Red Treads

Russian cyberspace toys.

Soviet cool!

It's Bugging Me

 A little while ago I managed to acquire a small Tomy Moon Buggy with 8 wheels. Its part of an ongoing love affair I have with these type of toys and ive blogged a series of articles about them before.

Just recently, the Philosophic Toad uncovered a cool little article from an issue of the TV Times with a mail in offer for one of these little beauties. Its dated 22nd November 1969 so it makes my assumption that the toys were a lot later than that false. A copy of the bigger vehicle in the upper picture is currently for sale on ebay and well worth a look!

Pulp Fiction

Russian Moon Base 1961

with pipe-hauling Bug, dozer Ranger and Sidewinder-esque legged rover.

Stills from Russian Film 'Planeta Bur'

German pulp novel ' Moon Town'

More German Pulps

World of Terror and Day Zero

Lunar Parks

Our friend the Lunar Rocket Ship, this time by Park Plastics of New Jersey. Did they do any more space toys? [pictures; Ebay]

WOTAN BUTTS IN AGAIN:

Parks made a number of air/water powered rockets too like the Merit Lunar Rocket. A polythene rocket is pumped up with compressed air after addind a little water and the water is ejected shooting the rocket high in the sky.

I also came across these cool Moon Vehicles some while ago and subsequently found a packaged version called the Lunar Dump. Nice.

Bootiful

I actually went to the local Car Boot sale on Sunday now that the weather is better. The day's catch included a large nice Fisher Price Alpha Probe, the cricket-lookalike Rocket Launcher, Willy Ley's book By Spaceship to the Moon and 1970's books The Pentateuch and Mysterious Britian. Not a huge hawl but not bad. Not pictured are twenty Big Box VHS video's picked up for a fiver. Anyone else started Car booting or Yard Saleing this year yet?

Small is Beautiful

I'm always on the lookout for miniature lookalikes of SWORD craft, especially ones not yet found in the cool mini fleet from Japan tracked down by toyhounds Terry and Wote. So I was chuffed to chuffington when I saw these wunderbar little Saturn Fives in an old Cragstan game called Ring-A-Rocket on fleadlebay. Not perfect I know and it's hard to be sure of their size but they might just do until the real thing turn up! Below are the same in detail.

On a similarly diminutive note here we have a small lot of missiles and rockets courtesy of fleabay. Notice the white deltoid winged craft bottom right? Probe Force One-esque perhaps? I love the little red Gemini capsule. And Lo! is that a push-down pen clicker I see to the right!?

And I couldn't not include this fleabay bundle of fun with the cool Thunderbird 3 half-sister on the right! hey, what's that Gnome doing in there?$5^! Maybe that's his Hot Rod?

Finally we have a couple more modern miniature plastic playthings, which just have SPACEX written allover them!

Eh, Voila!

The Fantastic Art of Adrian Kleinbergen

These fabulous illustrations are shown with the kind permission of the artist, Adrian Kleinbergen. Adrian cites the TV shows of Gerry Anderson as one of his influences. I'm sure you'll agree that the results are simply wonderful. You can see many more of Adrian's artworks online here. Wow!

More Moon Patrol

Pictures: online