Referring back to Woodsy's earlier post about the Blue Box Missile Bases, here is a shot that I originally sent him, decades ago when I first made contact, looking for Project SWORD and Spacex info on the web. The image shows the bare remnants of my old space toy collection, including the Blue Box Atlas Rocket Transporter, some Apollo Moon Exploring miniatures and the Hover Space Glider and Moon Rover. Shortly after, these items were sold off to a collector in the states, as at the time, I had little hope of ever replacing them with newer versions.
Little did I know that a few years later after discovering ebay, the toy cupboard doors would be flung wide open and all manner of vintage toys would begin to appear. One nice example is this boxed Rocket Base by Delaware, which uses bits and pieces from other sets such as the LP space series, but is in itself a direct lift from a larger Remco space palyset available in the states.
The Topper Rocket Base or Cape Canaveral set as its sometimes known, is the basis for the Blue Box series and is an 00/HO scale toy, with a missile battery, ICBM launcher and rocket transporter. Each of the rockets were about 11" high and seriously powerful!
As was always the case with popular toys, the Hong Kong makers copied the toys to make cheap alternatives and one of the more distinctive missiles from the set found its way into a small rack toy, along with a Matt Mason Moon Crawler copy and a crew of Giant Brand spacemen.
The real stars of the show were for me, the Blue Box series, which were scaled perfectly for the Golden Astronaut and Apollo Moon Exploring series models. The Ap Ex set also included a radar station at slightly smaller scale.
The Blue Box sets had the triple missile launcher with distinctive chrome dials and three non firing rockets.
The crescent shaped Atlas Rocket base did actually launch the rocket with a small spring and came with a couple of crew members, usually glued to the inside of the box. Lastly, we have the long rocket transporter lorry - this is the one rescued by Woodsy from the junk shop in Ponty!
A lovely little set, which was capped off by the Blue Box helicopter, itself a copy of the Triang Hornby model, which appeared on a low loader railcar in the early sixties, proof that you can't keep a good toy down!
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