Ein Spezi Please!

Still abroad I've been sampling various local brews. 

One here in Deutschland is Spezi. Sold in bottles and cans, it's a mixture of cola and orange fanta.

It's quite delicious!

Have you a cola drink in your neck of the woods readers!

BIG CHIEF NO MORE

 Sad to read that the high quality figure collections company Big Chief, which did a range of Anderson related figures, has gone into administration.

My sympathies go to the company employees, and the many people who pre-ordered the John Koenig figure, and the new range of Anderson action  figures.

I don't know for sure what caused the company to collapse, but from what I gather the recent Covid epidemic created a lot of delays.

Whatever the reason, it's sad to see yet another niche firm go bust.

WADDINGTONS PURPLE PEOPLE EATER

Here is another weird one. Is this something you came across in your days as a toy trader ? Did you ever play it ?

The Flying Purple People Eater was originally a 1958 novelty song by Sheb Wooley. There was also a 1988 children's movie (in which Sheb Wooley appeared), a game by Waddingtons, and several toy versions.

The Waddingtons Purple People Eater is described as being something like the game Operation. The object was to remove tiny plastic people (who were not purple) from the mouth of a sleeping Monster, without waking him up.

The monster was a large, hideous, slimly, octopus-like creature, with two eyes, one of which glows red, and a menacing growl (batteries not included). The colour scheme is purple/red/green/yellow.

The box provides a fair amount of information:

The Electrically frightening 'feely' monster game of skill.

The Purple People Eater is asleep. Can you save the people from his horrible clutches ?

If you wake him up you will hear him growl as his eye lights up in anger. Caught in his clutches you will feel his tentacles quiver on your hand.

Will you be able to rescue the people through his gapping jaw ? Take care, because if you wake him he will get very angry !

The creature does not match the description in the song (a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple alien). The Waddingtons monster does not appear able to fly, he has two eyes, and no horn.

From 6 Years, 2 - 4 players. It dates from the early 1980s sometime, with different sources saying 1979, 1980, 1981, or 1982. I could not find any photographs showing a copyright date, to pin this down.

A bag of 16 small red plastic people was included, for the Monster to chomp on. But in reality, the Flying Purple People Eater only ate purple people, so the little red people should be perfectly safe.

The retail price was £7.99 according to this old TV ad.

https://www.google.com/search?q=waddington+purple+people+eater&oq=waddington+purple+people+eater&aqs=chrome..69i57.11611j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:10762b90,vid:YwHC4v9AkKM

This is another one of those toys or games where you can only wonder what was going through the minds of the creators. It does not look to have been a big hit, and there are very few sales listings for it today.

Two photographs from Worthpoint.

What do you think?

Paul Adams from New Zealand

No Heavy Petting!

As a kid I disliked the public swimming baths in my home town of Preston, especially when pressed to go with school. It was a huge smelly, echoey brick box filled with chemically dead water, the chlorine gas rising from the pool like fog, through which screaming grubby boys somersaulted into the deep end like depth charges as we gawped at a sign that said No Heavy Petting, wondering on the school bus back what on earth it could be!

Even worse were the changing rooms. Stinking steaming cubicles with clothes baskets and a tiny bench. The very worst thing was the sodden floor, awash with chlorinated trunks bilge, snot, piss and Christ knows what!

The only good features of those God-forsaken baths were the medallions you got for surviving the ordeal - I got to Intermediate - and the mug of hot sweet tea in the cafe afterwards, slowly dissolving an everlasting chew strip in your mouth whilst drinking cha. 

All in all it put me off public baths for life.

Well this week in Germany we took the Grandkids to the very opposite of those rank depths, the very mirror of their crud. A modern multi-bath emporium of liquid fun: clean, family friendly, quiet, calm and simply wunderbar.

Fun pools, baby shallows, salt baths, warm outdoor pools, hot tubs, curving slides, tipping buckets, loungers, cafes, saunas and best if all a circular flume.

Yes, sports swimming pools were there too for keen crawlers but who wants them!

The kids adored the place and we've been twice in three days.

What was and what is your public baths experience readers?

ASTRONUT ANYONE?

You don't see much Astronut merchandise but here's a sticker from 1979.

Now my mind is struggling to recall exactly the name of the bloke that Astronut lived with.

Can you remember?

Did you like the cartoon?

MPC CYGNUS KIT (PART 2)

 Some more photos of my MPC Cygnus, this time against a more suitably painted backdrop.

“When stars die, they can face many deaths: Some destroy themselves in monumental supernova explosions, some contract and cool to become a neutron star, but then there is The Black Hole, the most bizarre star-death of all…”

“All the matter is compressed into a point so small – a singularity – that it drags everything within its gravitational field down into a maelstrom of crushing destruction!”

In the film, the Cygnus is able to maintain a constant distance from the Black Hole, and even has it’s own artificial gravity. I suspect science nuts might have an opinion on that, but for now I’ll let imagination have the edge.

“It is nearing the end of the year 2193: The deep space explorer craft, USS Palomino detects a derelict spacecraft perched on the brink of a Black Hole – the USS Cygnus which has been missing for 20 years!”

“The Cygnus is the domain of Dr Hans Reinhardt, a mysterious world where scientific genius and human madness intertwine, and where dreams quickly turn to nightmares!”

“The Black Hole: A journey that begins where everything ends!”

UFO ILLUMINATOR

This caught my eye on Etsy! What a cool re-use of our friend the UFO Interceptor by make Bicmade!

Its a lamp!

What do you think?

I Want To Believe

In the seventies, I happily believed that Flying Saucers were real. The 1971 Countdown annual had a great article about UFO's, filled with fascinating photographs of classic sightings. Target books also produced a great little paperback book in 1976 'Investigating UFOs', which I still have. Along with countless other tv and film influences, I was completely sold on the idea of UFO's and even convinced myself that I had seen one, but as I grew older I realised I must have dreamed it!

As its currently 'silly season' for the press, traditionally that period of high summer, where solid news items are thin on the ground and the press invariably tries to sell papers with spurious news stories. Today, 'fake news' is endemic and the nature of the internet makes it increasingly difficult to divine what is actually true.

At the moment, there is a major court case ongoing, hearing the testimony of an ex secret service officer David Grusch, who is attempting to disclose that the US government is aware of alien contact and has recovered and reverse engineered alien craft. The whistleblower hearings are attracting much attention and the recent release of Pentagon footage of supposed UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) activity on jet fighter cameras, of objects variously described as 'tic tac' shaped or a 'black or grey cube inside a clear sphere', has conspiracy theorists eager to see the government come clean.

Photos of various unidentified objects have been around for years, with the phrase 'flying saucers' being seized upon by the press, following Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting in June 1947. Arnold's objects were crescent shaped, but he described their motion as 'a saucer skipping across water' and the name stuck.

Kenneth Arnold with artist Impression

One of the images in the Countdown article were of a 'hat shaped' object, spotted by a motorist in Santa Anna in 1965. Rex Heflin shot a sequence of four photographs of an object hovering over the Californian freeway, before it took off leaving a smoke ring in its wake. At the time of reading about this, I was completely intrigued, as the image - by the standards of the seventies - looked authentic. These days, with A.I and CGI techniques available to anyone, its impossible to tell what what's real and what is fake. 

Brazil 1960

Historically, most UFO images or footage is invariably fuzzy or out of focus and those few images which are clear, are invariably discovered to be fakes. However, there are always a few images, which deserve closer attention.

Some of them are clearly either models, or everyday objects such as balloons, or birds, but in the early 20th century, prior to the advent of computer manipulation, there are still some amazing images appearing.

Brazil 1952

Lots of different techniques were attempted to fake photographs, such as frisbees thrown in the air, pot lids suspended from wires or paper pasted onto glass.

Bremerton, USA 1970

Costa Rica 1971

This image from Costa Rica appears to show a saucer approaching a coastline, but to me it looks like the reflection of an overhead lamp on a glass slide.

Edwards Air Force Base 1957

Some shots show UFO's which are not the actual subject of the photograph and are only discovered after the film is developed, which clearly have not been deliberately tampered with.

Ohio 1932

 Others show objects which seem to show saucer or cigar shaped objects in them. 

Peru 1952

Oregon 1950

With the prevalence of mobile phone, doorbell, dashcam and cctv cameras, there has been a huge increase in sightings of mysterious lights, black triangles, saucers and aliens, but due to the general public's ambivalence towards them, very few are taken seriously. Naturally, government sources deny any involvement with alien contacts or recovered vehicles and the idea of 'flying saucers' is dismissed as the realm of fantasy. Personally, I remain skeptical of the majority of modern sightings, as no clear, categorical evidence has so far appeared. Have you ever seen a ufo - or more importantly - taken a photo or video of one ?