'm not really one for board games to be honest, so I'll leave that side of things to those who are.

The model itself is static, with the wheels moulded into the base. It does afford a fair amount of detail though, considering it's just a playing piece.  

And it does look good on my display shelf.

project sword and spacex christmas presents we dream of.....

boxed gift sets:

BRUT Scout 2 and BRAUN Cricket 1

Moon Explorer Day Cream, Task Force Night Cream, BRUT Radar Aftershave and Astronaut Aerosol

SpaceX Moonbase Crackers

Which prezzies do you dream of?

FOCUS ON THE TIME TUNNEL

Continuing my look at Irwin Allen’s TV series from the sixties, I’ve been re-visiting The Time Tunnel which I haven’t seen for quite some time.

The Time Tunnel is Irwin Allen’s third television series following on from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space. It comprised of 30 episodes, and was produced between 1966 and 67. It stars James Darren as Dr Tony Newman and James Colbert as Dr Doug Phillips.

Tony and Doug are directors of a secret government time travel experiment, code named Project Tic-Toc, which is housed beneath a vast underground complex, 800 floors deep, and situated in Arizona. Their fellow director is Lt General  Heywood Kirk ( played by Whit Bissell), who is assisted by electronics expert, Dr Raymond Swain (played by John Zaremba) and electro-biologist , Dr Ann MacGregor (played by Lee Meriwether).

At the heart of Project Tic-Toc is The Time Tunnel, a huge receding elliptical tube which creates a pathway to anywhere in time, although, it does seem to be quite a temperamental device. (As seen in all of Irwin Allen’s TV series, the futuristic hardware which is used is prone to spectacularly shorting out at inopportune times during the action. It would appear that the submarine Seaview, the space ships, Jupiter 2 and Spindrift and the Time Tunnel don’t appear to use fuses)

 At the point the audience catches up with Time Tunnel, Project Tic-Toc has been in development for ten years, and has cost $7.5 billion dollars. The opening episode, ‘Rendezvous with Yesterday’, which is set in the future year of 1968, shows the giant complex with  800 floors deep, joined by walkways and staffed by 36.000 employees. The design of  some of these miniatures are direct homages’ to the underground Krel machines seen in the 1956 film ‘Forbidden Planet’.

The Time Tunnel idea itself was inspired by the 1964 film, ‘The Time Travelers’, in which two scientists, their female assistant, and an electrician are transported though a 3-dimensional time portal over a hundred years into an intriguing but ultimately bleak future.

Tony and Doug, spend most, although not all of their adventures in the past, beginning with their first in which they both end up on the ill-fated Titanic ocean liner, shortly before the Time Tunnel transports them into the future and the hold of a spacecraft about to take off to Mars.(This was the ‘teaser’ for the following week’s episode, however the ‘teaser’ at the end of the final episode, ‘Town of Terror’, shows Tony and Doug landing on the deck of the Titanic once again, implying that both the scientists are trapped  in some sort of a time loop.

Although I watched and enjoyed the series as a youngster living in the UK, it didn’t have the same appeal for me as Irwin Allen’s other shows. The problem was there were no models kits to make of the Time Tunnel, or even an annual, which would have reprinted at least one of the two Gold Key comic stories that fans in America would have got. 

The front and rear covers of the first Gold Key comic.

The front and rear covers of the second Gold Key comic.

As far as I’m aware neither of the two paperback books, written by Murray Leinster were published in Britain, so I never saw those, and no British comics published any home grown  comic strips, unlike Voyage and Land of The Giants, which would have helped me maintain more of an interest with the series  once it was off the air.

The first paperback cover using artwork taken from a previous book 'Time Tunnel' written by Murray Leinster in 1964 which was no connection with the TV series just to confuse things. I'd imagine Irwin Allen liked the title.

I'd have been fooled!

A lot less confusion with the alternative cover on the first paperback

The cover of the second book.

Re-watching it now, like all of Irwin Allen’s series, It’s certainly still a glossy and entertaining series, although some of the historic aspects are sometimes a bit dubious, but I am looking forward to re watching the whole series again after such a long time.

Cue the opening narration (voiced by Dick Tufeld) that can be heard at the beginning of most of the episodes;

"Two American scientists are lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America's greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time"