Alienation

A recent trip to Woodsy's favourite local car boot came up trumps for me, as having spent an enjoyable morning surfing the stalls with the man himself, I decided to have one last turn round the tables, while Woodsy took the load off with a coffee.

One stall in particular had loads of vintage stuff, books, toys, ephemera and for once, wasn't commanding silly ebay prices. In the middle of the table was a small tin box, loaded up with badges, seventies novelty key rings, bits of toys and other odds and sods. On my first pass, there were a couple of blokes furtively scouring the box for what looked like enamel badges, so I couldn't get near. On my return, I saw a gap and dived in, hoping to find a space themed badge or a nice retro keyring. Amongst the bits and pieces I found an Airfix Captain Eagle figure, but missing his feet, so he stayed put. There were several nice keyrings that I recognised from my childhood, like footballs, a met wood axe and a london taxi. Just as I was about to call it a day, I uncovered a small capsule and to my surprise, saw that it contained one of the silver spacemen that I had been collecting for years.

This little chap was very familiar, as he appears in the large Apollo Moon Exploring box sets and often crops up in the little LP window box sets. He also has a larger brother in the form of the rubber 'Moon Platoon' series, six aliens with sucker pads on the bottom. These also found their way into the jumping toys range, with flat vacformed versions attached to a spring base.

When I got him home, I saw that cosmetically, he was almost identical to the little silver LP figures, but was flatter and his feet disapeared into the base at the ankles. He's also slightly flatter in profile, with inferior casting detail. Still, he is a lovely rare little thing and the base of the capsule (which is glued shut) has the usual detail 'Made in Hong Kong' and the company 'Brabo'.

A quick google on the name reveals that Brabo deal chiefly with inexpensive novelities and toys, such as the dangling rubber figures like skeletons and spacemen and bendy poseable animals. An image search popped up an expired auction on Worthpoint, of 'Hula' figures inside the same kind of capsule too.
 

Here is the original Moon Platoon figure and below are the jumping jack figures and the Moon Exploring/Dekkertoys figures, which are the same scale as the Brabo one, but with sharper detail.