Ebay always reminds me of a tall, heavily loaded apple tree. You can stretch and climb to reach the highest apples, only to find that someone else pinches them before you. Or even worse, that the fruit that youve struggled to reach has a worm in it! Sometimes you find the sweetest fruit hanging on the lowest branches, within easy reach.
Ive just had a browse of the windfalls and bought two unusual toys for a few pounds. Trouble is, im uttelrly mystified by one of them. Advertised as "Triang/Marx?" Aircraft Carrier, i received this cool toy just this morning. Its about 15", has no makers marks at all, not even the obligatory "made in Hong Kong". It seems to be almost complete apart from the aircraft! At one end is what seems to be a launcher for a copter. Inside is a elastic band attached to a string which whirls the little red gear on deck. This looks very similar to the type of mechanism on the Triang Helicopter Launching Railcar. Does anyone have the slightest idea of age or maker ?
Next up is a slightly less mysterious toy, a Jimson Space Cruiser. I had thought I might have discovered another addition to the J21 'X' Series, but to no avail. Its a nice toy, if a little too retro for my tastes. Anyone recognise it ?
Another unlikely contender for a toy line must be Paul Verhoevens sci-fi shoot-em-up, Starship Troopers. Based loosely on Robert Heinleins novel about earth forces in an ongoing battle with sentient insectile aliens, the film was a quantum leap forward in computer graphics imaging for the big screen. Phil Tippett, who had previously been on the Star Wars production crew, brought millions of scrambling, screaming arachnids to life on screen. As the film was essentially a running battle punctuated with the obligatory schmaltzy love scenes, Verhoeven managed to cram in plenty of blood and guts making it a little unsettling for younger viewers.
However, the licence was picked up once more by Galoob and they placed the toys in the Action Fleet line along with Aliens and Star Wars. A line of six inch action figures was also made complete with vehicles. The Action Fleet line are easily some of the most impressive and unusual space toys ever made outside of the Star Wars cadre. Similar in premise to Remcos early Hamilton Invaders toys, they featured two small soldier figures to each boxed set and either a bug or a vehicle. The Plasma Bug (pic 1) is possibly the most outlandish. In the film, the giant creatures blast streams of glowing plasma from their abdomen and the toy features a spring launched ball of blue energy attached to a ribbon. This can be shot out and reeled back in. The Tanker Bug (pic2) was the central bug in one of the most impressive sequences, as hero Johnny Rico jumps onto the back of the flame spitting bug and blasts a hole in its carapace to plant grenades. Each tiny soldier has a magnet in the base, allowing them to be attached to points on the bugs such as the back, jaws or tongues. The Tanker Bugs have a launchable 'tongue' of flame on a ribbon with a magnet attached.
Easily the most scary bug is the fearsome Warrior, tiger striped in black and yellow (pic3). This was the central protagonist and to see the hordes of these creatures streaming over the hill to attack the marine outpost, is one of the best parts of the film. This came in the standard six inch size bug, a smaller battle damaged version from the carded Battle Pack sets and a large electronic one, complete with realistic scream!
The Hopper Bug (pics 4/5) is probably the prettiest with its irridescent green shell. This was also produced as a remote control toy (pic5) with rather limited walking action.
The squishy Brain Bug featured in one of the grossest moments of the film as it sucked out the brains of the human pilots. On screen it appeared as a fleshy, gooey being, which still managed to convey a feeling of eerie, cold intelligence (Pic6).
The standard Warrior Bug prepares to relieve the Marines of their limbs (pic7)
Dropping the hapless forces onto the bug ridden planets were the Retrieval Ships (pic 8) above. One of my favourite designs from the toy line. The boxy base unit has a door at the back to allow the troops to jump out, but also contains 8 large bombs which can be released to carpet bomb the bugs by pulling back on the tailfins.
In case the bugs are dug in to the hills or a fast air strike is needed, we have the TAC Fighter (pic9) - a two man interceptor with large missiles to blast the warriors out of their den.
In space, no one can hear you blog. No examination of spaceships can overlook the singular designs which came about from the 1979 science fiction epic Alien. Star Wars may have introduced the dirty, weatherbeaten look to space films, but the Alien saga took it a step further into the gritty, filthy realism of industrial spacetravel. Besides introducing one of the most scary and unusual creature designs ever seen, H.R Giger, the artist behind the concept, also managed to load the film with powerful psychosexual imagery both in the alien and in the ship designs.
The Alien saga is mainly an adult series with lots of blood and gore and genuinely unsettling moments, so its odd to find that it spawned a toy line. Besides Kenners large scale Alien action figure and a similar MPC construction kit, there wasnt much to be had in the way of toys until the Micromachine brand from Lewis Galoob began to introduce a larger scale model for Star Wars in the nineties, called 'Action Fleet'. As this series was quite successful, they added a sub series based on the Alien movies. Halcyon, the troubled kit manufacturer had already had limited success with its expensive large format model kits of the APC, Powerloader and Narcissus (see first photograph), but the 'play value' was nonexistant. Galoobs Action Fleet picked up the classic 'bug hunt' element from Aliens and added small figures of the Marines, Aliens and heroine Ripley together with cool action features such as opening hatches, interior detail and features such as the cryopod inside the Narcissus and moving weapons on the Marine vehicles.
During the production of the first film, Dan O'Bannon and Ridley Scott drew heavily on the work of Joseph Conrad, naming the main ship from one of Conrads books 'Nostromo' and taking the name of the shuttle 'Narcissus' from another. James Cameron continued this them in Aliens, naming th Marine Cruiser 'Sulaco' after a mining town in the book Nostromo. Production designer Ron Cobb provided most of the design work for Alien, while Giger came up with the creatures and the derelict alien ship and Space Jockey. Design chores were passed on to Syd Mead for Aliens, giving rise to the 'gun-like' Sulaco, Dropship and APC.
The Aliens models from Galoob are equally well featured and besides being very accurate models in themselves, also had the playability to enable kids to recreate some of the pivotal scenes in the film such as the Dropship attack and the aliens swarming around the armoured personnel carrier int he depths of the factory.
The APC and the Dropship come with Marines and Aliens figures and the APC has a nice touch which shows a squashed alien embossed on the bottom of the model.
The series was much more limited in its range than the Star Wars brand, although there was still scope to include other vehicles from the (then three) films, the line was not expanded apart from the inclusion of the rare Predator Shuttle. Predator would ultimately be crossed over in two dedicated films, but at the time, the connection was merely alluded to by the presence of an alien skull on board the Predator ship in Predator 2. 
The toy was loosely based on the ships glimpsed in the two Predator films and is possibly the rarest of the four models.
