ANIMAL OPENINGS

Animals were allover Sixties kids TV and I loved 'em!

Here are a few theme songs for you, while you slurp on a glass of Tizer! What do you think readers?

Belle and Sebastian!

White Horses

Undersea World of Jaques Cousteau

Tales from the Riverbank

Black Beauty

Animal Magic

Skippy

Flipper

and Champion the Wonder Horse

ACTION FORCED

 

More ephemera from my drawers. Here's a mini-poster for the Palitoy Action Man Action Force range. This poster is called Ground Assault.

I've bought and sold quite a lot of Action Force over the years and recently picked up this SAS Frogman.

Is it a line you like?

TOAST TOPPERS

Today I had a blast from the past, a vivid memory of a foodstuff I adored in the 70's: Toast Toppers.

This delicious creamy spread came in dinky little tins and had a ring pull top if I remember rightly. The flavours were largely cheese and ham I think. That's what I recall, the liquid cheese bubbling under the grill with the chunks of ham all cozy and hot.

Biting into a toast toppered slice of toast was a unique experience. Hot, crispy, creamy, meaty. Totally delicious!

I've not seen toast toppers for years so I assume they fell into food oblivion. Please tell me that's the case and haven't been available at Farmfoods ever since!

HONEY WEST'S FIRST APPEARANCE ON TV: BURKE'S LAW PILOT - WHO KILLED THE JACKPOT

Further to Scoop's ace stills on the bloggiversary, here's the full episode on You Tube.

Honey gets out of a cab and takes it from there!

WHAT A FIGURE!

I picked up a few more plastic action figures at today's car boot sale.

All cheap as chips as well. I spent a grand total of £2.20.

From left to right we have a Burger King [BK] Batman, BK Dr. X [update: this is a GI Joe Dr. Mindbender], two BK Action Men, an unknown blue commando from 2005 [update: this is a Lanard the Corps SAS Diver] , a BK Action Man astronaut and a green Monster in my Pocket.

Next to that is an interesting plastic pteranodon, which comes in half to reveal a small paper leaflet explaining the wing span. No idea of the make or year. Could be a pencil attachment too. Do you know?

Perhaps the most interesting plastic figures are three brown thinnish ones from New Zealand front left. No idea what they are. Have you?

[update: these 3 figures are cereal premiums from 1962 issued in New Zealand's Sanitarium cereals]

The 20p in the £2.20 went on the only die-cast I got. A lovely 1970 Hot Wheels Redline Side Kick from 1970. Car boots are full  of diecast but this is the first redline I've seen for at least 2 years.

Finally I got this little female figure holding a parcel or pack of books. Maybe a schoolgirl. Anyone any clue?

Have you been car booting today?

KP SPACE RAIDERS ATE MY POPPETS

 Rifling through folders and files I keep finding papers I've squirreled away like this lot.

In it is an old Space Raiders snack packet and a Poppets Robot cover box and a WHAM chew wrapper!

Newspaper clippings about Michael's Keaton's Batman and a shop in Leeds with a set of ABC batman cards in 1990.

A Monsters movie flier, a modern Hammer flier and a Superman can label.

Do you file away stuff like this?

MAISY

 Maisy, one of Moonbase Junior's fave TV theme tunes on his car CD! It's a real hoot!

I FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW WON: My adventures in Merchandizing Part 2 by Lewis M.

I'd been feeling pretty good about my Phantom lamp with the white glowing eyes, it looked exactly like the 80's original - or so I thought.

King Features who owned the Phantom property thought otherwise. They claimed the face didn't look like the face on the lamp in their office, but despite emailing photos of said lamp, they couldn't effectively explain what they thought was wrong. 

The easy way out would have been to drop over to their office and take a look myself, except... their office was in New York NY USA!

As luck would have it, I was actually just about to go on a holiday that was taking in Tokyo and New York. So I made an appointment and packed some tubs of 2 part silicone putty in my suitcase. 

King Features in NY was a swanky office complex and I spent about half an hour photographing the face of this damn lamp and making a rubber mould of the face. When I got back to Australia, I made a direct cast and glued it over my own sculpt, so the client would get exactly what they wanted.



The final approved lamp was a good seller and encouraged my Merchandiser to look at other options for lamps based on the same gimmick. He tried Marvel and got me to sketch up a proposal, but it went nowhere...




So next, he decided to try Star Wars and here is where the troubles really began...

What was proposed was a ceramic Darth Vader with red glowing eyes. I clearly remembered a pottery Darth Vader coin bank I had in the early 80's and as The Phantom had basically been a ceramic vase with empty eye holes, I decided to go for a smoothed feel as opposed to a hard edged look. 

The merchandiser also wanted a Yoda lamp as a companion with green eyes and I was actually quite pleased with the organic/ceramic look I achieved.





So we now had two reasonable working prototypes to take to the next level. Unfortunately things got off to a bad start with Lucasfilm who had very specific procedures that my Merchandiser didn't follow to the letter and things only got worse. The Darth head was sent to China to get a quote on manufacture and instead, they chose to cast the entire thing as a solid lump of resin.

I don't know what happened to my prototype, but the resin lump really got up Lucasfilm's nose. They didn't like the sculpt, they wanted to know which film the design was based on (the actual design changed subtly from film to film and they were insisting our piece represent a specific version).

They were suggesting the Merchandiser hire Gentle Giant Studios (fully owned by them) to do a sculpt at his own additional expense. He could see how it was going and already being several thousand dollars out of pocket, he decided not to throw good money after bad...

So I don't think my Yoda lamp was ever even seen by Lucasfilm, certainly it stayed with me and still peers down at me from the top shelf of my studio. Whilst a white eyed Phantom worked quite well, the red eyed Darth (although quite effective) never got to strut his stuff and poor old Yoda... 

While the idea of a glowing green eyed Jedi might have seemed a good idea, it practice it was more reminiscent of "Village of the Damned Yoda"!



And pretty much here ended my Merchandising adventures, certainly we never worked together again.

I think the demands of Licensing Holders are very specific and certainly the charming "off model" toys of the 60s and 70s are a thing of the past, in this pre-vizzed computer designed, computer manufactured world. Sadly, movie making has now gone the same way with everything pre planned down to the micron.

But like Rock and Roll, I'm thankful for the little bit I knew.
Cheers, 

Looey