PROBING THE DEPTHS: PROJECT SWORD PF3 FAMILY TREE

 My best guess as to the steps that were taken before Project SWORD's plastic friction Probe Force 3 appeared in 1967.

(* The Green Monster was a real rocket car]

Have you got anything like this?

The Ghoul: Tyburn's Terrifier

 I caught The Ghoul the other night.

Made by Tyburn [not to be confused with the much more successful Tigon] it was one of only three films the company released.

The Ghoul [not a word you hear now really] is essentially a slasher film spiced up with Indian Zitars and a large country house. Set in the Charleston age, the protagonists are two young couples from the English elite in a car race to Land's End. Two of them break down, the woman ending up at the hands of John Hurt's mad gamekeeper and then in the clutches of the Peter Cushing's even madder country gent and his Indian housekeeper. There's more madder things yet but I won't spoil it.

John Hurt's cruel gamekeeper is a great performance, as are the two beleaguered ladies. Cushing's performance as the tormented gent is OK, as is his housekeeper, but for me the most interesting character is the posh Army Officer.

Despite being in his civvies he displays all the spit and polish of his class and positively out-poshes everyone on his way to the truth. When pitted against John Hurt's fabulously deranged yokel on the treacherous bog we have the best bit of the film.

Not one of the best horrors you'll ever see but still Tyburn did a decent job, biting at the ankles of the mighty Hammer. I watch the Ghoul at least every other year.

Have you seen the Ghoul?

CREPE AND SATELLITES

How I remember these from Christmasses in the Sixties and Seventies. They were both on old auction sites.

Crepe streamers, those crinkly bandages that bedecked the walls and plastic satellite star hung on the tree. That clover of foil inside is like a portal to the past.

Do you remember these?

What decs did your family have?

AMT AMTRONIC

 

I love this AMTRONIC car.

I assume its a concept  and was never built.

I don't remember it being a die-cast either.

Is it a kit you had?

Flickering Spacetime

A common sight in the sixties were the false 3d effect pictures which were used on greetings cards, novelties and keyrings. Made of a plastic laminate, I was always fascinated by the corrugated surface and never really understood how the process worked. Years later, i discovered that they were called 'lenticular' images and were covered by a special prismatic coating, which used tiny lenses to deceive the eye into viewing separate images as a whole, giving the flickering, three dimensional effect.

As most of the examples I had seen previously were always small - such as novelty items from lucky bags of part f a toy, I never really gave them much attention as an image format, assuming the quality of the image would be poor, given the strange nature of the format.  Recently, I bought a couple of lenticular postcards, again from the sixties, depicting space scenes and was very surprised as how crisp and sharp the images were, despite being sheathed in thick laminate.

The first one I bought was a scene with a moon landing with a large rocket and two astronauts waving to their colleagues on the plan below. This was a standard postcard and was mounted in a double frame, with a small plain wooden frame, recessed into a larger gilt frame with a glass front. The whole assembly being supported by a wire hanger. The increased depth of the frames made the 3d effect even more immersive, almost like looking though a small window. Unmounting the frame and cleaning the glass and the surface of the card revealed a profound difference in clarity too, as dust had accumulated on the card and on the glass.

The card is assumed to have been produced by the japanese Asahi trading company and is clearly from the early sixties. The scene shows a large 'Atlas' style rocket fitted with landing gear in a 'SSTO' (Single Stage To Orbit) deployment. next to it are two astronaut figures waving to two capsules in the distance, on the lunar surface. Rather than being an illustration, the image seems to be a photographed model, with a diorama supporting the models. The rocket is not a familiar design, but seems to be similar to early Atlas ICBM vehicles, with telescopic legs fitted. In the middle distance are two very simplistic landers, which seem to be redundant as the rocket itself has clearly already made a successful landing and would not need a dedicated landing capsule.

The two landers are very rudimentary and obviously predate the Apollo programme by around five years. They are cosmetically similar to some of the early space toys I have from the same era and very closely resemble modern a 'LEM-type' capsule that I have found recently.

The second and later card is from Gibraltar and made by a local company. This shows a very recognisable Lunar Module, presumably one of the early Revell releases as it is too finely cast to be the more rudimentary Airfix kit, which appeared in the latter half of the sixties. Several other lenticular cards have used the Revell Astronaut kit to great effect, too. It is very similar to a Clifford toy LEM that I have, but does resemble a kit rather than a toy, much more closely. The docking collar is missing and a simple light ha been installed inside for effect. The Apollo Service module behind it, is another small model, with the image of the Earth probably a photograph and the luxuriantly green moon surface being made from plaster or resin.

 

Some LEM variants are shown below, illustrating the variance in toy and novelty makers approach to making a moon lander, in the rush to produce product for the Moon Landing in 1969.

ANT THRILLS

 I caught these old NASA prints on old auctions so kept the images.

The Grumman MOLAB on its test bed travels, a superb lunar concept workhorse known to Project SWORD fans as the ANT.

Do you any old NASA prints like this?

THE LAND OF NOD

 

I love this cover art on Nod, the gaming magazine issue 34 that I saw online.

It recalls the fantastic work of Kay Nielson, such as his Norwegian mythos and the Lad in the Battle, 1914.

How cool is that?

MOON MAKER: MY CUSTOM LONE STAR MOONRAKER TOY GUN DONE!

Coupla weeks ago I found this neat water pistol in a Charity shop

I had an idea!..... so, I set about re-shaping it .....

..... into this, my version of the Lone Star Moontaker toy gun.

 

Here's the original for comparison.

Mine's a clunky re-interpretation of this classic 

It was fun.

The grip is made of card.

Everything else is out of my bits box.

Not perfect but OK for the cabinet.

Hope you like it.

Next on the bench, Mr. Rock!