Its a slow day on Mars as a seasonal storm obscures the view across the
plains. Having seen a few robots and also a couple of Kinder toys grace
the moonbase blog, I was reminded of the small store of similar toys in
the Cydonia archives. I may have blogged these in passing relative to
similar toys but i felt they merited a closer look.
The four robots are made by Giodi, a company that makes a lot of the Kinder toys and similar novelties. They share a lot of the parts of the blue and white space model series of spacecraft and moon buggies. As far as I am aware there are only four, but i would be interested to see if there are others. At the time I bought them at retail in the eighties, there were just these available. Each has lever operated arms.
Ive always loved little toys like this and miss finding premiums in
cereal and inside xmas crackers. Nowadays the safety police have clamped
down on small novelties in kids cereal and its rare to find anything
with 'small parts' falling out of a packet. Kinder Eggs occasionally
reveal a real treat of a novelty gift, although the best items appear
on the continent rather than in the UK, where we seem to get the single
piece cartoon figures of penguins, hippos and other tat.
Kinder released a great series of models for the FerreroAir series, which transformed the plastic pods into planes and added a series of support vehicles.
I picked up a small selection of the vehicles on Ebay Germany a while back including the tiny fururistic tanker, crash tender, van and cargo handler.
Along with the tanker came another version of the truck with a really neat mini-sub on the back.
Less than an inch long the detachable sub even floats! Long before I found Kinder eggs I got a couple of odd kit based premiums, most of which have long gone, but one still survives - this odd looking Moon Bus type vehicle. Made of plastic and quite roughly molded, it has opening doors and rolling wheels. The other models I had included a space train and a rocket. Anyone recognise it ?
