For years, I thought this was Tom Cobet, I guess you read what you see, and the dyslexia (now known to be Asperger's) may have been a part, but I think a lot of people probably read words, new words that is, or especially names, wrongly! As a kid I read tons of Sci-Fi, and rereading now, you realise how poorly you understood the made-up names of aliens or their planets, and I suspect lots of us do it! Also, some of my LotR/Hobbit name-readings were way off too!
Still missing a couple of poses, and I think all the paint's going to have to come off, as I said in the Introduction,
Tom Corbett - Space Cadet was a TV serial (as they were called before they became series (UK) or seasons (US)), on all four main US Channels (not just the
NBC of my notes), and these uniforms seem to tie-in well, with the costumes of the TV series. The crawling figure, middle left, is an Alien.
More here;
I already had one of the missing chaps, with the mic, who I seem to have shot twice now, and there were two unpainted figures in the lot, which leaves two other blokes and the single female sculpt to find, I think, but that's the fun of collecting! Throwing money at complete sets, if/when you've got it, gets boring! All mine are PVC, aparently later ones were polyethylene, with bases added to earlier baseless figures.
These were pretty ubiquitous I think, and included in lots of the space sets, and while it looks a bit classroomy, they are all mean to be more 'control-room' than office! I think I got the small cabinet of component drawers on its side, without my glasses I thought it was a bookcase full of box-files!
Big important machine on the left and uppy-downy-side-to-side radar array to the right, there is a small hole in the top of the giant cash-register, which is for a mesh-
cullender-dish type thing, missing from these two examples, but we'll see one in a later part.
Educational interactivity was provided by the morse signaler boards, which changed over time, with at least two versions of code sheet. On the right is one missing the code sheet slider-insert.
From behind, obviously
by sliding them up or down, you can flash morse messages in either red
or black, with the printed dots offset by just enough to allow for them
all to go white on the push (red), or pull - black.
Close-ups of the two different sheets I have, there may be more?
Black includes numerals, red has letters only.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a big computer or a giant filing-cabinet, or should I lay it flat as a cargo-pod? The beauty of imagination in play! One thing I discovered while shooting all these was that the scenics/accessories were completely replaced over time, apparently by some pretty casual pantographing, resulting in the replacements being smaller all round.
Early versions were polystyrene, later stuff is in a tough polyethylene type polymer, with some (the red-orange stuff) having more of the feel of polypropylene?
Size difference is quite notable, and while I say I 'discovered' it, I couldn't find anything on the Internet about it, but I'm sure the experts in the defunct Plastic Figure & Playset Collector, or it's still extant offspring, Russel Kern's Playset Magazine will have highlighted such details at some point, and previous to my observations! The Americans take Marx as seriously as the Germans worry about the colour variations of Timpo Apache legs!
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