Base Luna: Italian Moon Base Set

 This looks to be a fabulous Italian moon set.

Base Lunar.

Maybe made by Baravelli.

How super cool is that?

Is it a set you would have wanted as a kid?

A Face Only A Mother Could Love!

 Ed's comment about the robot car made me chuckle and as it's Mother's Day here in the UK it reminded me of two other faces.

This is Hammer's monster from the film The Reptile, 1966.

And here's the face of a creature from James Cameron's recent Avatar sequel.

The same mother? 

PS. I love the Reptile!

Never Rush When Buying Old Toys

 My recent trip to a fab vintage toy shop was a salutary lesson in why you shouldn't rush. 

The Missus and me agreed I'd be in there twenty minutes, whist she mooched elsewhere. In hindsight, it wasn't enough!

I looked and rummaged among the thousands of items in the shop with a view to a couple of investments and maybe something for myself, perhaps even a Redline. 

The shop always carries a few sixties Hot Wheels in a locked cabinet. Once opened I made my choice, a nice Silhouette, not perfect, but one I could touch up a bit. Result! It went in the bag the assistant had open.

Next I chose a small Action Man soldier, which I guessed was a modern version of my beloved Little Big Man. The assistant opened the cabinet and having pointed at the little fella I walked off to look for more goodies.

This came in the form of an Action Force cruiser, a palitoy vehicle I'd not seen before. That went in the bag too.

With the twenty minutes up and a small discount applied by the assistant I went away a happy boy.

Until, that is, I got home! 

Alas, for some reason the assistant had put in a full-size modern Action Man skin diver instead of the little guy! 

 I was gutted as, with a bunch of original items I have (thanks Bill) I'd planned to relive past glories with my little big man!

But that wasn't all.

To some extent it got worse.

When choosing my Hot Wheels Silhouette Id simply assumed it was a redline since it was surrounded by .... Redlines.

Turns out it isn't a Redline at all!

Here's a proper Mattel Silhouette.

Here's what I bought.

It looks similar but .....

It's a Zylmex Bubble! A knockoff! 

Hot Damn!

I just hadn't looked at the wheels and the base, relying entirely on what birdwatchers call the jizz. How it basically looks! 

Well, I needed a beer after all this! Clearly twenty minutes just wasn't long enough in a sweet shop like that!

 But there is a sort of happy ending!

Speaking to my nephew the next day, it turned out that he was driving through Otley later that afternoon.

He offered to visit the shop and see if the little soldier was still there. Good man! 

He was!

 and once demobbed he drove back home to Moonbase!

😂

Have you any old toy shop horror stories readers? 

*

PS. The unbranded miniature man still remains a mystery. Any clues?

Cosmos RE-4

Now this guy is going places! 

Is this ugly?

Paul V's Warhammer Terrain

And here's a couple pics of the modular terrain I made for the boys, years ago.

Fairly straightforward - four plywood boards, with hills and cave made out of layered styrofoam, plastered over for the rocky bits. Standard ground cover of sand in thinned wood glue, dry-brushed in natural colours with grass matt and model flocking to finish off. Trees were made from the roots of saplings weeded out of garden. The few figures in the pics should give an idea of size. We also made some boards and buildings for the futuristic WH 40 000, but I don't have any pics of that I'm afraid.

Et voilà again. :)

--

Paul

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Paul originally sent me this post in 2016! This week I found it again in the drafts list.

Paul V's 1/72 scale Battlefield

Here's some ancient pics I managed to dredge up, Woodsy, showing the battlefield I once made. Not very large, sorry, they're scans I made ages ago from paper pics I've mislayed since... I should still have that field somewhere, with hills cut out and rest rolled up. :)

#1 shows construction: cheap wallpaper taped to floor of parent's living room while minding the house during said parent's holiday. Hills are filled with layers of stepped pieces of cardboard (from boxes collected at supermarket waste dump). Visible towards the rear are some game boards from Avalon Hill's Panzer Leader game, which I scaled up a bit (but nowhere to anything realistic).

Woods were made from styrofoam; houses are 4-5 basic buildings I drew up, photocopied and which we then coloured in with magic markers.

For rules we used the most basic ones from Panzer Leader. Having things in 3-D (as opposed to 2-D cardboard) means that things like "line of sight/line of fire" could easily be checked by eye instead of needing 2-3 pages of specific rules, and all the nonsense about troop morale was simplified to the morale of the players. :)  Unit strength &c we also got from the Panzer Leader game.

#2 shows a young P Vreede having set up the German side.

Reason I had some German troops is a good friend in college had a friend that staged massive battles and I wanted to participate. Friend's friend had a large Red Army, so to help my friend I made a reasonably self-contained (if unrealistically composed) German battle group. I never got to play with them for one reason or another, but it turned out handy when I discovered my best friend Lo (shown in #3) had enough American stuff to field against my little group. 

#4 shows my little Kampfgruppe, #5 and 6 are my rear/HQ area. Object of the game was to capture at least three enemy-held towns as well as the enemy HQ vehicle, which could be hidden. (you need an objective or else nothing much will happen).

#7 shows Lo's Task Force, posed for a patrol in #8. 

#9 - 11 are posed pictures of our troops.

#12 is from a real game (where so much was going on that we had to break up the normal turn system into individual little skirmish turns to manage the fighting and keep things both realistic and fair. :)  Red paper squares denote destroyed vehicles, orange means damaged for a turn. What we both lacked in equipment I quickly made out of paper: side and front silhouettes dovetailed together (also visible in last picture).

Et voilà.

--

Paul

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Paul originally sent me this post in 2016! This week I found it again in the drafts list.

Hold your Positions!

This looks like a good bit of plastic battle terrain by Atlantic of Italy.

 Did you have anything like this for your small soldiers?

Space Link

 

I like the look of Space link, tho I've never owned any. The space stationesque parts really conjure the taste for sci-fi toys in the seventies and eighties. 

Not sure if there were action figures with Space link. I recently saw a little figure in a boxed Robotix set, which I guess is a more modern version of Space Link. 

There's also a Capsela vibe to the construction above, which I saw online.

Are you familiar with SpaceLink, Robotix and Capsela? 

Bill wades in:
Its easier to show rather than tell, so here is my take on Capsela Spacelink. Originally made in the late seventies by Mitsubushi Pencil Co., Capsela was an ingenious engineering building system using capsule based components, containing motors, gears, electrical connections etc. It made building working models a simple task, as all the fiddly bits were enclosed in a plastic ball. The basic concept was in production until quite recently, from various companies, with Bandi being the latest owner. Play Jour extended the basic line into Spacelink, by adding space themed parts to attach to the capsules, such as wings and rockets and cockpits to fit inside, with a range of small figures called 'Capsenauts'.

You can see the scale of the Capsenaut figures in this line up of small figures and then running up to the Mattel Armageddon figure, which is about 8" high.

The Capsela range included remote control devices, simple computer control, infra red receivers and all manner of specialised parts.

Robotix by MB Games was a space themed building set using larger modular parts and a 3.5" figure. Although Robotix uses a similar hexagonal connector of around 20mm, it is rotated about 10 degrees, so attaching a capsule to a Robotix part meant that it was at an angle and would not sit right.

Robotix also had a few different owners over the years, with remote control parts and motors, but with an emphasis on more recognisably space module themed parts.