P is for Premier's Plastic Pulp-fiction!

I mentioned the other day that these were on their way from the land across The Pond, and they arrived a few days later, it took me a week or two to photograph them, then I managed to delete one lot of images while they were still in the camera, then reshoot them without noticing the alert that there was no SD card in the dratted thing, anyway, they're here now!

 

Group shot, I'll use Ed's ID list as a guide to these again;

 

https://toyconnect.blogspot.com/2013/08/premier-plastics-knock-off-flash-gordon_4270.html

 

So this is the five inch 'Dart', version 1, as made by Premier Plastics, presumably as dime-store bin toys, but they were also branded to Flash Gordon on multiple-element, tied-in cards.

 

Two of the smaller three inch darts, the red one I think equates to his version 1, while the silver one with an inverted '2' is probably the same as his version 1 also? I suspect, if enough are amassed, or compared, more numbers will surface, normal and inverted, and will be grouped in one version 2, as opposed to the unnumbered version 1?

 

Three inch 'Wide Bodies', these are all pretty identical, and with no numbers, are equivalent to Ed's version version 2 (five windows), but without the inverted '4', so again, will get a separate version under Ed's numbering system, one day?

 

Comparison between the three silver bods shows that the 3" Dart is that subtle pinkish-silver you sometimes find their (Premier's) figures in, like some simmering-mauve 1960's eye-shadow!

 

That's it, a quick post on 1950's pulp eye-candy, joining the fleet, which now has the two dodgy-painted ones, a soft plastic blue one and whatever has been hiding in storage-garage-storage all these years!

S is for Several Sculpted Spacemen

In addition to the two - quite sensible - rack toys, and the loose figures I used for the first narrative post, there were also some more assorted or generic spacemen and astronauts among the plunder of the first weekend in July, and which are the subject of this second space post.

 

Martin let me have these, pretty-much at cost, and a maker's name has come out since we last looked at them; Anabea, from Argentina, I think there were only the four poses copied from Deetail, but there is an alternate alien head used sometimes.

 

The Reisler also came from Martin, and is a duplicate of one previously seen, however this time he has a clear helmet, as opposed to the blue-tinted one we saw last time, a piece of Hing Fat junk from modern China, and a Cherilea pod-foot. I think my based sample is fair enough now, but I'm short on the pod-feet ones, with mostly HK or Marx soft vinyl versions.

 

Two K&M-Wild Republic on the left, with two new, baseless figures on the right. I think I may have seen their set, and if it's the one I'm thinking of, it's quite an infantile thing, for such realistic figures? A chunky flag-pole would appear to be missing.

 

A very cleanly marked 60mm Tudor Rose copy of Premier on the right, while on the left is a giant, 100mm-odd, polyethylene version of the Archer spacewoman, I think she may be one of the ones you see singly in bags marked A-OK USA, although there are plenty of parallels with the Hong Kong knock-offs, the quality is better. There should be an equally huge helmet, but it may be convertible for something else at that size - some of the modern travel-bottle sets have round-bottomed containers?

 

These Marx 60mm guys didn't survive the trip to Whitton, but I have better examples, so I guess it's off to 'recyce' for them, before their free-radicals contaminate anything else . . . Soylent Metallic Blue, yummy!

 

Also four post-Giant clones came out of the woodwork in the course of the day, three of the type 'C1' and a commoner 'C2', all grist to the mill;

 

https://butisitgiant.blogspot.com/search/label/Astronauts 

 

There is a bit more sci-fi/fantasy in the TV-Movie/Cartoon post, still to come, and thanking Adrian Little, Brian Carrick, Colin Penn, Isaac, Matt Murphy, Martin Fahie, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin for their part in what was a brilliant day.

R is for a Return to Premier's Pocket Rockets

Well, it's been four months and I can honestly say Windows 11 is the worst version since Vista, or even Windows 98. I used to enjoy 'computing', now it's become a necessary chore! Anyhoo's I mentioned the other day we’d return to these in a future post, this is the future, or it was until you read it, so let's go!

This is how they arrived, and it was not a pretty sight, thick layer/s of stab-and-hope (with a 'craft' brush) paint, which would have looked quite fetching if done properly! The gloss black and matt red are OK, in that they are quite flat coats, but the yellow is as thick as cheese and cracked like a lake-bed in a drought?

While this is mid-way through the thorough cleaning I gave them, at this point they have just been rinsed after washing, after an hour or so in TFR (Traffic Film Remover - concentrated ammonia), after an overnight dip in 50% bleach. The red is clinging to the contact-line with the yellow, while the yellow isn't budging, one iota!

I repeated the process over the next 24-odd hours, and maybe got them a bit cleaner, but that yellow 'aint going nowhere, and while because it's definitely a different type of paint, I was wondering if it might be factory-applied, the fact is I can't find other examples, and the red is still clinging to the contact-line so may go under it, which means, I guess, the painter used some powerful, pre-health & safety era, probably lead-based shit they found in their dad's tractor shed . . . 1950's Claas-yellow Rustoleum anyone?

I do have another hard plastic one somewhere in blue and a couple of polyethylene jobbies, I think, but since Ed Berg went through them all, I know I have a ways to go, so these will stay like this for a while, and at some point I'll have to give them a new coat with an airbrush or aerosol, just to neaten them up a bit! At least the wheels are there on the bigger one.

Ed gave them a nomenclature which makes sense, so I'll adopt it, and he calls the little-one a 3" Wide Body - version 1 while the larger model is a 5" Dart - version 6, I think? And they are all described here with links to the individual posts.

C is for Combex's Cruising Crayon Carving Craft!

Picked this up the other day, little rocket pencil sharpener, although, it's not that little; it's nearly ten-inches of pulp-cover, Space Age, interstellar loveliness, from Combex, that [not] very well known ex-comb maker! Geddit! Lots of useful stuff here.

To give a sense of the size, it's here posed with some Giant clones and a couple of Keshi eraser types I happened to have to hand. Clearly this was more of a desktop novelty than a pencil-case thing, and I'm a bit gutted I never found one in my Christmas stocking, because clearly it belonged there!

 

The whole ship is hollow, so you can literally disintegrate most of the contents of your pencil-case, in one sitting, should you be minded to! And the seven-vent engine-bay is removable to empty the contents. Maybe, it was sold AS a pencil-case, possibly even having some pencils secreted within, it could easily take five or six . . . anyone know? Yes it was, see comments/Graces Guide page (link below) - 1954! It's 69!

 

There are two launching 'rails' moulded on the underside, so it was a horizontal launcher, a popular launch method in early fiction, whether fired as projectiles or using some magnetic-levitation device, or sequential-explosion (multi-chamber) accelerator. There is interesting stuff being done to deliver small payloads with a giant revolving sling-shot arm, at the moment.

Posed with what I think might be early (very clean/sharp mouldings), factory-painted (more in a later post), Premier space-ship escorts, I think the far one is what Ed Berg has dubbed a 5" Dart - version 6, and the near one is a 3" Wide Body - version 1?

 

Obviously, with the rails on the underside, giving an 'up' and 'down', I never really thought to photograph the red side! So black-top and red-bottom/wings, and it's pretty awesome!

P is for Premier Plastics' Polymer Pretenders

Students of these Premier Plastics Flash Gordon space-ships might want to get this page (Ed Berg's Premier-Plastics knock-offs' article) up on a separate tab, to toggle between the two and ID them, but I didn't measure them, so....Doh!

Photographed on Mercator Trading's table back in the autumn, these are probably all copies although the yellow one is 'clean' and hard styrene and may be an original dime-store item from Premier? Well...photographed on the floor, an old Britains box lid and my jumper to be precise!

Although I didn't measure them I'd say the two blue ones are both over 3 inches (so the fat one isn't the one you're still looking for Ed!), and they are both soft ethylene. The yellow one is shorter and as I've said; hard plastic.

Close-ups...that's it really; there's not a lot else to say about them, they're single-lump mouldings, dime-store/pocket money, probably knock-offs and Ed Berg's covered them in 21 sequenced articles if you follow the above link and click on 'Space Ships'.