Continuing the Philosophic Toad's brilliant entries for the Timeline, courtesy of Shaqui Le Vesconte, here are 4 pages of Special Agent 21 from the May 1966 TV21 showing early drawings of the P3 Helicopter, which later became the SPACEX toy. Excellent!
Hi Paul,
I was intrigued by the Sword/ Spacex timeline on the blog.
I thought I'd add a few things to the list. I suppose it should be worth
mentioning the Lockheed Moonbase from 1962 which so inspired
the people behind Spacex, that they just put a picture of that on the
back of the bubblepack cards instead of the actual model. As the back
of bubblepack declared, "authentic designs created by scientists in man's
quest to reach the moon and beyond ", but of course as we know, it wasn't
just scientists who had their designs plundered...
One or two blog readers might be interested in a few other Spacex
inspirations from TV21 not mentioned on the list;
In issue 72,
a Fireball XL5 strip drawn by Mike Noble clearly shows Nuclear
Freighter NF2 (or something very much like it) being attacked and boarded.
In issue 87, A piece of artwork, drawn by Eric Eden shows
Tractor T-5 pulling a Viking long boat.( Although, to be fair Eric may
have been inspired by Eddie Houseman's tractor in the Thunderbirds episode
'End Of The Road' ).
In issue 97, and another Mike Noble
Fireball XL5 strip, we see what must be the basic design for Forklift 7.
The main difference being that Noble's design is a hovercraft type vehicle, as
opposed to the wheeled version we are familar with.
Finally,
leaving the TV21 inspired toys which only seemed to influence Spacex stage one
toys, I move on to Spacex II models, which to be honest, I only really found out
about after reading the blog, so my knowledge of them and their designs are
fairly limited. However, after seeing a picture of one Spacex II toy, the
L.T.10 , I recognized it as the asteriod shuttle in the Japanese
film The Green Slime.(1968).
Cheers, Mike
Here's the first of what I imagine will be a fabulous new album of pictures of the awesome Century 21 Nuclear Ferry from one lucky blog reader. It looks simply wonderful. I definately didn't have one when I was a kid - my 'trump card' was Zero-X. I wonder how many of these were actually sold in the UK? I imagine very few indeed. The last two seen on the Net were both located in the Far East. Perhaps they were a warehouse find? This makes sense when you read this Hong Kong Ebay US seller's description of his Dyna Soar currently for sale: Rare old stock found in my warehouse. 60's made in Hong Kong
for Century 21 Toys Limited plastic series.
I cried too Darth! Love the Dyna Soar model. A similar one, unsigned, ended on Ebay US recently.Well Paul I cried myself to sleep. I got knocked out of the Nuclear Ferry thing
in the last thirty seconds. I sure hope that at the very least it went to one of
the people who frequent your site and not just some dealer somewhere. If I had
won it I was going to send it to Bob McCall and have him sign it. Anyway,
attached are some pics for you. This is a Dyna-Soar model cast at the Boeing
machine shop in Seattle from the original final design from 1963. As you can see
it has been rather nicely stuck on an oak stand that looks exactly like the
stand used when they rolled out the real full size prototype in Las Vegas back
in the early 60s. It's also signed by a Dyna Soar test pilot.
