Sixty years ago, Kelloggs included a neat little premium in their Rice Krispie cereal, nine whole years before the Moon Landing, of a set of pioneering lunar spacemen. The six figures were made by toy soldier manufacturer, Crescent and were single piece colour plastic mouldings with detachable transparent bubble helmets, which bear a strong resemblance to early designs suggested by Arthur C Clarke in his book 'The Exploration of Space'.
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| original examples |
The six figures are rarely found with the original helmets and are often missing parts of the soft plastic moulding, such as the minesweeper attachment or the U.N banner. As a keen collector of cereal premiums and spacemen, I managed to get a set of these figures, both at a toy fair and via ebay. Although I have had them for some time, when I came upon two other figures this week in a lot of other space toys, I realised that I would be able to fashion replacement helmets for the team from some highlighter markers that I had picked up recently. With a little cutting to shorten them, the caps fitted beautifully and look remarkably similar to the original helmets.
Excellent set & display, thanks Wotan. With such delicate details they must be really difficult to find intact. Not to speak of helmets! Nice replacements.
ReplyDeleteAlmost impossible to find intact and complete with helmet, but oddly enough ebay is littered with them just now..
DeleteBeautiful Wote. Like art deco! The pen helmets are spot on. You just need to eat all those boxes of cornflakes now!
ReplyDeleteI hate cereal at the best of times, but 60 year old rice krispies might be especially tough!
ReplyDeletebut did you like cereals as a nipper?
ReplyDeleteno, never eat breakfast full stop. My mam got wise to me with cereal as i'd never eat it and only wanted the toys!
DeleteTalk about fussy!
DeleteNobody liked cereals. That's why they had to give away figures with them. When another set of figures was on the go, I went to the extent of buying boxes of Sugar Puffs on my way home from school, with no intention of eating them, and I still could not complete the set but at least the birds got extra food.
DeleteWOW! Those are great Wotan!! I've never seen these before! Now the question is - do I try to hunt them down or leave it be this time??? hahahahaha
ReplyDeleteTheres only six Ed - go for it!
DeleteMy mum insists this is a false memory but I have distinct recollection of her returning from night-shift at what was then BOAC catering and dumping a rather battered cereal box - it might have been for Weetabix, not Kelloggs Corn Flakes - out of which spilled a pile of these very same plastic spacemen, complete with their bubble helmets in heaps onto the dining table.
DeleteMy guess is that during the preparation of hundreds of economy class breakfasts, countless boxes of Corn Flakes with the free plastic spacemen inside had been emptied and since the toys were unwanted, they were simply thrown way or given to staff to take home - the odd thing is that my mum took them back shortly afterwards for some reason, so maybe a co-worker had loaned them to her for me to play with.
I've always wondered where they came from - I was an avid collector of "cereal premiums", in fact anything cereal free-gift related, but these have stuck with me since then - it would be great to have a set if not a pile of them :)
Ravi
What a great recollection Ravi! Probably they were just put into one of the empty cereal boxes as the stewardesses made up the individual meals. I imagine it was probably done either in the air or at the airport then, not pre-packed a moth earlier in a factory! Strangely enough, ebay is currently lousy with crescent spacemen, cant think why ...
DeleteFor every collector wanting helmets for the Kellogg's Spacermen, the highlighter markers are a great discovery. Do we know what brand they are?
ReplyDeleteThe spacemen were found in boxes of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies.
ReplyDeleteCuriously, Crescent never issued the Spacemen for sale in shops, as they did for other figures they made for Kellogg's, such as the Robin Hood set, and Cowboys & Indians (as we then called them), all with the Crescent name on the base and factory painted. Were the Spacemen unique in this regard, or were there other Kellogg's-only sets? Considering how topical the Spacemen were, with the US and Russia preparing for real spaceflights, Crescent surely missed a great opportunity, and lots of us young collectors would have been able to own the entire set: in my circles, nobody ever saw the UN flag figure, or the metal detector figure with the circular pad intact. Instead, we had to await the arrival of eBay where, as others have commented, they are regularly listed, often at very high prices when they include the helmets, which is fair enough, given the helmets' rarity, but not when they are obviously replicas, missing the distinctive lugs at front and back which fit into the neck ring of the spacesuits. Not that there is anything wrong with replicas, and again I praise Wotan's remarkable job with the marker pens which I have been unable to find despite lots of searching in WHSmiths and elsewhere. Wotan, do you remember what brand they are?
ReplyDelete