Sunday Stroll

Just walked a few miles in the Autumn sunshine around Stanley Ferry marina and canal with Missus Moonbase. Very pleasant. There were lots of beautiful houseboats moored up, which inevitabley make you think of a new life away from the crowds slowly meandering along still waterways. Will this canal romance last another hundred years or will new techno networks fill our dreams. In 1981 the great Japanese Sci Fi artist Shigeru Komatsuzaki was dreaming about trains travellling the 93 millions miles on his moonline!

Ten years before Harry Harrison spanned that similar void, the 'Pond', with his undersea railway in 'A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah' painted here on the cover for Analog in 1972 by the great Kelly Freas. I love the fish welders and the T in a Circle tunnel! Apparently the story can be seen as one of the roots of steampunk. Anyone know what that is in simple english?

Funny, the word steampunk makes me think of steam-driven things and tank girl. I used to listen to Steamhammer and String Driven Thing, when I was a headbanger but I digress. Can regular space vehicles be steamed or punked-up 'Pimp My Ride' style? Steampimped even! How about the standard Lunar Climber, in this case the Paramount Astro Car pictured here below?

Maybe flatten the wheels, add a drill-bit

and a cool blue paint job....

Or maybe inflate the tyres, beef-up the body

and stick some guns at each end

...eh voila, SWORDpunk! A whole new sub-genre! Needs a definition and it's first short story! Anyone?

Saturday Night Fever

Nearly midnight at Moonbase. The hairs on the back of my neck are still stood up after a particular chilling end to tonight's repeat episode of the Crooked House ghost stories on BBC4. I nearly spilt my bowl of pea and ham soup [late tea!]. That Mark Gatiss really does get all the plum jobs. I'm so jealous! He's even presenting a History of Horror Films on Monday night [9pm BBC4]. You can tell Halloween is fast approaching. It's going to be ghoulish!

I've been browsing through Ebay and saw this plastic Flash Gordon Battle Rocket made by Nasta dated 1976. There's something about its shape that reminds of the T in a Circle Space Vehicle [bottom picture]. You might even say its cheap and nasta! [groan!]

Having checked out this Flash Gordon toy at the excellent Mongo Museum it would appear that Nasta made two types, both of which still remind me of the T toy. I wonder if Nasta got hold of the moulds? Without a better picture of the Battle Rocket out of the bubble box it's impossibe to check the likeness further. Anyone got the Flash toy?

Now watching The Getaway from 1972 with the cooler king himself, Steve McQueen and the timeless Ali McGraw. In need of cheesecake I must bathe in the cold light of the fridge and partake in a slice. Yumm. I was also intrigued by another ebaying tonight, these Space Art Fantastic trading cards from the early 1990's. What excited me was the appearance of one of Robert McCall's LIFE/ Look and Learn images. Wonder what else is in there? Anyone got this set?

As Zebedee would say, time for bed!

Summer SWORD Art Competition Results

First Prize

 Shaqui Le Vesconte

'Project SWORD' comic strip

Joint Runners-Up [in alphabetical order]:

Andy Boyce

Probe Force 1 Launch

London Space base

Bill Bulloch [WOTAN]

Nuclear Family

Mike Burrows

Nuclear Pulse

The 2010 Summer SWORD art compo results are in. Alan Shubrook, Century 21 model maker, kindly agreed to judge the entries and the results are shown above. Alan thought the standard was very high overall and liked all the entries, but in the end he chose Shaqui's 'comic strip' for a well-deserved First Prize of a signed copy of Alan's Century 21 FX Unseen Untold book about his time as a model maker with C21 in the late 1960's and early 70's. Well done to Shaqui and to the joint runners-up too: Andy, Bill and Mike.

For my own part I enjoyed running the compo very much and would like to thank everyone to took time out to enter, artists all! I would also like to say a huge thank you to Alan Shunbrook for being such a good sport judging the comp and providing such a fab First Prize. I hope to be able to thank him personally at the upcoming TV21 con in Bristol this month!

Ridiculous to the Sublime

It's a winding, circuitous trail looking into the past background of an already old toy design. Its a little like archaeology - you find a remnant of some lost age and begin to piece back together its history. It can be difficult sometimes as information proves difficult to find, but its always rewarding. A lot of the time its a matter of extrapolation and guesswork, as anyone directly involved with the subject is uncontactable for some reason, or evidence no longer exists and has dissolved into the ephemeral years.

 

Digging about amongst the reams of information still available sometimes reveals other nuggets of info, not necessarily connected to an initial search, but extremely useful nonetheless.

One such example is the Scramble Bug. Previously, ive suggested that one source of inspiration for the radical, balloon tyred vehicle may have come from General Motors Futurama display in New Yorks World Fair back in 64.

  

This streamlined beauty used spherical wheels instead of the now familiar tyres we know from the toy, but the articulated body and three axle layout is certainly akin to the Century 21 craft.

 

Although the GM show at Futurama was intended as a speculative look at the far future, the technologies suggested arose from products already in development. While I was researching another line of enquiry recently, I came across another General Motors concept for a Lunar Rover - this time a working model designed to test out a spherical wheel and articulated chassis on a simulated lunar terrain. Although much simpler in form than the Futurama model, this design from 1961 again mirrors the familiar form of its later cousins.

 The articulated, balloon tyred vehicle was a favourite concept for engineers and aerospace designers looking to find a way to transport men and materials across a largely unknown, potentially treacherous, terrain. Until it was realised that weight at takeoff was a major issue and the ubiquitous lunar dust could be a serious problem, some quite large wheeled vehicle concepts were proposed.

  

Unfortunately, budgetary constraints, engineering hurdles and a general lack of interest in going back to the moon derailed any further development of lunar rovers after the later Apollo missions and the moon crawlers, molabs and moon buggies dreamed of in the early sixties never really rolled off the drawing board.

Booster Rocket Dateline pushed back further

Immediately following my blogging of the model Booster Rocket seen in the 1961 exposition in New York, blog reader Barry spotted and clarified the identity of the vehicle in question as being the NASA Lewis Research Center Mars Spacecraft. A quick search onthe net revealed an extended article on the craft and a date of 1960 attached to the program, pushing it back by another year from the original supposed inspiration for the toy of around 1963.


Astronautix has a complete background to the ship and also describes the earth return vehicle as being a 'delta winged' craft, not seen on the model or the diagram above. The later model of the Booster Rocket shown in Dandridge Coles book - Beyond Tomorrow (thanks Nyrath!) shows a vehicle much more familiar in shape to the toys which eventually appeared some years later.

Estrella Anyone?

Continuing WOTE's Booster Rocket theme I was pleased to see again the Booster on the top left of this robot box. I've blogged about this bot before, which I call the SWORDbot, but is actually called the ESTRELLA ROBO TV. I'm not a robot collector but it's interesting to see one of these on Ebay US at the mo, as I understand they are scarce. I'd love a pic of the box lid top and sides close up and even more a video of the TV screen rolling, which features Valigursky's MEV a la Spacex no less!

Stand By For the JR21 Thunderbird 1 by Jim Lewis

The friction drive Thunderbird 1 from JR21 toys is one of the lesser seen toys in the Rosenthal range nowadays. Despite being sold in two versions, with alternate colour schemes, the remote control version appears with far more frequency in decent condition surprisingly. This very fragile toy really never was likely to survive the rigours of rescue missions with a 4 or 5 year old controlling things. Even the example seen here has a rear fin which came off in my adult hands and only carefully applied glue holds it in place.

The general shape of the toy is pretty close to what children would have recognised from the show itself and the friction drive and 'variable wing movement' facility offered kids some play value but the bottom line is that it really wasn't best toy ever put out by JR21 Toys in the opinion of many. Strangely enough though the blue body version of this toy actually appeared in an episode of THUNDERBIRDS itself when Jeff Tracy acts as Santa Claus in 'Give Or Take A Million'.

I often puzzle over why, to me anyway, this looks very dated and old fashioned when compared to other toys in the JR21 THUNDERBIRDS range. Something about the colour or construction. I really can't put my finger on it myself. Maybe it's just me? Despite the flaws this toy is highly sought in boxed decent condition and I feel privileged to own one.

Jim Lewis.

Batman Flew My Glider Home

That final shot of my SWORD fleet the other day, Moonships and all, got me thinking about the very first bits and bobs I 'collected' back at the start of the Nineties! I had just left my twenties behind and landed a cool job in Leeds. And then I discovered old toys like the one's I had as a kid! It was a revelation. They were exciting times. Everything was new to me - Model Mart, Toy Fairs and the amazing Toy Shop Newspaper. Aaah! Happy days. The first thingy I ever found, which kicked my bug off, was a battered dinky SPV in a junk shop round here called The Anything Shop. Spirit duely fired I went to my fist evening toy meet in Normanton and found, wonder of wonders, my first SWORD vehicle! A boxed Space Glider [aka 'The Spark'], pictured above, which cost me the princely sum of £27. We were together again after 23 years! My collecting tastes were very wide at the start, a regular corvid was I much to my better half's irritation, as we lived in the smallest house in the world! Mucho Batman, KAPOW!, and any space debris I could find came home with me. It was heaven finding cheap stuff - all junk shops, jumble sales, charity shops and the occasional toy fair bargain. I remember my first Model Mart 'mail order' item [ a decade before Ebay in the UK] was the mint bubble boxed Corgi Juniors Batmobile [bottom pic in the centre]. I opened it on the 7.30am bus going to work in Wakefield. Sheer bliss! It was from a pioneer of mail order vintage toys, TV Toy Zone, who issued beautiful toy catalogues full of Anderson and TV related wonders. Sadly they moved into modern action figures when they became the more swish Toy Heroes.

Alas, I don't have any of the stuff pictured anymore [all swapped and flogged] except the SWORD Glider [old 'Sparky'] and Annual. I never knew at the time that the wingless rocket in front of the Glider was probably a Blue Box Space Rocket or similar, which we've featured on't blog many times. The photo's were taken by a photography friend of mine at the time - a proper camera with film, light meter and flash! I've scanned them for your viewing pleasure.

Pictures of anyone else's early [or current] collections are always welcome for posting here on the moonblog.