Fighting Fury in Filey

 We've done a flit to Filey to celebrate our Jasper wedding (42 years).

The first time we visited this East Coast town was back in 1989 with our 5 year old daughter and her mate, when I'd just started collecting after seeing Batman at the flicks. In a coastal grocers was a rack of cheap blister carded toys and I recall getting two Spider-Man sets, a pistol and some rubbery suckers most likely by Gordy or Larami. They were contemporary things but I was so chuffed and kept them for years (can't find pics sorry).

Decades on and several visits later I again got some toys in Filey.

A big bag of old Airfix soldiers. £3.

And in a pleasantly surprising vintage toy shop called Timeless Toys ( closes permanently at Xmas) I was genuinely spoilt for choice.

A Corgi Captain Pugwash set caught my eye, all new to me, but in the end it was two undressed action dolls and an incomete FAB1 that were bagged. £15 the lot.

LtoR:

Lion Rock 1975 - Little Big Man?

Dinky FAB1 to restore over Winter

Matchbox 1973 Fighting Fury with hand action

The owner is selling up so get down there if you're on the Yorkshire East Coast.

Aurora's Sealab on the Moon

Hi Woodsy,

I am currently reading a wonderful book called Aurora Monster Scenes – The Most Controversial Toys of a Generation, by Andrew P. Yanchus (who worked at Aurora in the 1960s and 1970s) and Dennis L. Prince, StarComm Publications, 2014. 

While it is mainly about the Monster Scenes kits from 1971, there is a lot of information in it about other Aurora projects.

In the 1970s Aurora was looking for ways to cut costs, and get some additional use out of its older moulds. One of these was the US Navy Sealab III underwater research facility.

This kit, of a real underwater research base, had not sold well, and the moulds had been expensive. According to Andy Yanchus, some thought had been given to ‘providing a new Moon terrain base and some space-suited astronauts’, to turn the kit in to a Lunar outpost.

That sounds like a great idea to me, but it does not look as though this was ever more than a suggestion. There are no illustrations in the book of what the proposed Lunar Outpost might have looked like, or what colour it might be.

The Sealab kit has a copyright notice on the underside of its seabed base for Aurora Plastics Corporation, 1970. Kit number 721-400 (the price extension to the number means that this was a $4.00 kit), was only in the Aurora catalogues for 1970 and 1971.

In 2017 the kit was re-issued by a company called Masterpiece Models. As the original mould had been destroyed, a new mould for the kit had to be created.

The kit was again re-issued by Doll and Hobby Georgia in 2024, so you could make a do-it-yourself version of the Lunar Outpost. The only problem might be finding some suitable Astronaut figures to go with it, as the Sealab was moulded in the odd scale of 1/93rd.

There might be some 1/87th scale HO model railway figures that would work with the kit (perhaps modern firemen in fireproof suits and breathing gear ?). It might also work with HO/OO Airfix Astronauts, if these were posed in the foreground ?

Two photographs from Worthpoint

Paul Adams from New Zealand