Attached is a picture including a ruler for scale for the Comet.
It's interesting that the 707 is referred to as the Rolls Royce 707, no mention of Boeing at a time when national pride was still put out by the initial crashes developing the Comet that kept it back for Boeing to sweep the market for world wide sales.
I've been seeing this Spanish toy pistol for years on Todocollecion.
What I don't know is the meaning of the artwork.
It looks like a TV show but what?
Well this week I may have found a clue.
I stumbled across this still from what again appears to be the same and even more like an animated TV show.
Beneath the still on this Italian site was a phrase which maybe the name of the show:
Siamo Fatti Così
Does anyone recognise this? * POSTSCRIPT! Eagle-eyed reader Kevin D has cracked it! Its the BODY SENTINELS cartoon! Its on You Tube too. Here's an episode. But why use an educational cartoon for the card art of a toy space pistol in Spain? Was it simply lifted or was the show popular in continental Europe? PS. This explains it further! The series appears to have been initially French! http://www.hellomaestro.fr/once-upon-a-time-life.html POSTSCRIPT 2: Kev's cracking of this particular case has lead to dig deeper. OK, the original French-Japanese cartoon series was called IL ETAIT UNE FOIS ... L'ESPACE or Once Upon a Time in Space and aired in 1982. In Spain it was called ERASE UNA VEZ .... EL ESPACIO meaning the same and this is what appears on the toy pistol's backing card. It was a TV-related toy after all! You can read much more about the show in all its forms here on Wiki. Many more toys and figures were released and here's just one example die-cast by Popy, the spaceship Libellule.
This has been a real education for me as I've never heard of this TV cartoon.
In looking at your blog and being amazed at the quality of model building by your contributors, and I exclude my own clumsy efforts, I am reminded of how building models was once considered a suitable hobby for kids.
Back in 1959 I made my first cross Atlantic flight from NYC to London in a BOAC DC7C prop aircraft, a grueling 11 hours. To pass the hours BOAC gave the attached to kids to entertain themselves.
How this was to be done without tools, glue etc didn't concern BOAC they provided them and that was it.
British Airways carries on this indifference to passengers, luckily flight time is less now.
So for your in flight entertainment, pre SST, try making these models with your bare hands!
REMEMBER: You are someone special to BOAC (Edward Scissorhands with a glue pot for starters)
Its one of my favourite Werewolf movies and a real gem from 1981. Rob Bottin did the amazing transformation effects. It was first solo job.
Directed by New Jersey's great son Joe Dante, its stuffed with monster and werewolf references from popular culture and other films. Its fun to spot them.
Some I know but some I need your help with!
The first one's easy, its none other than Roger Corman, the B-movie king who nurtured Dante early on. He walks into the phone box after the main character Karen leaves.
The next one I need your help with. Eddie Quist was the mangler at the start of the flick [played by Star Trek Voyager's Holographic Doc no less!]. In Eddie's apartment there's a horror magazine cover pinned to the wall next to this drawing of a werewolf. Which magazine is it?
*
POSTSCRIPT!
After careful study with a magnifying glass I deciphered the words The Fanged Flies, which lead me straight to the mystery horror comic!
Its is Weird Vampire Tales from July 1980
Lacking any obvious werewolf puns, I can only assume that this was on the newsstands shortly after Joe Dante's prop department got to work in California in May 1980.
Coincidentally, I had lots of the related Witches Tales and Horror Tales comics as a kid in the Seventies and still have many of them!
*
I've got the next one, another cameo. This time its the late great Forry Ackerman browsing in the occult store, the owner played by Corman and Dante stalwart Dick Miller. Forry is widely credited with sparking the monster craze of the Sixties with .....
his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, a copy of which I can see in his hands as he turns round. Can you tell which issue it is?
*
POSTSCRIPT 3
Yep, got this one too. My trusty magnifying glass helped!
Forry is holding issue 21 of Famous Monsters of Filmland, which includes a look round his home, the famous Ackermansion! The cover depicts Henry Hull aka The Werewolf of London!
I may have even had this issue as a kid, minus the cover! If I did then its in my attic upstairs!
*
Up next is what I assume to be Dante's nod to the origin of werewolf movies, The Wolfman. The film plays briefly on the TV of the two reporters at the heart of the Howling. In The Wolfman we can see Lawrence Talbot played by the superb Lon Chaney discussing his impending hairyness with Maleva the Gypsy soothsayer.
The next still I need help with. Leading man Bill is reading a paperback in bed here. Can you make out what it is?
[in real life 'Bill', Chris Stone, was married to the film's lead actress Dee Wallace. He died aged just 53, a little older than the actress Elizabeth Brookes, who played his on-screen wolf lover Marsha Quist. She died aged just 46].
*
POSTSCRIPT 1
Keen-eyed reader Tony K solved this one!
Bill, above, is reading You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas WOLFE!
Yep, its another of Dante's nested giggles.
Ironically 'Bill' Neill himself never goes home again as he is bitten by werewolf Marsha Quist and is later shot with a silver bullet.
Thanks Tone!
*
The last still above is from another film clip on the reporters' TV. Its an old colour animated cartoon of a wolf and a lamb I think. Anyone recognise it?
*
POSTSCRIPT 4
IMdB came to the rescue here. It lists quite a few Howling puns including the name of this cartoon, which it suggests is this Looney Toons episode "Pigs in a Polka" (1943) with the Big Bad Wolf, although I can't actually find the same scene as in the Howling.
That's because IMdB are incorrect! Having studied all the old wolf cartoons on You Tube its not Looney Tunes. Its actually this older Castle Films/ Celebrity Productions cartoon called The Big Bad Wolf from 1936 [there's even old reels of it for collectors on Ebay!] The "Howling" scene pictured above is around 3.50 minutes
*
There are many more nested references, which nowadays might be called easter eggs. For example a copy of Allen Ginsberg's poetry collection HOWL is lying on the reporter's desk at one point.
Many of the actors themselves link back to older monster movies as well. The older cop at the start of The Howling was none other than the chiseled young Captain who battles the creature in Roger Corman's Thing from Another World, another favourite of mine.
Let me know if you crack the mystery references and props I mention.
Super Arrow One of my earliest encounters with the fantastic world of Japan SF was also one of the most memorable.
In the glorious summer of 1968, a friend told me about a bunch of "weird space models" at a local department store, so I biked over there asap and discovered a small pile of white boxes with super cool artwork on the tops, showing some rather bizarre spaceships.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that there were three different models, all from a company called Paramount, which I had never heard of before. The three models were: Atomic Astro Boat, Planetoid Echo 7, and Orbital Ship Super Arrow.
The Astro Boat artwork was a fuzzy photograph, but the other two featured beautiful illustrations of the futuristic rockets in flight. The kits sold for 1.50 each, and had wind-up motors to make them run, something I thought extremely cool at the time.
I bought all three and brought them home, but for reasons unknown, the first one I opened was the Super Arrow. To say I was disappointed in the kit inside would be an understatement: the illustration showed a sleek, streamlined rocketship with tones of detail, whereas the kit looked like a squat, goofy, very toylike space ship, with giant rubber wheels sticking out of the bottom to boot.
I built the kit anyways, and thought it kind of cool when assembled, but the experience was sobering to me, my first experience with Japan SF often not matching their cover art to any reasonable degree. Believe it or not, I purchased the Super Arrow kit again, maybe hoping that the kit inside would be better this time, but of course it wasn't.
Fast forward 45 years, and I managed to snag a fairly intact kit of Orbital Ship Super Arrow on ebay and decided to build it as snappy as I could. I even fashioned primitive jet grills for the side rocket tubes, and tried to paint the canopy frame as close to that shown on the cover art. As goofy and homely as it is, there is something about the Super Arrow which I never forgot.
Also recently, I stumbled onto a Character Age magazine from Japan, and discovered that all three of these primitive little spaceships were amongst the very first wave of Japan SF, produced in either 1966 or 1967 by Midori, a big source of Japan SF kits.
The other two in the series are also interesting. The Astro Boat is a craft from the kaiju eiga classic, The X From Outer Space, and the Echo 7 was a design which found its way also into several pre-assembled space toys at the time.
I built and appreciated both of them, but the goofy little Super Arrow was and is still my personal favorite.
