P is for Pure Nostalgia!

MFP - Music For Pleasure, a British 'K-Tel', There's lots about both on Wikipedia, so I won't bore you with it, but it's interesting. We loved this, played it all the time! I don't know how it ended-up at our house, possibly Woman's Hour on Radio4 had something to do with it? All instrumentals, some originally having lyrics, and all pop-hits in the early 1970's.

I thought Telstar was on here as well, but I can't see it listed, so there may have been another 'Moog' album! We were quite late to pop/rock, living our early lives mostly outdoors, or, if it was wet (and it was 2024-style wet for years when we were kids!) it was Lego, the wooden fort or Action Man, with the odd dodgy foray into the chemistry sets - which invariably involved setting our work-table on fire . . . Methylated spirts, it's almost magic!

Anyway, as a result this was pretty-much what we got until we were old enough to buy our own, which for me was Blondie's Heart of Glass as a first single, followed by No Mean City by Nazareth as my first album, quickly joined by two space themed orchestral works off the back of Star Wars, then several more Nazareth albums and three from Tangerine Dream, I'm sure the Moog led me to Tangerine Dream, but it wasn't until the advent of Trance-Techno, that the sound I wanted to accompany mile-long starships, failing in C-beams off the Shoulders of Orion, finally arrived. 

 

Obviously by then Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Peter Gabriel, Mike Oldfield and Aphrodite's Child had joined the soundtrack, but that's for another day. However, I can't leave you with an album still, so make what you will of this! I'm not sure what I make of it, I'm pretty sure no one does, but the 1970's were a different planet! Watch the backgrounds, especially the Hooded Swan at the start!

I get sad watching this stuff, not because I'm some populist, flag-shagging, Trumpundbrexit Boris-hugger wanting to go back to some sunlit upland of chocolate rationing and beating your wife with impunity, but because we had such high-hopes then, for a magic, happy, space-age future, and what we've got is closer to the grey dystopia of Metropolis.

And I guess that's the point of nostalgia, it's got some poignancy attached to it, it's not necessarily a happy thing?

F is for Follow-up - Glow in the Dark Bug-eyed Aliens

Very much a follow-up to this post, which does itself link to the previous sighting here, so a third outing tonight! And far from just ID'ing them, I've managed to find and ID three lots under four monikers which is a pretty satisfying state of affairs, I can tell you!

They weren't capsule toys (I'm sure I've seen something similar on gum-ball machine insert-cards, so I'll keep an eye out for more on these!), they were Cosmo Explorer Glow in Dark Alien aliens, and imported or 'jobbed' into the 'States by Way Out Toys Inc., of New York (left hand card), however, under the Way Out sticker is the unmistakable Soma logo printed on the backing card!

So the ones we looked at last time were Soma, and in this pack we have a new three-finger pose (pink, right) and a new four-finger pose (greenish, left), and a colour variant - in the middle - of the pair I already had, with plastic-colour, pose and paint variations; who knows how many you can find? Soma pose-counts are often in sixes or twelve's, so it should be dozens, as a minimum . . .  oh goodie!

Meanwhile the card on the right shows what seems to be all four poses (some sources state six poses, but the blister say four - two pairs, two singles) of the Imperial Toys (another importer/jobber, but also a contracting one) Glow in the Dark Alien Invaders, in what seems to be all three colours.

Well, once you know what you're looking for, finding them (and inaccurate information about them! I'm talkin' to yooh - Pinterest and Wortpoint!) becomes easy, so I bought some . . . so you don't have to! But why wouldn't you want a glowing army of human-knapping cattle-botherers!

The Imperial ones are slightly less sophisticated in that they all [and only] have black eyes, with no other decoration and a lower pose-frequency count on the two with weapons, but then the Soma planet sends it's emissaries out with no weapons at all, so on that score these guys are better-off!

Close-ups; because I can, and because the Soma ones are good-enough in the link and now in storage, so I couldn't shoot them for this post and I didn't want to de-card the three newies. I would imagine Imperial commissioned theirs after they'd seen Soma's, but the factories in China may have spied on each other; bringing them out at roughly the same time - around 1992-94'ish, I believe?

But I got a half-decent image through the blister and shone a torch on them for the de rigueur glowing in the dark shot! On the eight I have now we can see gold, blue, green and orange paint with a distinct four polymer colours. And while Imperial have gone with one 'species', Soma's are - so far - all different.

They are all a nice 54/60mm with the Imperial Toys set having a constant, slightly cone-headed physiology (for people who follow all that 'greys', 'nordics', 'talls' and 'midgets' LGM stuff), with the cone/bulge at the rear. They are also all marked 'Imperial-[over]-CHINA' faintly, across their shoulders.

All the searching which resulted from knowing what they all were actually threw-up a third lot, another novelty importer; Amscan, their's sold as an eight in North America and a twelve here (but the spelling suggests they were both available for order in all sales-territories?), but only one pose/colour-way, with orange eyes. I haven't got any yet (they are findable), but in those multiples, too-many, so I'll wait until I see one or two in a loose/mixed lot.

I can't work out if the picture bottom-right is a mock-up or an artist-enhanced photograph, nor is it clear whether they have been and gone or are yet to arrive, but the image comes up when Googling them, so it (the picture) has been released somewhere (might have been the Amscan website), for some reason . . . something to look for!

I kept forgetting to turn the light off and/or turn-off the flash (the cat thought I was mad!), and so several similar shots resulted in an obvious .gif presenting itself!

It's like a 1970's disco' floor . . . "OOOOoooooo'Ifeellove-Ifeellove-Ifeellove-Ifeellove . . . Iyyyyy Feeel Luuuurve . . . I FEEL Luuurve, Luuurve, Luuurve Luuurve . . . I feel luuurve . . . piew-piew-dugaduga-whang-whang piew-piew-dugaduga-whang-whang Phessheewwww! Cheers Donna; the ultimate bangin' choon - and a nice spacey soundtrack for little rubber aliens!

And many thanks to 'Patti' in the US-of-A who sent me extra figures!