SPACEX ART WEEK: MOLAB [AND AMERICAN MYSTERY]

Despite never having owned one as a kid or adult, the Tri-ang SpaceX MOLAB is one of my favourite SpaceX toys and I especially love the card art as pictured above. As discussed before, I believe it to have been inspired by the MOLAB cover of Rocket Stories from July 1953 by American artist Alex Schomberg seen below.

On a completely different note, I never thought that the US Golden Astronaut series of toys included a MOLAB until I read this recently on WORTH POINT from 2009:

GOLDEN ASTRONAUT - MOLAB SERIES NO. 507 DELUXE DIECAST CHASSIS

AUTHENTIC VEHICLES OF THE FUTURE

SCALED TO SPACE ENGINEERS' DRAWINGS

1970 MULTIPLE TOYMAKERS, N.Y. A DIVISION OF MINER INDUSTRIES, INC

MADE IN THE BRITISH CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG

WOW!!!! APPOX. 40 YEARS OLD AND STILL IN IT'S UNOPENED PACK, IT'S ALL IN IT'S ORIGINAL CONDITION. PRETTY COOL CAR. THIS WOULD MAKE A GREAT ADDITION TO ANYONE'S VINTAGE COLLECTION.

Alas, there is no picture included. Was there really a Golden Astronaut MOLAB?

NEWSFLASH! Mike B has kindly sent me this amazing picture he saved from Ebay . Here we the American Golden Astronaut MOLAB and it's boxed! Wow! What a fantastic toy! Is it bigger than the SpaceX one I wonder and are there any more in the die-cast chassis series? Thanks Mike! Result!

Sunday Driver

 Here we go with todays tenuous space toy link! Its a concrete but slightly off-topic one, the maker of the Minix cars being Rovex. I happened to stumble on the 'boxed' Ford Anglia pictured above last week on ebay, at a 99p start and couldn't resist. Amazingly, I won at the ridiculously low price too. Apart from small toys being a passion of mine, this little toy was a direct route down memory lane for me too. As my dad had been a big train enthusiast, these little cars had often dotted about the layout. After a quick ferret around in the box of trains in the attic, I found them.

I don't recall them arriving boxed individually, or was I ever aware of the name, I always thought of them as 'Minic' cars, a brand I associated with Tri-ang trains from the catalogues.

 The neat little models have metal alloy wheels and the name and number clearly moulded underneath with spare details. As you can see from the box, there were free gifts available by collecting tokens from the packs. The gifts were not car related - two were glider kits and the third was a 'record breakers' booklet.

 Theres quite a range of the little vehicles and the saloon cars also appear on the back of the tri-ang car transporter wagon from the train sets. After another sort in the train box, I found what I vaguely recalled to be the car transporter, but it was a Playcraft version.

The cars seated on this wagon were all continental makes such as Citroen and far inferior in construction, having a basic body shell and no windows or chrome elements.

Im sure the Minix range must have had its own catalogue, as it doesnt appear in any of the Tri-ang main catalogues and the original Minic line of toys does. Has anyone seen a Minix leaflet ?

2001: A SWORD ADVERTISING ODYSSEY

"A PROMOTIONAL and advertising campaign to boost the SWORD range of space-age toys from Century 21 Toys Ltd. is being launched throughout the country during November.

The campaign will embrace trade, provincial Press and children's comic advertising, advertising on millions of bus tickets and competitions for both retailers and consumers."

The above quote comes from Toad's fabulous blog post on SWORD's November 1968 advertising campaign. You can read the full snippet here.

I was intrigued by the word provincial and thought I'd seen it elsewhere in the blog archive. It appears in the final line of this clipping supplied by Darth back in 2008, when we first discussed SWORD advertising campaigns. The clipping is undated but we know that 2001 A Space Odyssey, which it refers to in the past tense, premiered in London on 10th May 1968 [imdb - which cinema?]. Could the advertising campaign mentioned in the top article found by Toad be the same as that described here? The dates seen to fit with it all centred on 1968.

If you've looked back at our 2008 discussion refered to above you'll have seen another trade clipping about SWORD campaigns, also found by resident detective Toad. For convenience it's re-posted in full below with the relevant SWORD bits blown up below. 

This article, also about the 2001/ SWORD tie-in, is dated June 1968, after the London premiere of 2001 in May. Despite trying I can't find a list of UK cinema showings for 2001 except for those in Cinerama, which includes Birmingham 19th January 1969 [ref. in70mm.com].

So in conclusion, is it possible that all three clippings found by Toad and Darth  refer to one single SWORD advertising campaign, albeit in different parts, during the summer and winter of 1968, centred on the London release of 2001 and spinning out to the provinces from there into shops and onto buses?

One Small Step

After all the mystery surrounding Spacex, it suddenly occurred to me that I had neglected to look at possibly one of the best toys ever made, never mind just in the space toy genre, Major Matt Mason. We've looked at the figures, as examples of fine action figure design, but the characters were just a part of the story. What really set matt Mason apart from other astronaut toys, were the accessory sets.

Look at the price scribbled in biro on the back!

Aside from being realistically designed, all the sets were practical and functional. The Moon Suit had pneumatic arms and the launching pads all sported really powerful mechanisms. The Rocket Launch Pak has a small 'mouse trap' like mechanism which could be loaded with a cap for a loud bang on impact. The Satellite Launcher is especially good, powering the propellor driven satellites high into the air and also slicing into unfortunate fingers if you happened to misfire. One of my favourites was always the Reconojet, which came with a generous amount of black nylon cord, which reached easily from an upstairs bedroom window, down into the garden!  The only downside of this was it invariably became tangled inextricably around everything when it wasn't being used. These few carded examples are from a batch I found in an old newsagents in Liverpool, during the time I was out of work. I happened to be walking by one day with my girlfriend and spotted Sgt Storm sat in the window in his cattrac. When I went in, the whole back wall was hung with almost all the accessory packs, a few Callistos and Sgt Storms and all I had was a fiver...

Old East German Space Toys Circa 1965

Got this recently in the mail bag:

Hi,

Right up your [space] alley!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/diepuppenstubensammlerin/6440551323/in/pool-1334009@N20/

cheers!

Samuel

SPACEX 37: THE MYSTERY REMAINS

Having sorted the duplication of the Moon Buggy in my SpaceX 37 gallery spotted by both Darth and Paul V, what constitutes the list of 37 toys in the SpaceX range still remains an intriguing question. Does it include, as Toad suggests, Soyuz 6 and 7 separately? Are the the Apollo and LEM sperate toys? Does it, as Paul suggests, include the two Apollo craft as one, and the two Soyuz craft as two? Or does it perhaps include the 2 Moon Base boxed sets?

In an attempt to shed some further light on this I've had a look at some of the other adverts and articles I have in my archives, courtesy of the ever-helpful Toad and Will Osborne.

The top picture could suggest that 1970's LEM and Apollo were two separate toys given that the names are divided by a slash.

The next pictures of 15 Spacex I vehicles doesn't really help, although it does perhaps suggest that less than half of the 37 toys were available in summer 1969.

The third and fourth pictures [the fourth being an extract of the third] don't mention the number of toys available in Summer 1969. However it does introduce the concept of SpaceX Major i.e. the Nuclear Pulse, MLP and Moon Base HQ. Are these all part of the 37 total toys? Is SpaceX Major mentioned anywhere else?

Interestingly the article does suggest that four times as many SpaceX toys were being sold outside the UK as within it. No wonder there's currently so many turning up online in Canada!

2001 THE LOST SCIENCE BOOK AVAILABLE

Hi Paul, the 2001 book and DVD is now available here. It's getting great reviews from the people who've seen it. We're not selling it via Amazon. So only place to get it is from ebay or our website. I did all the animations for the movie and website.
Cheers
Darth

Do You Remember Sectaurs?

Hi Paul,

I've been a fan of your blog for awhile, after stumbling upon it a few months ago. Thanks for the great content! We [Nannynet] recently published an article “10 Awesome Kids Toys from the 1980’s That Disappeared” that you may be interested in sharing with your readers.

Here's the link on Nannynet .

Regards,

Debbie Denard