Just recently on the upcoming Swordcast, I was talking about the fact that 'vintage' space toys, as we know them - i.e pre-1970 - are very few and far between recently and stuff which is pre-1990 seems to have become the new vintage, rendering classic space toys virtually antique. Oddly enough, I found a couple of nice examples of 'Golden Age' toys on ebay just this week at an absolute snip too.
The first one is a Tomy Space Eight Crawler, a model that we have seen on Moonbase before, but with the unusual addition of an extendable grab arm. The Space Eight series has a number of variations and is the smaller cousin of a larger Tomy Buggy, which was in turn issued by Sears. http://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2009/12/eight-wheels-on-my-wagons.html
This particular model has not survived the rigours of playtime well and has lost its motor (eh Woodsy!) and the twin drive belts for the chassis. Still with a quick clean it will display quite well.
The next space oddity that I found was very similar to a recent Multiple Toymakers rack toy that I bought, only this was a loose lot. The previous set consisted of 20 gold and 20 silver Giant brand astronauts, a Moon Crawler and a Titan Rocket in a small polythene packet. This lot contained silver astronauts, the same Titan rocket, a white version of the crawler and two LP Moon Buggies.
Although I had all the other parts in the set already, the chief reason for buying the lot were the two plastic moon craters, which look very like the ones which come in the Marx Moon Exploration window box toys.
I had expected some stiff competition bidding on this interesting lot, but I managed to run away with the auction uncontested! Does this suggest that interest in older space toys is on the wane ?
No comments:
Post a Comment