E is for Eye Candy - Accoutrements, et al, 'Colorform' Aliens

Here's a daft thing . . . I posted these about a year and a half ago, while living in the previous flat, and it was cobbled together from Internet images and a couple of catalogue scans, when I had this image in Picasa all along, of my set, which I took in 2021!

So, to be viewed in context, here's the post to which they should have been included;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2024/04/c-is-for-colorforms-not.html

M is for Marx Space - Silver Astronauts

Also in my box, and definitely from the Moonbase and other 'Luna-themed' sets, was a near complete set of the Silver Astronauts, larger than the other sets we've looked at recently, they are closer to 54mm/1:32nd scale, but were often issued with the 45mm green Moon Men., and to be fair, are 'small' for 54mm, especially the two guys wearing dustbins, who are closer to 50mm figures.

 

Year-book photo', the upright poses are the ones which were used for both the 25mm Miniature Masterpiece window-box sets' figures, and some of the 30mm human poses in the Mystery Spaceship centrifugal wind-up UFO set, the seated figure is the same one as the chap riding the Mercury capsule, while we will look at the two 'bin men' in a few minutes.

 

Close-ups of the simple figures, I'm missing the pointing guy, found in other sets, and a couple of duplicates for the full 'mould shot', not that I worry so much about things like that, I just want one of each, before I die! The four sculpts to the right were in the Mystery Spaceship, all of them appear in the window-boxes, painted or unpainted, in polystyrene or polyethylene.

 

 

 

Speaking of not seeking duplicates (unnecessarily), I've gone from none to three, I think, on the Mercury capsules, in less than three years! With the one we looked at separately (with the part-work Ad's), then another came in with the Cape Kennedy set, only for a third, in the same leery-orange to accompany this silver chap!

 

The 'bin men' are actually both wearing suits which were serious propositions back in the 1960's, with a NASA procurement competition being sent out and two designs taken seriously enough for many trials, new versions, press-junkets leading to colour-supplement articles, public exhibitions/displays, and the like, leaving a fair bit of info., on the Internet.

 

This was the Grumman-developed rigid or semi-rigid prototype S-100 Space 'Moon Suit', tested in 1965, plenty of reading on-line, so I won't bore you with the minute, but suffice to say I think of the two suits you find pictures of, the Marx model is slightly closer to the number 8-suit, than the number-3, with the more rounded skirt? Matt Mason's was better!

 

But they got the more acute angle of both suit-body versions wrong, as with the [reversed] helmet window angle, so the plastic figure is only an approximation. Also, while constantly presented as a Grumman product, it was almost exclusively the work of an Allyn B. Hazard of Space General Corporation.

 

Marx did much better with this, the 1961, Republic Aviation prototype Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) Suit. Apart from not fully-modelling the fold out rest-break tripod arms, it's a pretty faithful reproduction. And in both you can see where the Kaled Survival Suits (Daleks) came from!

 

I had this figure, sans suit, for years, as his 50mm made him part of the small-scale collection, where I thought he was a Frankenstein's Monster sculpt - basic overalls, beseeching arms, starey face!

 

Scale is a moot point here, with both the Rex Mars and astronaut figures being of similar size, Marx liked their 'floating' astronauts/spacemen, and there is a third sculpting out there, in the '60mm' set, although when I posted them here, I thought they were closer to 54mm, so I'll have to check them!

 

The only accessories with this photoshoot, the errant legs of an MPC space station!

M is for Marx Space - Moon Men & "Aliens'

So, to the aliens, known in the later (1970/80's) sets as Moon Men, and six of a possible seven poses. I've only ever seen the crawling alien in the gray PVC, and we've seen him, so he got left out!

 

The set of six, in a softish 'Airfix' polyethylene, a bit bright, but not as bright as the orange-red of some of the space stuff, and it's the whole slime-monster lagoon-radioactive-neon lighting trope of a lot of sci-fi - this colour was common on comic art and pulp-paperback jackets, spilling, radiating, blasting or dripping! Even the 'lobby-cards' and posters for black & white movies would have plenty of florescent green, lime green or yellow-green!

 

Compared with the Rex Mars set's versions, and as we'll see in a second, they are 'versions', all six were found in the Rex Mars set, with one or two also found in Tom Corbett or Space Patrol sets.

 

'Big Ears', the only one found in all four sets, and the similarities between this sculpt and the Fireball XL5 character 'Zooney the Lazoon' is almost certainly not a coincidence, as the Anderson's raided the entire 1950/60's toy oeuvre for their various TV series', the fact that they ended up with a character in a 1962 production, which resembles a 1950's space toy from the other side of the pond, is beyond accidental!

 

Note also, all the bases (and feet) are quite different, these are variants, not the same tool . . . with each being re-cut/finished as it was included in whatever set, the six 'ethylene Moon Men having their own tool, leaving the crawling guy in the Tom Corbett set, as the outlier, not included here.

 

I've seen a Tom Corbett Space Academy set, with all three PVC sets, so you got three Big Ears, but helmets for the Rex Mars sculpts only, it had pale-blue 'office furniture' and was dated 1952, ten years before Fireball XL5!! 

 

Likewise, the 'Frogman Assassin'; 

completely different bases on each of my three samples.

 

I already had four of them in a different shade of green, whom I had shot for the archive, and actually found the bag first, whilst putting the others away, then remembered I had shot them, and you can see in the lower image a clear colour variation between them! No accessories in this post; I'd run out of things to pose the figures with by the time I got to these chaps/chapesses/whatever's!

M is for Marx Space - Rex Mars

I don't know if the Corbett license had expired, or if its sales were dropping to a market saturation-point, which Marx would have recognised from other sets histories, but for some reason they 'invented' a non-TV/Movie, royalty-free property of their own, Rex Mars, with figures similar to both the Tom Corbett and the Space Patrol these were issued with in bigger sets (I haven't even tried to work out the sets, there are dozens of them, stretching over three decades). And that's what this post is looking at, with more of the scenic detritus from my two partial sets.

 

The family portrait! I seem to be missing one sculpt, a chap holding a walkie-talkie near his face, and again, paint is going to have to be removed at some point! 

  

The landing party helping a 'red shirt' back to the shuttle! This time I have the female sculpt, but it's unclear who's who, as it's a made-up set with no TV serial or Movie to help guide the eye, it's all down to the kid's imagination who's boss! I put the lady in charge, she's the tallest!

 

The slightly more active component, they have the same rubber-ducting on knees and elbows as the Space Patrol, but other details are closer to the Tom Corbett sculpts, but with circular helmet-collars, they take the bobbled helmets with a couple of protrusions in the clear-plastic, which turn-up in mixed lots from time to time; I have a few somewhere in the spares pile, so some will get protection!

 

The Aliens, six in total, and rather like Lik Be's robots, all completely different! Which is fine if you want them from six different planets, but not so logical when they are the 'Moon Men' of the Moonbase set? They have their own post, probably next in the sequence.

 

There were, again, two unpainted ones in my sample.

 

The quadruple sonic-death-ray-beam traginator weapon, or boring radar thingy, depending upon your propensity for war toys - there were lots of them in the box, in three colours, but most in the mustard yellow! And something which equated to the morse-signaller boards we saw in an earlier post, apparently it's a solar battery!

 

Three of the landing pads for the Mercury capsule, it has a little hole in the heat-shield! And a ribbed, domed building/laboratory/accommodation unit, which is so remarkably similar to a gold-chromed lid off a touristy bottle of plum-brandy (with the plums in it), from Spain or Portugal, which I've been carrying around for about 50-years, after the Christmas we polished it off, waiting for a chance to scratch build (Terry Wise and the rest told us to keep everything!), I can't wait to dig it out and compare it with this, as I suspect one is based upon the other? But I'll have to wait, won't I!

 

The space-station, which I think can be similarly stuck on the rocket-engine building in the previous post? It's hopelessly out of scale, but so are most of the vehicles, in both my/all the sets!

 

Welp . . . I don't know . . . on the left we have the closest thing to an infantry heavy weapon/death ray, but it's too tall for any of the figures in the three sets we've looked at so far! In the middle, we have an 18thC telescope drilled through a 1950's parking meter! ! While I can't work out if the thing on the right is a sightseeing glass, or a 'What The Butler Saw' peep-show! Cum'on, design department - you can do better than that!

 

Help needed here, what I do know - the two tripods and two bent legs are from the MPC space station, the triple-disc thing is a broken instrument we'll see in a later post, the basket (front, left) also returns (and is part of the thing I mentioned in an earlier post, with the TV desk thing), but that's it.

 

I think the blue loudspeaker, may be from a vehicle, possibly a Hong Kong plastic toy, but it could clip into a tinplate 'wall' of a building? While I have no clue on the bowl (front, centre) which is hollow, the red bit might be a 'sprulette' (my own word), but there's a better shot of a silver one in a later post, so it seems to be a feature of these sets? And the two 'mine detectors' would seem to be from a 3 or 4" action figure? Anyone got any ideas on any of these five?

M is for Marx Space - Intro.

A bit of a box-ticking exercise, I bought another Marx space set the other day, it was packed with stuff, but not necessarily the stuff which should have been in it, lots of figures, which is what I was after, so I was happy enough, though.

 

However, because it was all a bit mixed, and because there are better US sources for all this stuff, which can be quite complicated, especially when several long-running playsets all carried similar stuff, I'm going to look at the figures over a few posts, as a sort of conversational overview, and some of the other stuff will come along for the ride!

 

So, this was the set I got, a bit tatty, but all in one piece, and supposed to be a 'Captain Space' set, however the contents were more suited to a 'Moonbase' set, with the figures surviving from the Captain Space set, along with their tinplate compound.

 

Compared with the tin Cape Kennedy carry-case I bought a while back.

 

The stuff I've left out of the posts, the tin-plate compound is in a bag, there's a ton of rocketry, but some of it's in a poor state, so I'll need to track down some better stuff later, although I haven't sorted them with the stuff in the main pile, or the extras in the Kennedy set, so something will come together.

 

The orange version of the launching gantry we saw, in white, in the Canaveral set, is definitely a Moonbase item, not a Captain Space thing, while I think the big rocket is MPC. Weirdest is the quadruple ray-gun platforms, there's about nine and a bit in this shot, plus a couple missing which were with the photo-shoot stuff!

 

Bases/lauchers, or parts thereof, from several other sets, and another piece of tin-plate, and a couple of things which aren't Marx were also kicking-about in the bottom of the box! Somehow missing the shot, was the Gemini module, but with a silver pilot, not the colour-matched get-up, we saw here, but the capsule was in the same leery orange-red!

 

But all these guys, gals and Aliens, along with a robot or two and a near full set of the larger 54mm NASA types were included, so it's through them, that I'm going to look at some of the more interesting bits, over a series of posts.
 

The grey ones are the Tom Corbett figures, with uniforms matching the NBC TV serial, the blue ones Rex Mars (Marx's own property), and the orange ones the Space Patrol figures, a set used to pack out the other pairs' sets, while the green ones are a set of Aliens pulled from the Rex Set for later issues like the Moonbase set.

 

I'm assuming the paint is all home-added, I can't find others similarly painted, so one day I'll clean them all off.

T is for Terra by Battat - 2023

As a first update to the previous post, there was nothing of note at the 2022 show, and while I missed the 2023 show due to other commitments, I did make it to the Spring [gift] Fair at Birmingham's NEC, where I shot these on a whole-seller's stall, whose name I didn't record.

 

Close-ups of things we've seen before, for the most part, I haven't seen that much 'out and about' but I'm guessing natural history museum's or zoological garden gift shops are a first choice for searching for them, with - maybe - a garden centre chain I haven't found yet being another likely source? We have shelfied a few in TK Maxx I think, but I haven't seen them in Smyths or B&M?

T is for Terra by Battat - 2020

Back to the 2020 Toy fair in London, and what was already a looming global health crisis, if you were paying attention to the news over Christmas, which I was, but funny, with nearly everything else cancelled that year, the Toy fair went ahead as normal and would actually get cancelled the following year, just as the world was coming out of its multiple-lockdowns!

 

And this lot didn't get posted at the time because I'd posted quite a bit in the preceding few years, since Brian Berke brought them to our attention in 2017, and this was (still is, on one level) repetitive of those previous mentions, but let's get it and two smaller updates out of Picasa and the Blog up-to-date on the subject!

 

Giant tubs, or 'buckets'!

 

Various packaging formats.

 

Larger Dinosaurs, nice models.

 

Smaller tubs of smaller figures, with duplicates - early learning target?

 

The wild and domestic animal families are really very good.

 

More Dino's including play sets

I think there were farm play sets' as well.

 

Small Dinosaur set.

 

Further displays.

I can't remember if these were shot on an agents stand, with or without a Battat representative, or on an actual Battat stand, usually I shoot them on other peoples stands, and if they had a stand that yera , it wwas the only year they've done so?