Hidden Depths

It must be a natural thing to love frogmen as well as astronauts - extreme environments, special equipment, hidden dangers...

Ive always had a collection of aquanauts and frogmen and subs on the go alongside space toys, as they always fascinated me as a boy. One of the best examples of frogmen toys were these unusual Britains Mini Sets. A rare departure for the toy soldier maker, these figures were smaller than the average soldier figure and came with a mini scene in each box. Possibly this contributed to the lack of popularity of the sets, as they only appeared for a couple of years after release in 1969. A few sets were added to the line in 1970, but then they disappeared from catalogues shortly after. I always felt this would have been a series begging for astronauts or spacemen, but it was never to be.

Featured at the top is the 1969 page from the catalogue, showing the cool transparent green octopus! I was a bit upset when i got mine to see it was a dull, elephantine grey! As you can see from the remains of these toys today, he's a bit dirty now but still looks as intimidating as ever! The second set of Divers and shark struck me as being a bit mixed up - surely the frogmen would have sat better with the shark and the deep sea divers might be more likely to see the giant octopus ?

A brief flurry of deep sea films cropped up in the 80's/90's, such as the Abyss, Deep Star Six and Leviathan - one or two toys rode the wave on the back of these, but nothing special. I dont know if it was the similarity to spacemen that got me into frogmen or whether it was just a wetsuit clad Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage and Fathom!

More watery fun to follow...

JUNIOR WORLD ENCYCLOPAEDIA

Just got time to post these before the surprise birthday party starts proper! I used to love these encyclopaedias especially this one above. I could stare at the watery skin diver painting for hours!

And inside were these beautiful pics of deep sea creatures, all teeth and fins, each one bigger than the other!

And finally a third page of more wonderful illustrations and in particular the shimmering pastels of the one-man submersible, ersatz SPACEX card-art for sure!

and in close-up!

Below is my own humble but fun collection of frogmen. I particularly like the PENN PLAX one as it's a great old aquarium brand and also the manufacturer of one of the rarest, if not the rarest of all monster toys, the 1960's PENN PLAX Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I'm sure there are many more frogmen out there so let's see them!

RAPHAEL LIPKIN FLIPPY FROGMAN: TABLETS WERE NEVER SO MUCH FUN!

Like many bloggers I have long been a fan of frogmen. I remember as a 60's kid playing for hours with my Pedigree Action man frogman. I can feel it now swimming beneath the troubled waters of my bath seeking out my huge rubber Action Man shark, which was busy terrorising that wonderful lead-botted Deep Sea Diver! I remember having loads of cheapo plastic frogmen (some on Ebay US now) and little scuba subs Thunderball style!

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Frogmen had that same mysterious allure that Astronauts had back then, explorers of the unknown and like super cool. Every one a 007! One of my favourite pictures was of the skin diver on the cover of the Junior Picture Encyclopaedia, which I'll have to track down. In fact I loved all those different terms - frogman, skin diver, scuba diver and poshest of all, spelunker! Funny, like astronauts, they've faded into obscurity.

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I have often wondered what a PROJECT SWORD or SPACEX frogman would look like if such a toy existed. I imagined them swarming from SEA SWORD or para-diving from the NEEDLE PROBE in search of hidden oceanic spies! Well I was thrilled to find the RAPHEAL LIPKIN FLIPPY FROGMAN on Ebay US! Not only is it such a cool toy 'powered by harmless jet-action pellets' amazingly it's made by the same toy company as the SPACEX II range, Rapheal Lipkin aka Pippin! Wonderful! I've just thought, I bet Alka Selzer would be a great substitute for those pellets! (is it still around? Or the other powdered bubbler, Andrews?)

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Any one else got any Frogmen in their collection? I'll post pics of mine soon. Just got my better half's birthday to celebrate tonight! hic!

1966 TV21 X60 COMPETITION PAGE

WOTAN posted this wonderful page from TV21 in the side-bar last week. I read it and loved it so much that I thought I'd post it in the main column. Dated 1966 it's just fascinating to see that 120 of the fantastic JR21 X60's were available to win! And all you had to do was colour in the black and white drawing of what look's like the recently ebayed X50 rocket (more on this from Ferryman during the blog's Birthday month from September 15th). Wonder if all 120 X60's were won? Bet not many of them survived either!

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We'll be running our own brilliant competitions during Mid-September -October and there's even a JR21 mint toy to be won just like back in 1966 (not the X60 but something equally excellent). Stay tuned!

FIFTH PROJECT SWORD SOLO COMIC STRIP AND T IN A CIRCLE

This is the fifth PROJECT SWORD comic strip that was published, July 22nd 1967. 2 pages and a Fleet ID Guide. Note the basic nature of some of the toys in this Guide. Are they all actually toys or are some of them simply models? And there appears to be a T in a Circle on the nose of the Moonbus! If this is the case it is the strongest evidence yet that the original SWORD range was indeed T in a Circle. Has anybody got a Moonbus like this?

Credits: Top two pages - Woodsy Collection, Fleet ID Guide - Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History Site (GACCH). For an in-depth look at all the SWORD strips visit GACCH.

Tomorrow Never Came

I saw a quote once, in an old isse of 'OMNI' magazine:

"The Past is gone, the Present lost as it arrives. There is only the Future."

When I was seven, I once remarked to my schoolmates that I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up. I would get married at 24 and have two children and drive an E-Type Jaguar (at the time one of the most streamlined streetcars available). Forty years on, I cant drive at all, will never reach space and have the smallest practical car to carry my loving wife and two children. At that time, I looked forward to a future of glass and steel, monorails and aerocars and world peace. I think I must have bumped my head on the desk at some point, as I was obviously hopelessly myopic.

Everything in the sixties promised a new Space Age - it was a time of plastic and funky design, bright colour and limitless imagination. Designers and engineers sold us a slick, streamlined world of open highways, clear skies, velvet reaches of space and the means for anyone to travel them.

As I write, the building im working in shakes, quite violently sometimes, as the old hospital site adjacent to it is torn down. My office is in a building which has stood here since the 1950's alongside the old hospital where my daughter was born 12 years ago. Very shortly, the site will be clear and work will progress on the new development.

Shall I expect to see golden towers of plexiglass and arcologies of spun steel ? Will the future hold nanomachines silently busying themselves over the construction of organically styled homes as hypersonic jets leave doughnut shaped vapour trails in the blue sky overhead ? Somehow, I doubt it.

For the foreseeable future, I think the only space age I will enjoy will be made of plastic, but on a considerably smaller scale than I first thought in 1969.

ATOMIC SUBS AND AIRCRAFT CARRIERS: A WHOLE FLOTILLA

I've recently been immersing myself in TV21 comic strips I've aquired in 1980's Action 21 comics and Thunderbirds In Space from the 1990's. There's a whole armada of huge futuristic ships not least of which is the fabulous Submarine Aircraft Carrier (more to come on this during September) and the majestic PRESIDENT atomic ocean liner. Short of finding these comic creations (well we know about the Sub Aircraft Carrier but surely there's no President toy!), I have found some other cool and sometimes nuclear vessels online, mostly Ebay.

Above - Atomic Submarine bagged

Above - Britains Scuba Sub - I had one of these!

Above - Gama Atomic Liner - Wow!

Above - Telsada Train Ferry Boat - that box style is very Tarheel!

And last but not least, the Telsada Clockwork Aircraft Carrier! But what did it do?

Oh yeah, the Renatta Sub is in the side-bar too!

Under Pressure

Well, it probably looked like a great idea on paper and the artwork for the box is pretty dynamic and interesting, but the Jetspace Pulsair Base really doesnt blow my skirt up.

Ever since I was a kid, i'd seen fabulous bases in space and on the moon with clear domes and travel tubes zipping astronauts around on monorails and in capsules and nearly every good space toy had an implausibly huge glass partition that you could peer into to see the inner workings or the pilots sat at the controls.

When I first came across this set, I imagined it to be full of clean tubes with small spacexy capsules zipping about while helicopters lifted off the landing pads and starcruisers orbited overhead. I'd long been a fan of the Takara Micronauts line and had often coveted the fantastic Rocket Tubes set, which encased a 3 inch figure in a special capsule and then shot him around four feet of perspex tube to the main base. The Pulsair set turned out to be more like one of James Dysons bad trips and could have been just as easily created from a batch of Tupperware bowls and some old vacuum parts. It includes lots of pipes, each about as thick as your average index finger, a big clear dome and several modular 'base' units to clip the whole thing together. Once the laborious duty of plugging it all together and hoping it stands upright, was complete - two simple pumps are attached and a quick thump sent a one inch 'bullet' shooting down a pipe at speeds too fast to actually see. If the connections werent secure at this point, the whole thing would pop apart and the capsule would be liberated into the far corner of the room.

Originally made by a company called Ceji , the licence was picked up by Revell and small box of accessory vehicles were released. These included large cruisers very reminiscent of the swan-necked spaceships of Angus McKie and which were designed to sail along a cotton thread. Also there were small buggies, each made of individual vinyl plastic parts and one piece copters. The capsules came in three sections and would only work with a small collar of transparent film attached at either end to preserve a tight seal. The central body popped open and allowed the insertion of possibly the tiniest figures I have ever come across - barely 3mm high! A standard Golden Astronaut towers over them in comparison. Possibly, such microscopic parts meant the end for the series as they were so small they represented not so much a swallowing hazard as the probability of being inhaled if you bent too close to watch the 'action'!