Is Dizzy Bug a Koyo Turtle?

 In the late Sixties I was given a game at Christmas called Dizzy Bug by Joyment.. 

I recall it clearly, a sort of frantic tin bug arena in a large box. It was great fun.

Remember it?

The tin bugs were blue and pink domes with a small head a lot like a ladybird.

Underneath were two powerful pull-back windable wheels, which gave the bugs the juice to whizz round the arena and into a coloured slot. White slots didn't count I don't think.

Those bugs really did whizz and I've often wondered if Joyment came up with the whizzing tin bug design.

I now think they were originally Japanese by a company called Koyo, a logo with a capital K inside a kite as seen below.

These Koyo bugs had the same wheels.

The most common design was a turtle in various patterns. These turtles may well be the brand's signature design. 

Koyo also released a ladybird too.

I have seen other designs such as this bunny.

The same wheels are featured.

There may well be many more styles.

So, Is it possible that Joyment got hold of some Koyo turtles and  as a result thought up Dizzy Bug?

What do you think readers?

Richard Allen's Skinhead

 I remember these from the Seventies. I saw them in bookshops back then.

My memory was jogged by a modern monotone reprint of Skinhead I saw in a charity shop in Castleford,  but it's the colourful NEL original I remember.

Suedehead is the other NEL paperback I recall vividly, never really knowing what a suedehead was. I didn't know any.

Richard Allen's quest to novelize every category of Seventies British yoof knew no bounds!

Books all new to me but available online include Knuckle Girls and Terrace Terrors.  I have to wonder if the author made these group names up or were they known like that?

Are the cover characters on the Allens actors do you think?

Boot Boys is a sub-culture I came across as a young teenager and these two fellas look more stylish than I remember them being. I knew them as Bovver Boys, who's passion was a bit of aggro and some argee bargee!

Sorts and Smoothies are new to me. Well, I can guess what a Smoothie was - I reckon a sort of mod - but Sorts, no. Clearly a girl thing. But hang on, that Smoothie bloke is on the Boot Boys cover too! He had two careers!

There's no doubt more Richard Allen field guides like these. What about Mods, Hippies, Greasers, Bikers, Teds, Punks, Yobs and Rockers?

Are these paperbacks icons now would you say? 

The Bluebird CN8

 I was amazed by this Bluebird CN8 design on isrinmin. I'd never seen it before.

This is a model by Soldan Models and I can find very little else about this particular model.

The CN8 was a conceptual supersonic vehicle with a view to breaking speed records in the 1960's, which was never produced.

It bears a little resemblance to the Century 21 Task Force 1, especially the Tarheel blue American.

Have you come across any dart-shaped vehicles, boats or planes readers?

Cold and Recovery

 Well, the whole family - daughter, SiL, Grandkids, Missus and me - has been struck by the common cold and members are at varying stages of misableness.

After keeping it in abeyance this weekend somehow whilst attending a large family gathering in Leyland its geared up with avengance today, so I've been in bed most of this Monday on my new laptop and drinking hot tea in between sneezes.

A big job has been trying to recover a corrupted file for my latest book project with Blurb on the X-series of toys.

After several hours of re-pasting Bill's fabulous photos and my archived pictures, Stage 1 of the recovery has uploaded and I now need to complete Stage 2, the text edits again, which will take a good hour.

More steaming Yorkshire tea is required before I carry on though.

Have you got a cold?

Have you ever lost or corrupted an important computer file readers? Did you recover it?

Image: Bill Bulloch

Kelly's Cover

 You can spot a Kelly Freas a mile off. It's those twinkling stars and the fluid limbs.

This ANALOG cover is a great example of his fantastic style. I don't fancy the explorers' chances. Those panthoids look hungry. Is one riding the other?

Do you like Kelly Freas's style?

La Navicella Spaziale Anyone?

 

This Italian space toy looks so familiar. What is it I'm thinking of? Space Precinct?

Anyone got this toy?

And the sticker at the top left says Kidco! Are they the importers?

Tron Ares

Ever since I first saw Tron way back when I've been hooked.

The geometry, the costumes, the grid, Flynns, the bikes, the whole techno world: I loved it all, which looking back, is odd, as I'm not a gamer at all. In fact I've never played a single computer game in my life.

A few years back I saw the superb Tron sequel, Legacy and just this week I caught the new Tron Ares.

I was blown away, I loved it as well. 

No spoilers here. Needless to say the whole Tron architecture is still there, all the sights, all the lines, all the sounds.

Wunderbar!

Is it something you would see readers? 

NATIONAL LUNAGRAPHIC

                               

One of the great benefits of working in a University library is that there are sometimes large donations of books coming in. Nine time out often, they will be text books or out of date volumes, but now and then we get other materials that donors have brought in, with the intention of being distributed again to students. This week we had 7 crates delivered of books, presumably from a staff member who was having a clear out and amongst the volumes of Shakespeare and linguistics texts, I spotted the unmistakable gold cover of a National Geographic. Even more exciting was the cover feature and the free gift! The July 2019 issue was a Moon Landing commemorative issue and included a facsimile edition of the July 1969 edition too. National Geographic is renowned for its editorials and award winning photography and both the early edition and the new one do not disappoint on either front.

The 69 edition covers the planning and execution of the landmark Apollo 11 mission and includes some wonderful shots of the period. The articles are laid out with large splash pages of glorious colour imagery to compliment the reportage.

 Besides recording the historic event, the article also capture the zeitgeist of the era in classic form

Interspersed with actual photography are some artist renderings of the manoeuvres and landing, as well as flight plans and maps.

The mission photography is glorious and shows all the salient points of the flight, especially interesting are the telescopic shots of the Saturn V separation and the spent stages burning up in the atmosphere.

The final part of the article looks at future ambitions for the space race, with a view towards visiting Mars and the development of the Skylab research station.

The 2019 edition is equally - if not more impressive, making use of modern graphical techniques and a wealth of data from the previous decade.

The article is heavily illustrated with images of Russian rocket launches, as the Soyuz capsule was in frequent use to supply the International Space Station at the time and NASA did not have a regular rocket based service in operation, relying more heavily on the Shuttle.

The main thrust of the edition is the move towards a return to the Moon and ultimately Mars, with a discussion on the projected direction of plans for NASA and commercial vehicles, such as SPACEX. It also looks back at the enthusiasm and wonder of the space age and how it was reflected in the culture of the sixties, from automotive design to toys.

One of the main spreads even includes a nod to Mattel's Man in Space, Major Matt Mason, with an image of the man himself on a fold out insert.

As expected with the National Geographic, the photography is backed up by sumptuous infographics and diagrams, showing the developments of the spacesuit and projected exploration of the Solar System.

Possibly my favourite part of the graphics is the map of the lunar surface, which clearly makes full use of current lunar photographic records as the basis, obtained by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, just as information from the Lunar Orbiter series of probes in 1967 was used as the basis of maps for the Apollo mission.