JAMES BOND'S SUPER BALLS

 

Not sure I've seen this before, a 007 Superball by Italian toysters Baravelli. I suppose its a play on Thunderball.

I quite like the dark artwork.

Anyone seen this before? Was it licensed?

HELP! BARAVELLI CATALOGO CHRISTMAS 1967: PICTURES NEEDED

I'm trying to look at this page here but I need a much better image than this one on Picclick. Can anyone help? In particular I need to know what the writing is next to the two female spy dolls on the right.

Similarly if you can find any more images of secret agent dolls in baravelli catalogs I would be grateful.

BARAVELLI BOX ART

This is the box art for the Italian firm Baravelli's Serie Minizero Spaziali Pattuglia Orbitale. The image courtesy of the HäT website. 

I have covered all these model figure sets before on MC but the box art is just so good I'm giving it another whirl.

As most of Baravelli's non-space box art was by Italian artist Gino Palotti so I assume he did the space ones too. Does anyone know for sure?

Baravelli included LP style knockoff astronauts in their space sets. You can clearly see the posed figure pointing at the spaceship. Its LP [rear] and Spacex/ Golden Astronaut [front] 'pointing' equivalents can be seen here in this excellent graphic courtesy of Paul Vreede from his special MC blog post way back in 2009.

The spaceships in the sets tended to be clones of Japanese sci-fi vessels from Ultraman and also the UK's Thunderbirds TV series. The vessel shown on this particular box is based on the Ultra Hawk 3 from the Ultraman/ Ultraseven TV series.

These sets are very collectable and often discussed on model figures fora such as here on Airfix Collecting.

Amongst other things, Baravelli also distributed the Action Jackson 12-inch action doll line in Italy on behalf of toy giants Mego.

Have you any Baravelli figure sets or toys readers?

BARAVELLI LP ASTRONAUT BOX ART

Since I came across the Italian LP astronaut clones by Baravelli I've been enthralled by the box art. I can't think of any other Company that attempts to illustrate them in such detail, not even LP.

Okay, there have been some other drawings of LP spacemen, such as those in the Moon Base Play Set graphic in the Project SWORD Manual, but they're simple affairs.

Baravelli must have employed a talented artist to capture the LP's in their characteristic poses and place them in really exciting scenarios featuring the toy vehicle in that particular set.

The art is worthy of a comic strip in my opinion.

Intrigued as to whether all the LP's were illustrated by Baravelli I compared the box art figures with the actual LP spacemen. I'm not sure they did but you may want to check yourself. Some of the illustrations are at different angles to the normally erect astronauts!

Here are all 8 LP spacemen with their small SpaceX equivalents courtesy of Paul Vreede from his excellent Origins of Tri-ang SPACEX Figures posted on the blog, unbelievably, 6 years ago:

Here's my comparison. The two question marks relate to the corresponding illustrations to the left. I don't know which LP figures they are meant to be.

ULTRAMAN ORIGIN OF THE BARAVELLI LP KNOCKOFFS?

I saw this the other day online in Japan and thought, hmm, maybe these are those cheap looking plastic models in the knockoff Italian Baravelli LP boxes I posted the other day?

Although not easy to see, the Japanese models appear to bagged Ultraman and Thunderbird 2. What do you think readers? What are the Ultraman spaceships called?

ITALIAN LP ASTRONAUTS: BARAVELLI SPAZIALI

Readers of the cool Alphadrome and the Airfix Forum may already know of Baravelli Spaziali but I only discovered them last night on a random cybercruise down the autostrada.

Baravelli Spaziali were a set of six different boxed space toys and figures released by the Italian toy company Baravelli from 1970 onwards. The Spaziali sets were part of a larger series called Minizero, which included soldiers and cowboys and Indians.

Of interest to Moonbasers, SWORDies and SpaceXers is Baravelli's use of LP astronauts, which they imported from Hong Kong, bagged and stapled and along with a plastic space vehicle, formed the contents of the Spaziali sets. The LP astronauts are marked HONG KONG on the base and are HO scale. 

The vehicle designs have been knocked-off from both  UK and Japanese TV shows popular at the time, with Thunderbirds and Ultraman at the fore. The positioning of a Thunderbird 2 and LP astronauts is especially neat and almost SpaceX-like. One other vehicle looks like a stripped-down LT10 Lunar Transporter from SpaceX, but in reality i think it's a Japanese TV space rocket.

Probably the most interesting feature for me is the box art, which is quite stunning. I have never before seen an artist take the trouble to illustrate astronauts using LP Spacemen's actual poses. Here we can see the classic 'sky finger pointer', ' sky pistol pointer' and the 'orb in palm' [my names!] we are so used to seeing in SpaceX, Golden Astronaut and Apollo Moon Exploring, not to mention the Project SWORD Moon Base Set. They are so good they could have been contenders for SWORD box art and easily be the basis of a much-needed SpaceX Annual in their own right!

The artist was Gino Pallotti and you can read more about Baravelli's Minizero Spaziali sets at Atlanticplus.eu which interestingly says that some of the box art is at the V&A Museum in London. In the meantime here are some pictures from Italian auction archives. If you have any of these sets or know any more then please share the Italian joy!