LUNAR TOAST

Me n Missus Moonbase are celebrating 31 years wedlock today. We docked all those years ago and the seal is still air-tight!

Raise a Zero-G glass with us as we look to the future this wunderbaren lunar day.

X-80 SPACE CAPSULE TOY HEADER CARD ART

I saw this the other week on a Japanese auction site. It looks like a sort of astronaut puppet perhaps. The thing which intrigued me was the red and yellow space capsule on the right of the header. I knew I'd seen it before. And here it is, on another Japanese header, somewhat SWORDy too!

They both look like this X-Series toy space capsule art, the X-80:

KEV'S ZERO X SCRATCHBIULD: THE NOSE CONE

Hi, I've made the Zero X nose-cone, out of plasticard covered in chrome tape. Kevin

SAYING STUFF WRONG AS KIDS

When I was a kid various words were impossible to pronounce properly. Here are a few I can remember:

• Draclia - Dracula
• Ambliance - Ambulance
• Sammich - Sandwich
• Frankystein - Frankenstein
• Pacific - specific

Not sure what these would be classed as: spoonerisms? malopropisms? simple mispronunciations?

I suppose the chap who made a living out of this kind of thing was the TV personality who said stuff like 'take the hotty custardo and pour it overly the rolypolopud' or something like that! Can't recall his name but he voiced a character like this in a Gerry Anderson TV show - Joe 90, Secret Service? 

I came across him again on the classic Small Faces album Ogden Nut Gone Flake years later!

Which words did you mis-pronounce as a nipper readers in whatever launguage?

MYSTERY JAPANESE BRAINS ROCKET

I've been drooling over old Japanese ads and goods in books I've been kindly loaned and also some online too. This page from a book has a strange yellow rocket behind Brains bottom right. Any one know what it is?

Project Sword Magazine Idea: Kev's Cover

Hi,

As requested, I've had a go to see if I could mock up a cover of a Project Sword magazine and this is what I came up with.

take care,

Kevin

Sleeping with the Fishes

As a kid, two things obsessed me, space and dinosaurs. I had more books on these two subjects than anything else. Even today, I still enjoy both subjects, but it was especially exciting for me when sometime in the early 1990's, I discovered Tomy Zoids. The combination of science fiction and dinosaurs was a gift to me and especially when I discovered that they all included a tiny seated golden astronaut like pilot, I was hooked.

The extra special draw was the inclusion of sea borne creatures in the line, such as the 'Hammerhead' shark and the coelocanth-like 'Wardick' armoured fish. With clockwork motors inside and floats in the body, they work as well in water as on land, wriggling realistically along.

Disney's animated feature 'Atlantis' also featured biomechanical creatures such as the 'Ketak' fish and the wonderful Mike Mignola designed 'Leviathan', seen here in an earlier related post.

RECOGNISING PROJECT SWORD AND SPACEX TOYS IN THE SIXTIES

As we know some SWORD and SpaceX toys were based on real NASA concepts and vehicles when they were released between 1967-1970.

Being only a nipper back then the only NASA vehicle I will have recognised in the SWORD range would have been the Cape Kennedy Set, because the classic Saturn V and gantry were often on the telly in the UK.

But what about US and Canadian kids and kids elsewhere? Will they have recognised the Dyna Soar [oddly unavailable in the Tarheel range], the Space Glider, the Space Patrol 1 and the other NASA stuff?

Which toy will have been the most instantly recognisable from real life do you think?