HYDRAULIC TOWER TRUCK TOY

I'm sure I had one of these hydraulic tower trucks as a kid. Mine came with a lamp post. Or maybe it was a Dinky or Corgi toy. It'd be great if I could actually remember stuff fully!

Did you have one?

PROJECT SWORD IN TV21: THE REBEL APRIL 20TH 2068

Text and images owned by Century 21 Toys

TWISTED NERVE MOON EXPLORER MYSTERY

I caught an old Sixties horror flick the other night on the Horror Channel called Twisted Nerve. It starred John Mill's daughter Hayley Mills, Billie Whitelaw and Hywel Bennett.

Of interest to toy collectors is the opening scene set in a Sixties toy shop. Hayley Mills asks to buy a Moon Explorer toy but decides not to. I just can't see the Moon Explorer in the scene.

Unfortunately I can't locate footage of the full opening apart from this brief section on You Tube. At the very end of it you can just make out the inside of the toy shop but the Moon Explorer toy remains a twisted nerve mystery!

SLICK VISIONS

Another continuum of covers. 

Above is a Zero-X-MEV-like super sleek craft sporting the cover of Galaxy Science Fiction from August 1966. Looks like a couple of Wookies at the wheel!

Mike Trim, he of Century 21 fame, gave us his own vision of sleekness eight years later in 1974 shown below. A much more industrial design, it reminds me of the realistic mechanics of artists like Foss.

It was my great pleasure to be able to buy a copy of this image personally from Mike at Fanderson's TV21 con way back in 2010.

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Addendum:

Here's a pic of slickness itself, the Zero-X MEV from TV21 January 2067

I wonder if the MEV's design ever changed?

THE PORTABLE TELEPHONE ATTACHE CASE CIRCA 1979

Having always had an interest in spies, attache and briefcases, I couldn't resist buying this on Ebay. It popped up around 2005, was very reasonably won and it came all the way from the USA.

Its a Bell American VOX XXI Portable Telephone circa 1979, part of the origin of today's tiny mobile phones!

There's a dial handset and whole console of big buttons, none of which I can fathom! The blue metal cover is atop a huge battery, which takes up most of the case and weighs an absolute ton! Needless to say its flat and I have no way of charging it.

It came with dealer correspondence and information.

The letter dated 1979 explains that such a telephone would cost around $4,000 all in! God knows how much that would be now! It was clearly a rich kids' toy this!

The letter hails from General Electric in Ferndale, Michigan, USA.

A 1983 spec sheet was in there too!

The base of the case has four feet, two maker's plates and a plug socket.

The socket, close up above, has 10 pins. is this for power or something else? there is a jack plug socket next too it. As to what for I'm unsure.

I'd love to charge it up and make a call! ha ha.

It's the closest I've ever come to one of those iconic cases from 2001 A Space Odyssey containing a complete office like the one below, complete with television! Anyone got one of those beasts?

WOODSY'S PHONES

Continuing the 'phone conversation', here's a table of telling bones, which I've collected over the years. The most expensive by far was the upright cream Erikson which I bought in a beautiful vintage shop in Whitby called Stonehouse. 

The rest of the phones were from local car boot sales. They all worked except the American cream push button Bell, probably my favourite phone of the batch. I adored the way they were carried round for miles around kitchens and dens in US TV shows!

The black and grey flatbed phone was issued by Swatch no less. The radio-phone at the front was a hangover from the 1990's and inspired by that icon of the Seventies bed-side, the Goblin Teasmaid I should think. I wonder if you could use the phone as a clock alarm?

Alas, many have these have now left Moonbase for pastures new but all were cared for whilst resting here.

MIKE HAZZARD: MARX'S DOUBLE AGENT BY TONY K

Mike Hazard: the Marx Double Agent, is often underrated or overlooked by collectors, who favour Gilbert's popular 007 and UNCLE figures for their spy fix. 

Yet arguably, Mike was one of the most imagination-inspiring toys of the 1960s. 

Market leaders like GI Joe and Action Man, always arrived at the birthday party empty handed and unarmed, but sensing the danger ahead, danger man Mike rolled up in an action packed box, brimming with an explosive arsenal of gadgets, guns and gimmicks, that would've done any Mission Impossible screenwriter credit. 

Mike was a master of disguise. 

He could be a tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. Wearing a curious rubber mask and rather disturbing wig, he could blend in amongst the other toys seemingly unnoticed... often eavesdropping on subversive Action Men with the sonar machine pistol, sound pick-up cone, attached movie camera and headphones. 

Few action figures could have equaled his imaginative inventory with over 50 pieces of equipment.

Mike didn't have a back story... but then he didn't need one. 

The Cold War telly of the 60's and early 70's was smoking hot with spy stories to brainwash impressionable kids like me. Movies such as The IPCRESS File provided indoctrination for the hazardous world Mike would inhibit within the border-crossings of my espionage infatuated young mind. 

He was the spectacled, working class Harry Palmer of my toy world. 

To other Cold War kids he would have been Jim Phelps or Rollin Hand of the IMF... possibly John Steed, or even the evasive Number Six... always trying to escape a village patrolled by toothy, grinning, space hoppers.

A product of the 60s, Mike didn't infiltrated my toy collection until the early 70's. 

He was part of a spy exchange... a troubled, hardened, hand-me-down, from an older cousin who sold him out him for a leather football. 

When Mike and I teamed up, he was in good shape and still had many of the tools of his trade, including his trench coat with secret pockets, hat, specs, booby-trapped attache case, pipe gun and even a neat little stiletto blade tucked behind his tie. He was the real covert deal. 

Marx, the toy company, not the revolutionary socialist, had equipped this trouble shooter for every eventuality.

Like Checkpoint Charlie, Mike has been all but forgotten and faded into Cold War obscurity. 

Occasionally he does step out of the shadows and can be glimpsed on internet auction sites, reliving old tales of espionage with other bygone toys from those adventurous days. 

For me, he really is the toy spy who came in from the cold. Here's to you Mike Hazard old friend!

Tony K

PAUL V'S PHONES

Woodsy's memories and the comments by Tony and Kevin awakened a few memories of my own (thanks for that!).

Earliest memories of a phone are from when I was six. I can still remember our phone number from then, which I actually use as a password for certain things (as did my late Mum, I once happened to notice :)

I can recall also using the trick of clicking the button the receiver rested on, which was also reputed to make the exchange think you'd interrupted the call so you'd be calling for free :) though I've never known if that was actually the case (perhaps Tony would know that?). Prank calls were also a favourite pastime.

My dad being a collector of 78rpm Blues records (pretty well-known in his time) meant that we'd also get calls late in the evening, with an American voice asking for "Mex Vree-dee" (not how you pronounce it :) so some of the first words in my English vocabulary were "I will get him for you."

Trimphones I came across as a student in London's East End in the early Eighties, in fact there was a classmate who could do a perfect imitation of the "ffrrrrp-ffrrrrp" sound it made to the confusion of whoever picked up the real one in the studio.

I fondly remember using British pay phone boxes quite a lot in those days as well, which also had a distinct smell which I can't really describe. A real shame most of those red street icons were taken away. (Once had the idea of buying one and converting it into a shower stall, but on second thoughts it would probably be too small... not to mention getting the thing into the bathroom!)

I too have a couple of old phones knocking around. The oldest is a simple wooden box with a funnel on top to speak into, separate earpiece on a lead (currently missing), and a push-button on the side to call the exchange with, no dial.

This may have been an in-house phone to call to the kitchen perhaps, but for all I know it could've been used in a very early public network. In my first flat in Brussels (where we also survived without a phone) I had it hanging on the wall in the kitchen; anybody wanting to use our phone would be told about its existence before being directed to the bar across the road which had a payphone!

Next oldest is a British bakelite set very similar to what Tony is showing (little drawer underneath and all). I had hopes of still using it, but the Brussels exchanges going digital prevented that.

Much more recent is a Swatch cordless phone, an excellent rap-rod which has sadly given up the ghost but which I intend to try and get fixed. The benefit of the bright orange colour was that it made it much more findable every time Mrs V left it lying around somewhere!

To round off I include my old iPhone, the first and only mobile I've ever had. Although I'll readily admit that mobile phones are very useful, I'm not that fond of what they lead to. F ex certain people blithely bothering you whenever it suits them (or being annoyed that they couldn't when you don't answer), people in cars using them, or the interruptions during social occasions where apparently the call or text message is more important than the live person one is talking with. 

Plus mobile phones had nasty little buttons in a generally most unattractive package, before the iPhone came along with its clean interface in a clean housing design. A friend brought one over from Florida (before they were available over here) and gave me first right of refusal, a colleague could jailbreak it and that did it for me. 

So it's the original first model, still running a by now obsolete system, but still doing sterling service. To protect it I've added padding to a 1942 US Army first aid kit pouch; the notice on the start screen is a sign from a WW2 destroyer at Chatham Dockyard which somehow looked appropriate. :)

Paul Vreede