Twenty Million Reasons

Fellow monster fan EvilEd gave me the heads up on a TV airing of Twenty Million Miles To Earth this afternoon on UK TV. Loving everything about the film - the rocket and Ymir - I managed to catch the second half after work. This reminded me of the various posters and 'stills' I've put on the blog over the last few years inspired by the film, which I've grouped here.

and, my personal favourite, back in 2010 I even had a go at a short comic strip involving Ymir. GRR!

SpaceX Moon Base HQ For Sale - Take Two

Fellow toy blogger and collector Luke Toywalker, based in Berlin, had a SpaceX Moon Base HQ for sale last month you'll remember. Well that one went to a reader of this blog. Now Luke has found another one and would like to offer ot for sale. If you have an interest in owning a boxed Spacex Moon Base HQ then contact Luke direct for all the details.

Thunderbirds Movie Kits

 Thunderbirds the Movie may have been an awful movie and certainly didn't do the franchise any favours, but one thing it did manage to do well is produce some beautiful vehicle designs. If you forget for a moment that the shapes of the Thunderbirds ships that we know and love have been hauled into the real 21st century and have been drastically altered and look upon them as pure sci-fi vehicles, you can safely say they are impressive.

 Besides making toy versions of the craft, Bandai also prepared a number of kit based models, moulded in coloured plastic on a snap-together basis. While simple in construction, needing no glue and little more than a spare pare of hands for the fiddly bits, the kits do make up into rather fine - very toylike - models. Thunderbird 1 is about 15 cm long and has swing wings, variable position engines and removeable landing gear, with undercarriage doors. The clear parts and the colour elements are all cleverly produced on the same sprue, the mouldings of a lot of the parts being very comprehensive and complex, cuts down on the amount of bits needed.

TB1 also comes with a second model of itself, a mini scale model of four pieces reminiscent of the Kelloggs Anderson models of the sixties. This 4cm kit even has its own decals.

Thunderbird 2 comes in a toch smaller at around 12 cm, moulded in red and green and yellow and even at this small size, with clear plastic windows. The model doesn't shirk on detail either, the intakes and landing jets are all well detailed and the twin 'pod' bays are moveable, with the main bay including a ramp and micro model of the new Mole. The legs can be alternated with tiny covers for the holes in the hull, but these are tiny and difficult to fit in.

 Generally, the TB2 is very similar to the Deluxe toy versions that Bandai produced and a cursory glance would mistake it for same.

Thunderbird 3 is a similar length and makes up for its lack of action features by including a Thunderbird 5 stand and a sub-microscopic Thunderbird 4 at just under a centimetre! Im not sure as to the extent of the model range from Bandai as these are the only kits i've come across, but they are well worth looking for as a sci-fi kit as opposed to true Anderson memorabilia.

Dig this!

Professional model maker Kevin Davies spectacular constructions are always a delight to see and this scratchbuilt Thunderbirds Mole is no exception! Wow!

Moontrip Manchester

Missus Moonbase and I went to Manchester on Friday for a day out in the big city over the Pennines. It was raining but we still had a great time. We were keen to see Afflecks Palace again after a twenty year absence, a rabbit warren of collectables and vintage bric a brac. Besides a lick of paint and a new facade it was just the same and we had a fun hour wandering through the rooms and corridors of mostly Sixties and Seventies clothes and ornaments. There was only really one old toy dealer [the toys were old, not the dealer - hyphen alert!], which, to appeal to the hundreds of beautiful young things strolling around, was choc-ful of retro computer games.

I did enjoy seeing a set of Colourforms Outer Space Men ear-rings. The grey figures had been miniaturised really well and the highlights coloured in fine detail. Imagine wearing Orbitron and Colossus Rex in your ears! Can't find any online so they may have been hand-made. They had all Series One represented there and were £4 a pop. Outer Space Men remain a relatively unknown toy range for many Europeans but have some serious devotees in the US, from whence they hail....or was it Jupiter...or Neptune?

Space Oddity

 While I was surfing a design blog recently, I came across an ad for an injection moulding company, offering fast prototyping of plastic parts. It also had some great guidance for designing elements for injection moulding. What really caught my eye was the offer of a free demo piece - the Protomold Torus. Basically a three section doughnut moulded in transparent colored plastic, with each section showing the various connectors and bits that can be produced and an accompanying booklet to explain how and why they are made. You may wonder what the hell this has to do with space, but again, its my personal obsession with colour that attracted me and the fact that it looks like an abstract alien space station! and it was free! Result!

 Just to bring the post back to normality and with a slight nod back to aliens and colour, heres a cool new generation Dalek I picked up for 99p in a local discount store - clockwork and it whizzes about with the eyestalk waving! If you have a B & M Bargains near you, i'd get down there and start building that Dalek army!

Monster Force

Ymir

says

Come 'ere

Tonka Turbine Power

The superhighways of my future world would always be full of sleek, streamlned supercars. As a child I always assumed that carswould follow the Hot Wheels style and when I grew up, I'd be driving some low slung, metallic coloured landshark that hissed along the road with a whirr of nuclear turbines. Reality never matched my expectations, so now I like to visualise that future on a smaller scale. Besides Hot Wheels and Matchbox, the other vehicular constant in toys was Tonka. Every childs garden or backyard seemed to have at least one yellow truck left out on the lawn in all weathers, or covered in sand or dirt in a corner, waiting to be picked up and driven again like there had been no pause. Personally, I always found them a little too heavy and chunky for my tastes, favouring the smaller scale cars that I could easily team up with Airfix soldiers.

 However, before Tonka was swallowed up by other companies and began to produce less solid metal models and veered into plastic, the seventies produced several futuristic looking looking models such as the Scorchers. These simple models have an exagerrated, powerful look about them, with big thick tyres edging out to cling to the road and chrome pipes poking out from an unseen power source.

 Of the three models I have managed to find, the red vehicle has a turbine style fan at the rear, suggesting an unusual engine and power source, the cabin on all three leaning forward with a design aesthetic that gives all three models a look of speed and inherent power.

All three toys have been played with, hard and are battered and scratched, but Tonkas robust and simple construction means they are simple to take apart. Inside is a spring based engine, so that drawing back the car winds a clockwork engine, making it roll forward under its own power. The other good thing is that its a simple job to sand down the scrapes and dents and re-spray with car paint, to give a good finish.

So far, the green car has suffered the most ill treatment and I have repainted it with standard enamels, but the orange and red cars, having more complex stickers, must wait until I can make replacement decals.

An earlier and simpler Tonka car is the six wheel ATV. A slightly different scale, but a rather nice model too.
A bigger model that I am keen to find is the Crater Crawler, a chunky moon buggy that I often ran into in toy shops as a child.