During the Midsummer weekend visit my daughter, Miss Moonbase, left this fortune card, which she'd been vended [is that a verb?].
As soon as I saw it I recognised it as similar to the the card Tom Hanks gets in the film BIG from the Zoltar Speaks machine. which I think was on Coney Island [maybe it's still there?]
The Zoltar Speaks fortune cards were and still are issued by Characters Unlimited of Boulder City in Nevada, USA, as are the machines themselves!
It reminds me of an uber-cool vintage Japanese toy from the Sixties called the Gypsy Fortune Teller by Ichida.
A fabulous companion to the battery-operated Mod Monster, I first came across this beautiful toy in one of the very first books on vintage toys I ever got, in 1990:
Yesterday's Toys 3: Robots, Spaceships, and Monsters Paperback, 1989, by Teruhisa Kitahara (Author), Masashi Kudo (Photographer)
[have you got this book too?]
The Ichida Fortune Teller is in action on several You Tube clips. Here's one showing the card being palmed.
During our scousetastic weekend break in the city of the Beatles, Liverpool, I chanced upon a large plastic tub on a shop counter.
In said tub where items so strange, so random, so right, that I had to look twice.
With the brand name Archie McPhee I saw a stack of ....... small hollow plastic hands and feet!
I immediately yelled across the store "I've seen those hands and feet before!"
Yes, I was thinking of my beloved Mod Monster toy from the Sixties and his large extremities!
OK, the Archie McPhee limbs [McPheet?] aren't gnarly or luminous but they'd do in an emergency. You could always paint them. The big plus about these is the fact they're hollow and could be inserted onto Mod Monster, when he's not looking, like the real things.
The big question is the size. They maybe too small. Frankenstein doesn't do small limbs. He has enough problems with his loose trousers!
For these plastic hands and feet and many other essential things check out Archie Mcphee's yourself here https://mcphee.com/ and let me know what, like Frankenstein, you find goooooooood!
Just been enjoying Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the telly. Its the Directors cut and I'm pretty sure I've never seen the sandstorm opening before.
For toy collectors the early scene of the boy's bedroom is a treasure trove of Seventies stuff. Besides the cymbal-clapping monkey I saw my old fave the Mod Monster Blushing Frankenstein, who drops his trousers at the sight of the alien presence! There are loads of tin cars whizzing round including a police car and a train too.
For the life of me I can't find any video footage of the scene to blog or even a screengrab of the toys. Can anyone help?
One other thing, where the alien ships ever released as toys?
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