echoes of an angel interceptor

Noticed this in Japanese cyberspace, a carded rocket launcher toy set with two jets.

The card art looks as if its inspired by Ultraman but the light brown one looks like a sort of Angel Interceptor from Captain Scarlet.

What do you think?

amidst the boats and carts sat a blue cricket

I stumbled across this bundle of joy online. Its an old Ebay photo of a long-since ended auction.

What first caught my eye was the Apollo Moon Exploring red and white rocket among the tractors and trains, together with what looks like the red space glider from the same series by Imperial.

But then I noticed the BLUE Cricket P-1 [minus its canon] to the left. What the? 

Aren't they usually purple?

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Postscript:

Found this close up of the very same cricket! It does look blue!

and by way of elimination, its not the SpaceX cricket knockoff from The Futuristic Space Vehicle series, pictured below, which is clearly metallic green paint.

None of these either!

or any of the other ones we've featured here over the years as seen in the post Cricket Team.

dyna soar delivers...

a bit of fun using Paint on this dark damp night!

anyone else remember raving bonkers robots?

RIP ARNOLD PALMER: HE GAVE US TOY GOLF TOO

Golf legend Arnold Palmer sadly passed away today at the grand old age of 87. An icon of the game of golf his influence was even felt on my childhood in remotest Lancashire during the Sixties, when one Christmas I received a huge golf toy.

It wasn't any old thing either. It was the Arnold Palmer Pro Shot golf set by Marx. An amazing toy, it has a miniature Arnold at the end of a golf club contraption. By turning the handle you could get mini Arnold to play shots for you! It was a stroke of genius.

You can get an idea of what it was like to use on this You Tube clip.

Did you have this set readers?

Arnold Palmer RIP.

i wanna be ejected: the space 1999 para toy by helm toys

I do love coming across toys new to me.

This is just such a one. Now I'm not a Space 1999 fan. Alas, the TV series completely passed me by. But I'm aware of many of the toys - but this one is definitely new to me:

the Space 1999 Eagle Para Toy by Helm Toys of the USA released in 1976!

This is an old photo from an Ebay auction. 

I just love those garish bright colours. At first I couldn't fathom what it did but on googling further I found a carded example on the fabulous Catacombs Space 1999 site here.

Its a parachute toy and Commander Koenig himself gets ejected into sky, whereupon he floats down to the ground on his red and white plastic chute.

How neat is that!

Anyone got one of these beauties?

The Fastest Guy Alive

Well it took a while to find it, but here's my response to The Stars for a Shilling - me at Southport fair in the mid sixties, grudgingly riding a 'super-thunder-sting-car' on a carousel time ride with hydraulic arms. Having been terrified by the Caterpillar ride some years earlier, when a racing coaster unexpectedly folded over a green canvas cover across the cars to make a caterpillar shape, leaving me howling in terror in the dark, I was never keen on rides after that.

Still, this was a nice green Nuclear Freighter shaped ship, so I gritted my teeth and thoughtof Spacex!

thunderbirds tv21 monster okuropachi toy surfaces from the depths!

Cancelled before it was released for sale, this handsome plastic devil which featured on the covers of TV21 and known in Japan as the Okuropachi or Okloparchi has surfaced on the Japanese online site Mandarake.

I've blogged this toy before complete with its header and baggy in a post in 2014 and Scoop has covered the TV21 appearances too in his post in 2015.

Thanks to Rev. Orsonzilla for the Mandarake link.

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The Okuropachi also graces this masthead of a Facebook page too!

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For some reason it's mouth always reminded me of the toothy Morlocks in George Pal's brilliant Time Machine movie.

AURORA 'SPINDRIFT' RESTORATION

Spurred on by the re-showing of Land of the Giants on TV , I thought I'd have a go at restoring my old Aurora 'Spindrift' kit, which I've had since the early seventies. 

I got it second hand from a friend at school who'd painted it bright yellow for some reason. 

I set to work hand painting it a deep red. And that's how it's stayed for the past forty odd years, until now.

This week I carefully took it all apart and and left it overnight in a 50/50 solution of 'Dettol' antiseptic disinfectent. This works fine with plastic and doesn't make it brittle.This broke down most of the old paint, Leaving it for a further 24 hours in the solution did the trick.

 The only paint left on it now is mixed with the original plastic cement, which will need to be removed by scraping and sanding.

There's still a lot of fiddly work to do, trying to make the parts fit back together with all the old glue needing to be removed. The base is in pretty bad shape as it has an indentation and crack caused by an excessive amount of glue when it was originally put together, and as well as that both the two  top sections have large cracks in the plastic.

Even so, I'm looking forward to completing the project. I'm obviously not expecting the restoration to produce something mint, but if I can cheer it up and make it reasonably decent I'll be happy.