The Triang Zone: Shoot to Thrill

Christmas was always an exciting time for me and Xmas 1968 was no exception. Tucked under the tree that year amongst other goodies was a large low box with one of the most innovative and fun toys I ever had as a child. Evidently chosen by my dad as I had never seen it before, the Triang Shoot or Surrender! set was the perfect accompaniment for carpet wars.

Inside the box was (what seemed to my small hands) a huge remote control tank, loosely based on the Churchill. Named the Wildcat, it had a big clumsy looking wired handheld control which looked very much like an army field radio. The chunky, important looking switches had a very practical look to them and allowed the tank to move back and to and turn left and right. A grenade style pull ring activated the missiles. The whole control system had obviously been carefully designed to look and feel as militarily functional as possible and worked like a dream. I was able to hide about three feet away from the tank behind a barricade of cushions and slowly approach the target.

The target in question was a cool Anti Tank Gun, which being a Triang product, used the chunky rocket from the BattleSpace Rocket Launcher wagon. This used a powerful spring driven mechanism with a plastic missile with heavy rubber tip. The gun itself followed standard field gun lines, except for the missile and could be elevated and lowered by means of a small geared mechanism allowing very precise aiming. Precision was the order of the day as the idea of the game was to knock out your opponent before he did. With the antitank gun, this was achieved by taking a hit on the square shield on the front of the gun, which would then fall forward, disabling the rocket mechanism. The tank had a slightly upper hand in that it had three missiles at its disposal, again rubber tipped, but not quite as powerful.

Just beneath the row of missiles on the tank turret was a small rectangular plate that served as a switch. If the red rocket struck the plate, it pushed back a connection inside the body, releasing a sprung figure in the front of the tank and flipping off the front cover panel. The figure popped up, arms raised in surrender. The clever part of this arrangement was a metal contact on the drivers helmet which completed the electric circuit and when released, immobilised the tank.

The mucho resourceful Philosophic Toad discovered the page above from a 1968 Boys World annual (the same edition which held the Pleasure Cruiser origin) which shows the toy to great effect. The tank itself was also made available as a stand alone item as the Super 7 Action Tank as seen on this pic from Ebay.

 

My original tank was so well played with that it eventually gave up the ghost. The rubber tipped missiles perish easily and I have only managed to preserve one of the Anti Tank rockets along with most of the gun. However, the tanks do appear on ebay regularly and I bough a 'fixer-upper' recently, which had replaced the ring pull on the handset with a sliding switch. Again the tank featured the same logo as the Minic Missile Tank, a mushroom cloud with lightning bolt. The gun has a small logo with an exploding tank featured on it.

Incidentally, I know I have intentionally left the hyphen out of the word Tri-ang throughout this series of articles, this is out of pure laziness and reasons of ecomomy of time and not a typo!

The Triang Zone: Moving with the Times

In the first post we saw Triang toys begin to expand from simple dolls and prams into areas such as Minic vehicles and other wider appeal toys. As the company entered the 1960's, the zeitgeist once more saw the shadows of war and conflict appearing in the global culture as well as the nascent space race capturing the publics attention. The first man in space had briefly orbited the Earth and the race to reach the Moon had begun. Toys naturally reflected the cultural trends of the day and jet planes, tanks and rockets began to appear in abundance in the Boys toy sections of stores. The threat of cold war meant that missiles and rockets appeared as toys and models, Americas involvement in Vietnam highlighting their profile considerably.

The 1961 Triang catalogue had the usual fare of dolls, prams and the full range of Minic models, but was now joined by FROG model kits of Nike Hercules ground to air missiles and the ONTOS vehicle with six recoilless rifle missile launchers strapped to its armoured sides. The Minic range which had formerly included the WWII Sherman tank opted for a more up to date version of the classic machine - the Rocket Firing Tank. Ostensibly a Sherman with a new turret, the futuristic looking monster also featured a newer logo which had crept in towards the end of the run of the older Sherman, a mushroom cloud overlaid with an ominous red lightning bolt.

The Tank itself was essentially, the Sherman chassis - the original mold had been retooled slightly to add a large panel just behind the turret and some work on the upper surface to admit the bigger steel dome. The turret sported four metal barrels and an integral mechanism to elevate them. The missiles themselves were more like harpoons as the majority of the body of the missile had to reach deep inside the turret to the firing spring.

 

I had originally seen the Missile tank in the catalogue long before I saw the Sherman and had been immediately impressed by it. Not long after buying the Sherman on Ebay, a 'spares or repair' model of the missile tank appeared and I was able to buy it. It was missing the missiles and box and the motor was in worse shape than the earlier tank, but after a lick of paint and some cosmetic fixes, it displays quite well. Below is shown a more complete version on ebay, the missiles tended to have rubber tips which were prone to perishing with age, so after forty odd years, its unlikely that I will find any now!

The Triang Zone: Tanks for the Memory

Back in the late 1950's, some years before I was born, my dad began a small work which I would years later, take up. He had always been a keen railway enthusiast and collected magazines and books, made models and copied copious details on the various rolling stocks of the UK in volumes of notebooks. When in 1962, I was born, he must have realised that here was a crying, squealing excuse to start buying toys and model trains for my futurity, but more importantly, for his own enjoyment. Whilst touring the model shops and toy stores, he picked up reams of catalogues and leaflets, storing them away in a cupboard at home. Thanks to his magpie instinct, I have been left now, some ten years after his passing, with an invaluable archive of ephemeral paperwork. He would often let me browse through the box of old Airfix, Matchbox and Hornby catalogues as a boy, but it was only when I had unrestricted access to the books that I began to discover the less obvious inclusions in the collection.

One noteable item is the apparently diminutive Triang Minic catalogue. Just about 3" high and about 1.5" when folded, it opens out into a concertina arrangement of panels showing the whole Minic Clockwork range.

 The early range of toys covers all manner of cars and vehicles and the catalogue also shows some of Triangs early plastic toys such as the Jabberwocky, Loch Ness Monster and Spider.

As a boy, besides space toys and rockets, I also loved Army vehicles. The Minic range included a small armoured car and a Sherman Tank. As I was not familiar with the old Minic toys, I assumed that the majority would be small clockwork models in the vein of similar clockwork tanks I had as a boy. A few years ago, I found a Minic Sherman advertised on ebay for a few pounds and bought it. It was only when it arrived, that I discovered to my surprise that it was in fact a huge, weighty toy - some eight inches long with a mighty clockwork motor and a bellows arrangement inside that blew powdery smoke. The model I bought had damage to the motor and the main spring had burst open the body and was in bad repair, but it also came with a dilapidated box too.

Shortly after I found a later version of the tank too with an eye to make one whole working version, but I only managed to recover the tracks.

On further inspection of Triang catalogues from the beginning of the sixties, I noticed that the tank was a regular feature each Christmas.

This undated catalogue (presumably 1958-1960) has some wonderful monochrome illustrations of the toys and also includes Triangs very first foray into the space theme, the tinplate and plastic 'Space Cruiser'. This carried a flying propellor on the back in the style of the much later Nuclear Pulse. Also visible on the page are vehicles from the 'Push and Go' series such as the aeroplane transporter and Missile Carrier.

The last catalogue shown here certainly displays the variety of toys made by Lines Bros at the time, everything from the new Comet Airliner to a clockwork Crab! Its interesting to note that early releases of the Sherman Tank have a standard US Army star on the turret, but the later release shown in the Xmas special brochure above, designed to promote a dedicated TV commercial on the new medium, shows a different 'atomic' style logo. This logo would appear again on several other toys as we shall see shortly.

Hot List 1967

Sorting through boxes of old catalogues while preparing a series of articles for the forthcoming Triang Zone, I found some of my old Hot Wheels paperwork and rediscovered that childhood thrill that I always got while seeing the extravagancies of automobile design produced by Mattel in the mid sixties. The small catalogue that came with the boxed sets had cool illustrations of the first line of cars, simple line and wash drawings that really didn't do justice to the actual cars, but still looked wonderful in their almost futuristic economy of line.

Later still I got a large format A4 catalogue of Hot Wheels Racing World which showed the extended ranges of cars and tracks including the limited release Heavyweights and electrically powered Sizzzlers.
The listing for the standard Redlines always made me drool with expectation of my next purchase, but sadly my collection never really expanded beyond one or two cars.

The short lived Heavyweights range remind me of the General Motors cargo hauler design 'Bison 1' from the Futurama II display at the New York Worlds Fair back in 1964. Which brings me back to the perennial question as to why long distance and heavy haulage trucks are always so un-aerodynamic and boxy when fuel economy and efficiency must be an important consideration in design ?

Pass Me My Harpoon Gun Mish Moneypenny

These fabulous 007 toys, part of the spy craze that ran in tandem with the space craze in the 60's, belong to supercollector Ferryman. He explains that both toys were based on existing ray gun tooling with barrel and butt attachments. The Lone Star one (top 3 pics) is well known for having made various appearances as Dalek and Star Trek guns over the years. The smaller gun (with black body) is less frequently seen but its original form appears to be heavily by the Lone Star Dan Dare gun. The smaller gun has no makers name on it and simply says made in Hong Kong. The bottom picture is a comparison of both. Awesome! Thanks for sharing Ferryman.

The Triang Zone

Over the next day or so ill look at one or two salient Triang toys and their connections with various themes and other toys. I've a load of Triang catalogues showing some of the early toys made by the manufacturer, but I will focus initially on a certain theme. Not necessarily a space or sci-fi related toy, but something that links in to the general genre that we have seen on the blog previously. Do not adjust your set. I will control the vertical, I will control the horizontal... imagine a world we will call the Triang Zone..

Nova Squadron's Return

Tarheel Nova II toy and not so great photoshoppery [I'm sure you can do better readers!]

The toy is very much like the Stiletto X3 experimental plane.

Are there any other X3 or X3-based toys or models out there?

Wow! The Zero X Theme Song

There aren't many opportunities to say that SWORD made it onto vinyl. Randy Rayder's stories about his Probe Force 1- doppelganger Athena just scrape in on the basis of the cover art. But this is the real deal, the Zero-X Theme from the 1966 film Thunderbirds Are Go courtesy of You Tube! Get your Zero-X out [well maybe just the MEV!] and wave it about to it: the majestic Barry Gray orchestral version and the Shadows instrumental version [starts at 2.05 minutes]. Can we agree that this is the SWORD theme from now on?