RIDERS IN THE STORE

I've always loved rack toys. My two favourite toy shops in Preston when I was a nipper, Thomas Mears and Zodiac, had stacks of toys on racks. They were mostly cheap, knock 'em out quick coloured plastics.

  

I still love rack toys and one of my favourite adult acquisitions was the Ghost Rider by Fleetwood. It came out in the 1970's. Fleetwood did loads of cheapo rack stuff and despite their pocket money origins they are all quite beautiful and now very collectible. Ghost Rider the comic hero was born in Marvel comics in the summer of 1972.

Fleetwood made a later version of the Rider with a different card. The bike came in red with no silver.

Not being one of Marvel's A-listers, Johnny Blaze aka the Ghost Rider has a strong comic following and every now and then he rode out into the toy stores again. Here's another carded rider but the transparent toy remains a mystery to me. I found the image on an old Ebay archive.

Toy Biz re-invigorated many Marvel heroes in the Nineties and Naughties. In 1995 they issued the Flamin' Stunt Cycles including this, Blaze's Dark Cycle.

Ghostie got at least seven incarnations in the Marvel Legends line including this 2004 issue with another red bike.

In 2007 Ghost Rider made his Hollywood debut and came of age. I loved the fact that the rider had his own film but Nic Cage was wooden as the lead. The 2012 sequel was awful. Rider's brush with Tinseltown spawned some cool toys though, like this Ultimate Ghost Rider by Hasbro.

I still prefer my Fleetwood rack toy from 1977. Issued just 5 years after the rider's fiery birth at Marvel it remains true to the comic and untainted by the glitz of Hollywood.

I'll end with another beautiful Rider collectible from the Seventies, equally as cheap as a rack toy at the time but no less cool, the Ghost Rider gumball ring. Blazin'!

Are you keen on rack toys readers? Which ones?

FLEETWOOD RACK

These are so cool. Do you like them?

I have the Fleetwood Ghost Rider motobike toy on card.

http://www.plaidstallions.com/racktoys/fleetwood.html

BONE TO BE WILD

 When I was making my copy Boneshaker below I came across quite a few boney bike toys.

Here's Mattel's glorious 1973 original Boneshaker.

Here's Mattel's Chopcycles Ghost Rider. Chopcycles were a motorcycle version of Sizzlers. I adore the flowing stylised ghost. Those Mattel designers were something else back then.

Further skeletons appeared on Hot Wheel's Scorchin Scooter in their City line.

A much more recent affair, I'm unsure when this City bonehead was released. I'd certainly pick one up if I saw one at a boot sale.

Like most things Hot Wheels, fans mess around and here's a really comical duo of the Rrrumblers Boneshaker with a Scorchin' Scooter rider!

and there's even more rib-tickling adoration in this replica by Hell's Dept I saw online. I'm not certain what this is made of but it looks really neat!

Last but not least in this ossifying outing is the legendary Ghost Rider by Fleetwood toys. Below's a loose one I saw online, which you don't often see, loose.

This basic plastic rack carded toy has attained grail-like status among action figure collectors and I'm amazed to say that I have one tucked away. I bought it at a good price decades ago on Ebay so that I could attract people to my old vintage toy stall at toy fairs in the Noughties!

More often than not this carded rider is encased in plastic with an AFA grading like this one on Hakes in the US. I'm unsure what exactly 60 means and whether mine would cut the mustard. Anyone know about AFA grading?

You can read more about the Fleetwood Ghost Rider on MC as its a bit of a blog legend. just click on the label below.

Have you any boney toys, skeletons in the cupboard or playthings of to-marrow readers?

Pat D's Carded Ghost Rider Racer

Here my Ghost Rider friction toy Woodsy.

The funny thing is mine is different. it's a racer. Not ghost Rider!

You can tell from the helmet and a different color. I bought it about 25 years ago. A corner store going out of business and I picked it up. 

The plastic bubble had fallen off about 15 years ago. I put a few dabs of glue to hold it together. 

The bottom of the card is also shorter as you can see but this is how I got it from the store. 

Not sure what to think since I've never seen another one like this before. ..thanks Pat D

Anyone got a Fleetwood Ghost Rider toy?

[more Fleetwood Ghost Rider on the blog here]

Burning Plastic: The Fleetwood Toy Ghost Rider

And now for something completely different from my toy cabinet. I loved rack toys as a kid. They were always affordable with a little saved-up pocket money. I was too old for rack toys by 1976, having diverted my interests to rock music and the opposite sex, but had I been 9 or 10 I would have snapped this one up, the 1976 Ghost Rider by US plastic rack toy specialists, Fleetwood Toy Corp.

Having always been enthralled by Super Heroes I started to collect comic strip collectables in the early 1990's. To feed my passion I bought various reference books and magazines and in particular Tomarts wonderful guides and Action Figure digests. It was in one such book that I stumbled across the above Ghost Rider and I was hooked. The scarcity of the toy added to its allure and I vowed to own one one day. That day came around 2005, when my friend bid and won one on fleabay on my behalf. I was thrilled to bits. Not perfect but still a fine example of this rare toy. Hakes, the US valuers, describe it as the very first Ghost Rider toy ever made. There is a later variation with a flaming red card title and you can see an example on the mega Mego Museum site.

Anyone else got any interesting Super Hero toys locked away in the cupboard?

SWINGING FOR TARZANS

 Passing the village of Greystoke last week as we wended across Cumbria to Keswick, I had yet to settle on my latest project.

Having decided, its to try to recreate a blog legend I first saw years ago on the cover of a Plastic Warrior Magazine, the fabled Lone Star Tarzan set, with its waving Tarzan figure.

I'll update the blog about this specific project as it swings into action.

Meanwhile here are some further sightings of vintage waving and other Tarzans hiding in the cyber jungle, all of which I would have loved as a young chimp back in the 60's!

*

Jungle Set

Dschungel

Zoo animal set

Wentoys Safaratiere

Dulcop Tarzan

Dulcop Zoo

Fleetwood Tarzan Safari

Blue Box Safari Set - is that the same as the Fleetwood Landrover above?

Tarzan in the Valley of the Dinosaurs [image: Plaidstallions.com]

Original Tarzan Figuren with monkey alphabets by Bildschriftenverlag or BSV.

see also https://www.bsv-archiv.de/pages/sonstige-publikationen/tarzan-figurenset-blister.php

Ador Arte Tarzan bag from Argentina

Primitivos by JC of Spain

African Hunting for Wild Animals bags

The waving Tarzan repainted as The Phantom in his Jungle Play Set by Larami

and finally, a 12 inch Tarzan cheapo, which may well be a future knockoff chest beater of mine.

Which set do you like?

Do you like Tarzan in any of his media?

Has Tarzan had his day?

Have you any collectables?

Riders On the Cheap

Like many baby boomers and space race babies I've been a fan of comics and comic heroes all my life. In particular I always loved those characters who dwelled in that grey area between good and evil. Were they hero or villain? A rogues' gallery would include Morbius, Silver Surfer, Swamp Thing, Werewolf By Night, Man Thing and Moon Knight. But the king of them all was Ghost Rider, he of the flaming skull and hell-fire bike.

Ghost first appeared in the 70's but very few toys came out. The most well-known amongst collectors is the Fleetwood plastic action figure pictured below, which I was lucky enough to get hold of a few years back.

Ghost Rider had a welcome come-back with Nicholas Cage's first film a couple of years ago, which I thoroughly enjoyed. So you can imagine how excited I was last night when I went to see the second Rider film, Spirit of Vengeance. I needn't have been. It was absolutely awful!

[This next bit contains Spoilers!] What's wrong with it? Were can I start! Doesn't really matter so I'll kick off with Nic Cage's acting. Well it's really the lack of it that's the issue. He's as wooden as a milk-stool and he desperately needs his thinning hair styling. He's meagre dialogue is seemingly dragged out of him by an outside force to reveal itself in a tedious drawl. It matters not as no-one else around him could act either as they'd all been rounded up from a Budapest boxing club. Which segways neatly to location. Ghost Rider is an all-American flaming skull, with his comic roots in the Wild Western past. This new film is set in Eastern Europe!


This fact alone explains many of the film's myriad flaws as the Rider should not be there. Made by a largely Eastern European team, the already paltry budget I suspect was largely blown on the Rider's flaming head, bike and chains, leaving precious little for set design. Located in a quarry, the colour scheme is that God-awful silvery-browny mess seen in countless straight-to-DVD-B-Movies, which occasionally cut to vaseline-smeared shots of zero budget big holes and piles of spoil. Even the main event of the film, a blazing Mining machine, is a big yellow mess. Comparing this shameful Marvel effort to say the recent Iron Man movie is like comparing a fag end with a solar flare. I can't believe that Stan Lee put his name to this garbage. Jonny Blaze should have ridden straight over it to DVD hell.

MARVEL AND DC'S LESSER MOVIES

I have always been a fan of Ghost Rider. The combination of horror and super hero is a no brainer for someone like me.

When I had some spare dosh in the mid 00's I invested in a neat Ghost Rider carded action figure toy, by Fleetwood which really appealed to me. Amazingly I haven't sold it and its still riding round the attic looking for the contract.

I'm also a huge super hero film fan and naturally I was excited about Ghost Rider blazing a trail onto the big screen. I went to see it, with leading man Nick Cage in the title role, at the local flicks.

I caught it again last night on UK TV and realised that there is something different about certain Marvel movies like Ghost Rider.

Some don't have the flickering Marvel comics pages device at the start and there is clearly a smaller budget being spent.

There may also be something about the lighting, a sort of vaseliney haze across these movies but that could just be me.

These Marvel 'B-movies' I would say include Ghost Rider, Ghost Rider 2, The Punisher, Man Thing and the recent Venom to name a few.

These are clearly 'lesser' movies in the eyes of Marvel I'd say and seem to be secondary to the big hitters like Captan America, Iron Man, Spidey and the Avengers.

I suppose the same could be argued about DC. There are many DC 'B-movies' like Swamp Thing, the early Superman films and Supergirl.

Maybe its just a timing thing. More recent films get bigger budgets?

What do you think about these 'lesser'movies from Marvel and DC?

DOCTOR DOCTOR!

I always enjoyed a good doctor's set as a nipper.

Slapping that toy stethoscope round my neck made me feel like the local GP. Tapping Action Man's knee with my silver plastic reflex hammer was always fun as was dropping something yukky in the white kidney tray.

I seem to recall a bright red case for my doc's kit shaped like half a plate. It had a white cross on it.

My daughter had the classic plastic set by Fisher Price that came in a beige plastic case. Its star item had to be the inflatable blood pressure unit, which came with a little pump. She always checked my blood and said I didn't have any!

In the Noughties I found a huge loose plastic doctor's and nurses set at a car boot sale. It was from the Sixties or Seventies and came with dozens of toy medical items, the whole lot being held on a toy trolley. It was fabulous and a real credit to the seller that it was all still intact and I snapped it up for my toy stall back then. I never found a brand name on this set but I imagine it was by Nasta or Fleetwood or someone.

Since then I've seen vintage branded medical sets for the old US TV series Dr. Kildare and one called Emergency I think. I seem to recall a show here in Blighty called Emergency Ward 10 but they won't have been the same.

Did you have a toy doctor's kit readers?

KING KONG IN MY POCKET

Its Sunday morning, the sun is shining at long last and the coffee is piping hot. Yes, it feels like Winter may be well and truly coming to an end after all. Even the frogs are at it in our new Moonbase pond, which I consider to be the official nod of approval.

When I was a kid I liked nothing better than to check out my stuff in the sunshine. My pockets were always crammed with nic-nacs like cap gun rolls, board game parts, anglo bubbly gum, rubber jigglers and key rings.

I had tons of key rings. They were everywhere that Kids went back then: shops, zoos, garages, everywhere. One of my favourites was a plastic King Kong key ring. I say King Kong, but of course he could have simply been a big gorilla. I suppose anyone could make a gorilla toy and suggest it was King Kong. Was the name in the public domain I wonder?

My key ring looked a bit like this American one on Etsy but not quite. Mine had its feet standing on a base, as if a small plastic figure had been made into a key ring. Also the key ring itself had a proper opening clasp.

The figure looked more like the Kong in this picture again from Etsy. The small one to the left. Mine may have had his arms down, but the mists of Skull Island have fogged my brain over the years. I can't remember!

Like LP astronauts these little Kongs seemed to be everywhere too. Once off his Island he certainly multiplied in number. He appears in a rack toy by Fleetwood Toys like this one on Ebay.

and again even closer over at Plaid Stallions. He may also have punched his way into the mega rare Tarzan set by Lone Star by I'd have to check that*. I bet you can still buy this figure in modern toys nowadays. Or?

Did/ do you have any King Kong figures readers?

*POSTSCRIPT:

The only picture I've ever seen of the super rare Tarzan carded set by Lone Star is on the cover of the excellent Plastic Warrior magazine from the UK as featured on their own webpage of back issues [ issue 118, 2007 ]. Having just read my own copy, its a crouching chimp that appeared in the set rather than a gorilla although its hard to see in the picture.

PS. Plastic Warrior have included some great articles on LP astronauts and aliens over the years. Let me know if you want the back issue numbers so you can try to locate them.