My First Photographs of My PROJECT SWORD Collection: early 1990's

Looking through some old family photo's to send with Xmas cards I stumbled across these prints I took of Project Sword craft about 15 years ago. The quality is terrible! Pre-digital bog standard kodak! I feel that the second one down with the wavey green look isn't that bad. I can't beleive I had a hair on the lens in the bottom photo of the Scout boat! I'm sure that blog readers can do much much better than this!

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So - I'll be soon launching a - wait for it - a PROJECT SWORD photo competition!!!!!! Watch this Space!!!!!!!

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Here's an early shot of a young Woodsy displaying my passion for spaceships as I patrol the skies with my cousin Susan in a Space Tank and Supercar at Butlins in the glorious 60's. Check out Thunderbird 1 catching us up! Heaven!

FERRIES EVERYWHERE!

WOTAN has sent these extra pics of the Spacex II Nuclear Ferry carded and uncarded, together with a scratch built white 6" Ferry and a better shot of the carded Lunar Orbiter.

All these photo's have given me an idea for the New Year!

Nuclear Physics

From the atomic WOTAN: In researching the background of the Sword line and finding out about one of my favourite vehicles, the Nuclear Ferry, I recalled an illustration from about 1969 that I had seen as a boy in Look and Learn magazine. Recently, the bulk of the magazine has been converted into a fantastic searchable database on the web, and keywords in hand, I dived in and within seconds found the very picture I had been searching for all these years - top picture above! The article was one of a regular series on the emergent space race and showed the fantastic ship in all its glory, with cut aways showing how the craft worked.

It may not be visible in the text, but the description gives the length of the main fuselage as 125 feet and notes that the shuttle is held on the frontal dome in flight, and swings down, 17 feet to connect to the base of the freight module. This then detaches and is flight capable. (This feature also seems to be apparent in the Century 21 toy - middle picture above - as there is a visible seam at the rear of the conical front section of the toy, but does not appear on its tiny Spacex cousin - bottom picture above.)

Near the bottom of the illustration is a signature - McCall - Robert McCall, being a renowned NASA and space illustrator and fellow blogger and publisher Rob Godwin aka DARTH told me that he once met Mr.McCall and he was quoted as having "just dreamed the craft up" and it was not one of NASA's future projects. Looking at the illustration and comparing it to the box artwork from the SWORD toy (middle picture above), obvious similarities can be seen and again on the Nuclear Ferry Watch Backing Card spotted on ebay the image is blatantly plagiarised once more. It could be confidently suggested that Mr.McCall is the father of the Nuclear Ferry and all its future imitators.

Nice one WOTAN! Watch this space for WOTAN's fabulous scratch built Nuclear Ferry!

Will Osborne Space Toys: Spacex II, Elf Tracy Island, Marx

Above - Spacex II Booster Rocket backing card rear Above - Spacex II MOLAB backing card rear Above - Spacex II Lunar Orbitor backing card rear

Above - Spacex II Lunar Orbitor and Apollo Tracker backing card rears and Boxed Moon Base Set ( foldable plastic lunar plan not shown)

Above - Spacex II MOLAB backing card front and Lunar Orbiter front (with toy, astronaut and badge)

Above - top left: Elf Toys Tracy Island Prototype with Dinky die- casts: Top right - Elf Toys Tracy Island actual toy with JR21 vehicles

Bottom left - Spacex boxed Superset with hard plastic moon surface; Bottom right - Linemar space vehicle

Above - top left: MARX Lunar Exploration boxed sets: Top right - 2001 NASA remote- control Glider

Bottom Left: MARX Moon Grabbers: Bottom right - MARX Moon Grabber Train Set

Will Osborne, a good friend over many years and a keen Space toy enthusiast, has sent me these pictures of part of his brilliant collection of Spacex, Thunderbirds and Marx toys. The original pictures are colour photocopies and prints, some of which I recieved many years ago. Enjoy!

DYNA SOAR BOX ART

I've been researching space art and artists on the web in an attempt to work out which artist might have painted the covers for the Century 21 PROJECT SWORD box art. Probably the most well-known design of the SWORD range is the DYNA- SOAR (top picture) and as you'd expect there are a lot of illustrations of it on the net, a few examples are shown above. None of this really brings me closer to the answer though. WOTAN thinks the box artist was Ed Valigursky and I'm inclined to agree. Does anybody actually know?

WAR OF THE WORLDS

Treated myself today after work to a viewing of my old VHS copy of George Pal's movie vision of HG Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS. Like The Day The Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth, there are loads of sci-fi icons in the film - the wonderful saddle-shaped alien craft with roving 'rediffusion' eyes, the wierd purring sound that the alien ships make, the desperate music and the amazing jet-wing (above) that drops A-bomb on the visitors. Like the DYNA SOAR, I love the shape of the jet-wing ( was it ever made as a toy?).

The excellent CED Magic has this to say ' War of the Worlds makes effective use of archive footage of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing when it is shown dropping an atomic bomb on the Martians. The above image appears 24:36 into Side 2 of the disc. There were only two jet-powered YB-49 aircraft built and both ceased to exist over three years before this movie was made. One plane crashed on June 5, 1948, killing all crew members including Captain Glen Edwards. The other plane broke into two following a landing gear failure on March 5, 1950 and was scraped. Edwards AFB in California, the site of many space shuttle landings, is named in honor of Capt. Edwards'. CED have a great page on WAR OF THE WORLDS too.

The film also features beautiful martian artwork by the space artist Chesley Bonestell, who actually appears in the credits.

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

I went to see the remade THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL last week. I was excited as the original 1950's version is one of my favourite sci-fi films. So much of the film is simply iconic - the world-destroying robot GORT, the silver space-ship, KLATU's completion of impossible atomic equations on the blackboard and most iconic of all, the scene where GORT is prevented from detsroyong the world with the words KLATU BARADA NICTO - a phrase I always keep handy just in case I run into the big silver guy!

Needless to say, the modern remake, as is mostly the way, was nowhere near as atmospheric, probably because it was in colour. Keanu Reeves didn't make a convincing KLATU but he tried. GORT, however, was excellent - huge, powerful and relentless - trouble is we just didn't see enough of him. MORE GORT PLEASE!

I found the above picture on the net with child star BILL MUMY clutching the original GORT head! Bill was the boy Will Robinson in the seminal 1960's LOST IN SPACE TV series.

RAGNOROCK ORBITAL INTERCEPTOR 1975

Paul - im having a trawl around for moonbase kits, found this model RAGNOROCK on Fantastic Plastic, which I used to have - it would have fitted neatly into the Probe Force series - had a lot of toy-like play value and was about the same size as PF2. Had a removeable Rocket Support Ship and Nuclear Reactor! Fab! WOTAN.