Spent some of SPACE BUCKET SUNDAY! examining the playmat surfaces which accompany these Hing Fat "Space Astronaut" bucket sets. I have two examples, one from the mid 80s by "Awesome Kids", a company I have had very little luck in searching, and the new one from "Daron Worldwide Trading" as part of their Space Adventure Series 20 piece Space Exploration set. And an evolution of the miraculous Lunar Terrain features + playmat Marx Toys used for "Operation Moon Base" in 1962. I am confident their are earlier examples of the concept including those from sets depicting Earthbound activities.
Playmats are usually intended to be the surface onto which the toy forms are placed, but an interesting attribute of Hing Fat's approach is an option for users to arrange it as a readymade diorama stage by having the "sky" fixed to an upright surface i.e. wall and the lunar landscape spread out before it. Most playmats I have seen are either just surface features or a star field. Somebody was thinking when they cooked up this idea, a distinction which applies to a lot of what went into the original Space Bucket kit design.
BTW: Browser spwellcheck keeps trying to correct "playmat" with "playmate" ... and yeah, I'd rather think about those too. Apologies if the syntax error persists beyond my ability to manually correct the auto-correction.
Top: Daron Worldwide, with Hing Fat credit.
Bottom: Awesome Kids with their credit at lower right.
Same basic design with some interesting differences. The one thing both share is the same lunar mountain horizon: Identical on both mats, as is the basic orange/yellow coloring for the moon surface. But Hing Fat reduced the size of the mat and re-worked its surface detailing for the sky and moon.
The Awesome Kids set playmat has a purple space sky with a more detailed lunar surface. I believe its proportions are also somewhat more square-like.
If you can find any info on them give me a shout. One goal would be to simply know what they called their Space Bucket set to try and find a vintage example which is still sealed. Millions of units of these bucket sets were churned out over the years since they first appeared but it is very very rare to find still-sealed examples dating before 1990 and (so far) impossible to find them dated before 1980. My suspicion is that due to their regarded cheapness a lot of unsold Space Bucket stock was simply discarded for landfill, though it also lends credence to the claim that the form only originated at Hing Fat's 1980 founding. Not so sure over here as I had one as a kid in the early 70s, or at least had the same vehicles as issued in more contemporaneously manufactured Space Bucket sets.
Did it include a playmat?? I think so but harvesting that kind of memory 46 years down the road is a tough egg to crack. It probably did as the familiarity of the playmat concept is robust enough to recognize having had one. Probably.
The Daron Worldwide set's playmat has a blue space sky with better detailed planetary painting but far less surface detailing to the moonscape. Smoothed out.
LEM vehicles & flat pieces. The flag on pile of rocks form goes back to Marx Civil War and Battleground era Army Man sets, but to my knowledge it is not included in any of their space sets depicting activity on other planetary surfaces. They did have a flag on a simple stick for "Operation Moon Base" but it was rectangular in shape and did not have a pile of rocks to stand it in.
Video notes how the fit of the bits on the LEMs is different and examines the plastic used for the detailing components. But I neglected to mention how the emblems on the sides of the vehicle are tampo printed on the new Daron LEM, simple decal stickers on the Awesome Kids LEM. The two top ascent stage sections are also not interchangeable with their bases, and the upper section of the dome has been re-shaped.
Left: Daron Worldwide.
Right: Awesome Kids
With 1960s Marx produced "Swoppet" style plug head guy, whom I'd kept out from earlier in the day. Maybe he becomes the personification of my Space Buckets guy. Gotta be from Italy or something like that. Has an accent.
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ISN'T THIS EXCITING! as Mr. Polichemi would say upon realizing our chemistry class was thinking about anything else. Or asleep. And by my eye the "new" lander from Daron is about a hair width taller than the older lander, its dome somewhat narrowed as well.
Pretty sure. Will get out the micrometer in a future post of barely-restrained excitement.
Space Bucket Sandro. From Tirol, accounting for a mixed Italian and German accent ... "VEE TAKE ALL ZE ASTRONAUWGHTS AND FEET THEM INTO A BEEG BUCKET. AND SO VEE CALL IT ZE SPACE BUCKETS" he says, foam flecking from his lips. With DVD case by Allsop.
How the heck did those guys end up in the lexicon of Marx space toys?? Plastic item in front of him is a cap from a water bottle I'm going to make into a space helmet for my Tootsie Toy Major Mars figure ... Wish I could remember which bottled water so I can go get a dozen more. This is fun!
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