A re-post of the original Dekkertoys diorama bloglet, with a new addendum at the end!
I love plastic moonscape dioramas. Ever since I saw one with the Spacex Superset and the Johnny Astro toys, I was smitten. It was so much easier to imagine that the little plastic toys from LP and Tri-ang were landing on the lunar surface, when there was an otherworldly terrain to aim for.
However, I am mystefied as to why almost all of the available moonscapes are all painted blue! I got a set of four Dekkertoys vacform moonscapes from the early 80's and shaded them in blue tones, to match the two main ones.
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| DEKKERTOYS |
I picked up a small vacform battlefield diorama, only about 8 inches long and after a quick wash of blues and lilacs, It made for a nice base for some of the very small toys.
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| BATTLEFIELD DIORAMA |
AIRFIX LEM BASEPLATE |
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The Tri-ang Luna-Cy game goes a step further and gives you a whole moon hemisphere to play with too! You could attach this to the back of the door and blast spring powered rockets in to it!
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| TRIANG LUNA-CY GAME |
Guardsman Games 'Moonshot' - basically tiddly winks with a nice 4" diameter crater base!
Finally the two remaining items from the Dekkertoys set that I cadged off the company, the bubble car and blue mercury capsule. Both inferior quality to the originals and probably, re-purposed cake toppers.
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Interesting post. Using my Human based pattern recognition powers I notice the SpaceX moon surface has been bootlegged off the Johhny Astro one! The central crater and nearby two radial impact points are identical. Rather than making thier own original pattern, I suspect SpaceX got hold of a Johnny Astro base and added clay to the surrounding features, to try and make it look different enough to avoid legal entanglements!
ReplyDeleteThe Topper Johnny Astro one is about a third larger. Triang did re-package a lot of American toys, such as Lionel Trains and other stuff, so they would certainly have had access to the original materials. Alternatively, it could be based on a Lunar Orbiter photograph, which were used to plane the Apollo 11 landings and were in circulation at the time. Ill have to see if it matches an existing crater now! Bill
DeleteGiven that the Moon is known to be made of Green Cheese, the proper colour for any Lunar landscape is clearly green. If it is blue, that cheese must be really mouldy.
ReplyDeleteClearly Stilton!
DeleteHad the Johnny Asro one, but it may have been repackaged for the UK, under another toy name.
ReplyDeleteIt had a fan,of fans, and a balloon with a tie on plastic base, that you had to try to land in the crater.
Used to pretend to launch my Dinky UFO Interceptor from it.
Had one too Mish. Really great fun too! What a toy!
DeleteSorry, ' ... fan, or fans ...'.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Wotan - I really luv the smaller space toys
ReplyDelete