On the Shoulders of Giants

On a bright summers day way back in 1970, I was on holiday in Devon with the family. I would have been 9 years old and space toy mad. On a day out to Paignton, a bustling town near the coast, I was walking down the high street and spotted a large display in a department store window, which featured the Project SWORD Apollo Saturn Rocket - one of the larger and more expensive toys in the range. Until this point, I had never seen it outside of the manual, so naturally I was glued to the window. Keen to get to the beach and unwilling to spend a chunk of his hard earned on such an expensive toy, my dad chivvied me along to a sidestreet with little holiday beach shops and found something to brighten my long face. That something was a Space Explorer set, similar to the one shown above.

The chief difference between the one I had then and the one I have just obtained, is the other one had three compartments, with the rocket in the centre. Paul Vreede has an example of the set, made by Multiple Toymakers, on his excellent and comprehensive Triang Spacex site:  

http://www.triangspacextoys.info/SpGAderv/OTHR/mixMmtch/MTspcExp/MTspcExp.html

Interestingly, the pack records the contents as having 30 astronauts and two crawlers, whereas mine has 38 - 20 silver and 28 bronze. As the pack was open and came without a header, its hard to know whether there are parts missing, or parts added. In amongst the bronze figures was a stray LP brand Golden Astronaut and in the same lot, three MPC spacemen and two Kelloggs Crescent figures.

As Paul details on his site, the pack is a mismatched set of odd toys, including astronauts copied from Giant originals, a Moon Crawler derived from Major Matt Mason and copied from LP Apollo Moon Exploring and most unusually, a Titan Rocket copied from the Topper Cape Canaveral Base set.

As I had the Topper set a few years earlier, I recognised it immediately and it even retains the lugs at the base which held the Topper rocket in the launcher and on the back of the transporter. The Topper set came with decals to apply to each rocket, named 'Titan', 'Thor', 'Jupiter' and 'Atlas', so the makers had opted for a recognisable name for the small version.

The figures all owe more to military styling than astronauts, coming in classic army poses with shoulder launched bazookas, long pole minesweepers and rifles. Both sets of figures and all the toys are unbranded.

My original set came with a blue crawler with red legs and a yellow with blue. This one came with a yellow with blue legs. The pilot had become dislodged, so its impossible to tell if he had been fitted facing backwards as the MTM set shows. Above we can see the Apex Crawler matching the Mattel original exactly, a later version and the two copies.

The rogue LP spaceman stowed away in the bag. I enquired if the seller had any other space toys, as there clearly must have been other goodies in this collection, but they reported that these were just a random lot. A shame, as the previous owner had obviously cared for them well. 

Finally, a photograph from the late 90's, that I sent Woodsy of part of my meagre collection, which shows the original Titan rocket from the Paignton set, now sadly traded away, along with the Red Box Atlas Rocket Transporter (again copied from the Topper Canaveral Set), a Hover Glider and Moon Rover (repaired some years earlier by my dad with a plywood base to hold the fragile wheels on!) a handful of MMM Apex toys and tucked away in a corner, a cheap plastic rocket on a wooden gantry.

So besides recovering another pleasant fragment of childhood nostalgia, I am left with the question as to whether this was a different, smaller set to the original Multiple Toymakers one, or is it the same set with one pocket of the vinyl package carefully (and extremely neatly) removed and the card insert replaced? I'd like to think it is a distinct set in its own right and that it is almost complete, but either way, I am over the moon.