Ring Out Solstice Bells

Happy Midsummer Northern Readers!

PROJECT SWORD NEWS 1: APOLLO SATURN CAKE TOPPER

Last month I acquired a bundle of cake toppers from America, which I blogged briefly at the time. I said I would talk about the rocket topper in more detail and you'll see why.

The rocket topper came with the Major Matt Mason topper [read more about this MMM item on the fab Wildtoys site] in a bag marked Create A Cake and hailing from Ohio. I believe that the shop keeper bagged them up together back in the Sixties.

The rocket itself is the reason why I got the toppers in the first place. It looked like an Apollo Saturn from Project SWORD!

The rear states the name of the maker in raised capitals: EGC, CINCINATTI OHIO, MADE IN HONG KONG, the same maker as the Major Matt Mason topper.

Initially I thought the topper was based on the Century 21 version of the Apollo Saturn from 1967 featured below [1].

But then I found this ad for the Sears 3-Stage Rocket [or Rocket Base] from their Christmas Catalogue 1966 and bingo! An almost perfect match! So, I'll stick my neck out and say the topper also dates from 1966, which makes it one year older than the C21 SWORD fleet.

[check out the HUGE Sears 1966 Catalogue yourself here - couldn't see any Major Matt in there though].

The Apollo Saturn topper is only a couple of inches tall, the same size as the SpaceX Mobile HQ.

Here it is making friends with the gang! The icing on the cake!

BLUE BOX MYSTERY MULTI-WHEELED VEHICLE

This is reader John W's mystery vehicle toy by Blue Box. Does anyone recognise it?

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO: HEAVY METAL

The latest TAG episode shown in the UK is Heavy Metal which  starts with Alan and Brains visiting the Quantum Research  Centre,  home of the Supreme Hadron Collider.

Brains meets up with his lab partner from his old Cambridge days, Professor Moffat who is carrying out research into gravitons - the superglue of the universe!

Things start to go wrong after Alan presses the start button to smash a few atoms!

There's plenty going on in this story. It's full of scientific gobbledegook and is obviously  based on the theoretical fear that the real Higgs Boson Large Hadron Collider was going to create its own Black Hole and suck everything into it when it started  crashing particles into each other.

In Heavy Metal, a gravity well is formed in the Graviton Generator,  which incidently reminds me of the spacecraft in the film Contact. This begins to suck things into it like orbital satellites and passing aircraft.

Enter International Rescue, in which all their vehicles are used, except TB 3, although a previous TB3 manuverour is used by TB 1 to get out of a tricky situation.  All the Tracy brothers have a part to play  with Gordon coming up with the final solution.
Oh,  and we see that Brains still has a crush on Prof Moffat !

The end titles do credit Elaine Kelman. which I'm assuming is the same lady who works at the Michael Palin Centre helping  children and young adults with stammering.

All in all another fun episode which will no doubt  hold the kids attention for 22 minutes.  

Sundae Sundae

When I was a kid there was a particular dessert called a Sundae. Its hard to be exact about exactly what one was but we had them on holiday, and, well, on a Sunday too. It really was quite confusing as a nipper, what with two different spellings of a word that sounded the same!

So, Sundaes. Yes. Basically I think they were  [ and are ] ice-cream with fruit or sauce or often both. The Sundaes I remember the most are Peach Melba, Banana Split and the daddy of them all, Knickerbocker Glory. With a name like that you could build empires!

Peach Melba was vanilla ice cream with peaches and some of that delicious peachy syrup from the can. It came in a half globe glass bowl on a stem. Heaven.

Banana Split was a big boat of a thing with a mountain of ice cream and whipped cream flanked by two halves of banana like two subs circling an ice berg. The whole heap was drizzled with chocolate sauce and sprinkled with chopped nuts. The entire shabang was served on a cigar shaped dish or glass bowl. Bliss.

Knickerbocker Glory, the mothership of Sundaes, came in a tall thick cut glass vase at least a foot tall. You paid handsomely for this bad boy but the pain was worth it. The Glory was layer upon layer of ice cream alternated with tinned fruit like peaches, strawberries, grapes and pear. 

The vast column was crowned with a mop of whipped cream and pomaded with nuts and raspberry sauce. A long spoon unique to the Knickerbocker was the final bit of kit. The dessert of choice at our own wedding, the Glory is quite simply the Nuclear Ferry of sweets.

All of the above concoctions of delight were liberally peppered with garnish like chopped nuts, chocolate sauce, raspberry sauce, chocolate sprinkles and hundreds and thousands in various amounts and combinations. Tinned fruit was critical and without a cut glass stemmed bowl it just wasn't a Sundae.

Great pretenders came along now and then like ice-cream floats, mixed ice, Bird's dream topping with strawberries and fools of various types, but they were misguided and everyday. Compared to Sundaes, they were, well, just fools!

What was or is your favourite Sundae or ice-cream dessert readers?

MORE ANDERCON PUPPETS

A few more photos of the many puppets that could be seen at Andercon.

Finally, a test head of the Sam Scott character from FireStorm. The finished puppet will have real hair.

SPACE ANTI-TANK GUN-TYPE TOYS

I do love this toy of Bill's, the hilariously named LUNAR DUMP. Its on of a quartet by Parks. What interest's me here is it's rear 'turret'. There's something wholly futuristic about angled turrets pointing to the sky. I suppose as well they remind me of ant-aircraft guns from WWII [is that the same as a flak gun?]. Maybe I mean retro-futuristic? Anyways. in this case the turret is actually a telescopic crane.

Another fine turret is the SpaceX LAMA or Lunar Anti-Meteorite Attacker. Based originally on Ed Valigursky's book cover for Sinister Barrier, the LAMA fires satellites for detecting meteorites.

Can you think of any more angled turrets like this readers?

ANDERCON PUPPETEERING

Unsurprisingly, there was plenty of puppets at Andercon, mainly replicas, and many with heads cast from moulds taken from original  props.

As the Athena venue had plenty of open space many of the puppets had their own  replica sets.

This highly detailed set shows Brains in a scene from Thunderbirds episode, The Cham-Cham, and was built by Andy Grishaw and Jeff Gaskell.

Another lovely recreation. Here's 'Nosey' Parker with Light-Fingered Fred doing porridge! 

This photo of Joe McClaine with the Rat Trap in the background is a set up recreating a 1993/94  Brighton display restoration courtesy of Chris Carter.

Puppeteers Judy Preece and Richard Gregory appeared on stage, showing the tricks of the trade with their puppetry demonstrations.

The highlight was a practical demonstration of the state-of-the-art puppet of Sam Scott from Anderson Entertainment's proposed new series, Fire Storm.

This remarkable puppet looks fantastic, and takes puppeteering to a whole new level.