All Fired up

Well its sunday evening and as I don't want Woodsy to risk taking the laptop into the bath, im adding an extra piece on the Pyro Mania thread!

After I spotted the photo of the Space Control Tower in the Blast Off book, see earlier update, Arto sent me more pics and some commentary on the Pyro/Tudor Rose connection.

"Your recent posting on Pyro opened a veritable Pandora's Box for me as this Pyro / Kleeware / Tudor Rose has been a kind of underground project for me, boosted by the two Atomic Space Ships by Tudor Rose found (see pics), a model which seems to be their own UK addition to the Pyro fleet. Tudor Rose borrowed the other molds of the X-range from Pyro, as has been investigated by the super collector Lester J. Harrison.

There is a better picture of the Space City Control Tower at Alphadrome database http://danefield.com/alpha/forums/topic/11751-tudor-rose-spaceships-x-200-and-the-control-tower/ But it gets even better! There is a killer Batman version of the same. A couple of those were auctioned last year for about £800+ a piece. I cannot seem to find any pictures of it online anymore, (but im sure someone will have one for us Arto).

The great thing about blogging is the almost instantaneous response from readers. Andy also sent me a shot of Tudor Rose Space Control Tower box artwork too!

Woodsy chips in! - here's the Tudor Rose Batman Control Station box too. The toy itself is the same as the Control Tower I think.

Pyro Mania

Ed 'Ice' Bergs fabulous golden age space fleet is a welcome change to the modern style ships we feature on the blog usually. Nuclear engines and bulky fuselages make way for elegant, streamlined ships with an art deco grace about them. I never really encountered any of these toys as a child, although I did have one or two Tudor Rose spacemen. When I posted the first part of Eds article here, it sparked a short debate about the Pyro X 200 ships at the rear of the shot. Arto queried whether the belly of the ships was made to fit onto another toy, the Tudor Rose Space City Control Tower, seen here, courtesy of Vectis.

Ive never seen a toy like this and neither had Ed! Presumably, the wire rods fit into the yellow section on top and the clockwork motor rotates them around the tower. (Arto feel free to corrrect this assumption!). The box artwork is stunning! Eds X-200 ships are made by Pyro and lack the square box arrangement beneath the ships and have standard undercarriage as he shows here:

 So can we assume that Tudor Rose re-tooled the original Pyro ship moulds to accommodate the box that holds the wire in place ? Does anyone have one of these fabulous Tower toys ? If you are interested in the golden age toys of Pyro and Tudor Rose, you could do no better than to invest in Mark Youngs wonderful book, Blast Off! A colourful and informative tour of early space toys such as Marx, Pyro, Tudor Rose etc and covering Giant, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon models.

Stop Press: Spurred on by all this talk of Pyro, I had a look in my copy of Blast Off! and there was a nice picture of the Space Control Tower, with ships in place!

Theme Work

To celebrate Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom having been on the box yesterday I wondered if I might challenge readers to the theme tune test!

OK, the test goes like this: hum the following movie theme tunes one after the other without pausing [well, OK, you can pause for breath]: Indiana Jones, Superman and finish with Star Wars. Easy! Try it on your friends!

I have been pondering over a possible fourth theme tune to add to the test. Any ideas?

Bath Time Toy Time

Bath time in the Sixties was always fun as a kid. For some reason I associate it with Sunday evenings. Maybe I had one bath a week! Phew! The fun came in the form of lots of bath toys mixed with tons of bubble bath in what I recall as being a incredibley deep tub. Or was just so small!

Any toy with a whiff of submersibility was chucked in the water but my favourite toys were the wonderful metal-booted Action Man Deep Sea Diver, the  rubbery shark from the Action Man underwater [?] set, the orange explorer boat from another Action Man set and swimming furiously through them all, the Billy Blastoff diver. Good clean fun!

What are your favourite bath time toys?

SPACEX MOONBASE HQ FOR SALE

Berlin collector and all-round nice chap Luke Toywalker has yet another SpaceX Moonbase HQ available to purchase. If you would like to find out more please get in touch with Luke direct here and mention the Moonbase blog. Thanks.

MODEL CITIZEN

 Scratchbuilding and modelling maestro has just sent me these shots of his latest creation, a 22" Eagle Transporter. Kev says its built with plasticard, tubing and one or two bits culled from Ebay. Look upon his works ye mighty and be amazed!

No Email

Alas, my IT woe's continue. My laptop is at the doctors awaiting a bypass. The hotmail account I have been using for emails, on Missus Moonbase's PC, now refuses to let me sign in. So Wote et al, as of this morning, I have lost ALL email access for the time being. I am now going to find a crater near moonbase and jump in.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm now accessing emails again. The PC's date was wrong, which prevented email access! Doh!

FULL CIRCLE: BILL EARLE'S SPECTRUM ATOMIC AIRCRAFT CARRIER SAILS BACK TO THE BLOG IN COLOUR

Below is the Captain Scarlet Specification Sheet

Front in colour and back in black and white

Back at the very start of the blog in 2008 the first real discussion we had was about the existence of an toy atomic aircraft carrier Wotan had seen in a shop window as a wee boy. Along the way we savoured the delights of the Spectrum Aircraft Carrier kit by Paramount described by one Bill Earle in an old old SiG article reproduced online. Having returned to this cool topic from time to time over the years [e.g. 2011] I'm super pleased to say that Bill has made contact and supplied us with the above fabulous new images of his terrific Spectrum Atomic Carrier for us to drool over. Bill is also in the midst of a grand quest to locate lost Andersonalia and wonders if anyone can help. I'll let Bill take up the fascinating story himself........

Hi Woodsy

I noticed your March 11, 2011 commentary concerning the Spectrum Atomic Powered Carrier in Project SWORD Moonbase Central and felt it was about time I made contact.

Attached are images showing my assembled and unassembled examples of the original Paramount kit; the associated page from the 1969-70 Paramount Hobby Kit catalogue; the assembled IMAI model; and two different examples of the 1968 Komatsuzaki Shigeru artwork. Although I can't prove it, I feel that this craft is based on an early rejected concept for Spectrum headquarters just as the early concept for the Mysteronized Captain Scarlet as a mechanical man was also rejected in favor of a flesh & blood human being. The majority of Gerry Anderson's creations went through a series of incarnations before settling on the one which fans remember. Should you wish to discover more concerning the Atomic Carrier, my best suggestion would be to attempt to have translated the Japanese text associated with the three illustrations.

After a lifetime of collecting Anderson memorabilia, I have found examples of the original specification sheets to Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and The Secret Service. In the case of Captain Scarlet, I've been able to locate only the small monochrome edition. The 23 by 36 inch original colour version has thus far eluded me. As contributor "pod7", I have recently been making related submissions to Fanderson Forum, beginning about half way down page 3 here . My hope is that some reader will respond, leading to my acquiring some high resolution stills, scans or an original Captain Scarlet specification sheet itself.

 All the best! FAB and SIG
Bill Earle

Please let me know of you can assist Bill in his epic quest. Thanks, Woodsy

POSTSCRIPT: Toy hound Terry has spotted the Imai boxed version currently gracing yahoo Japan. Note the C21 gold sticker. Thanks Terry.