J is for Journey Into Space

We haven't had any poured-metal for a while and when it comes to poured-metal it doesn't get much better than this.

Thanks to Martin Hills for letting me photograph this find before it went off to its new owner...

Journey into space...with Cherilea! I've seen smaller sets of these figures before, one each of the main poses, a rocket and two robots, that sort of thing anyway, but this is pretty special.

Better shot of the contents, I'm afraid they're not my best photographs as it was a hurried opportunity at the last Sandown Park toy fair, and I wasn't quite in focus with them.

These figures were later run (by Hilco?) in a very chalky white polyethylene which is now very brittle, and therefore even bags of broken bits exchange hands for a fiver or more!

To get two-each of most of the elements is quite enough, but there is a pose here I've never seen before...

...the prone figure in the centre; totally new to me.

The robot on the other hand is one of the most common figures out there and it would repay the effort just to collect them. Well...I mean he's not that common, but there are many versions of him to track-down and collect.

In the US he appears in various sizes in hard and soft plastic, in the UK as well as this figure and the Hilco plastic shots (which tend to survive due to the sculpts 'chunkyness'), there are larger versions, probably from the US moulds via mould-sharing deals?

Then there are the arm-down versions from the Bell/Merit magnetic 'Answer Robot' games, which were reproduced three Christmases ago by House of Marbles, and literally dozens of versions of the same game existed all over the world, over several decades - lots of which are on that BGG link.

In addition to these there have been many rubber and plastic gum-ball machine prizes, key-rings, erasers and the like coming out of the Far East, the robot would make a nice, compact, single-subject collection.