Paul Woods is cool. Sent me an email over the summer encouraging my efforts here at crafting a space toy blog and indeed
stumbling across his Moonbase Central blog celebrating the history of the British PROJECT SWORD legacy of toys and media was a principal source of inspiration to fueling my insatiable appetite for "NASA era" Made In Hong Kong space plastics. "NASA era" meaning the very early 1960s through mid to late 1970s: Most of the online resources oriented towards vintage space toys focuses on the Golden era of Atom Age Buck Rogers & Flash Gordon art deco space forms. Finding stuff made during the span of my life set me off. Was born in 1967 (52 years of age as of this posting) and became a toy consumer during the waning years of the Apollo Program 1971 - 1973. Learning that the forms produced during that era were just as special was of great reassurance and showed me a colorful formed plastic alternate reality into which my imagination was quickly assimilated.
And there's SO much from that era to discover, the bulk of it seeming to revolve around the very early creation of "Project Sword", which if my understanding is correct was an offshoot of British visionary Gerry Anderson's media empire specifically created to facilitate toy production of forms which went beyond "The Thunderbirds" into a darker region of fantasy which is enjoyably at odds with the optimistic and child-oriented world of Anderson's television projects. The most obvious result of the experiment were the space toy forms created by British firm Triang, historically better known for their marvelous (and often functional) toy train products.
Triang adapted some of the vehicles featured in the early Project Sword media comic book form releases into an incredible line of toys which are startlingly unique, modern and lethal-looking when held up next to their American made counterparts of the era. In the middle to later part of the 1960s the Project Sword toys were re-adapted into smaller budget line pieces which served as the bases for the Spacex toy range (for British & European markets) and Golden Astronaut line (for North American markets) which in my opinion serve as the pinnacle form of the low-cost plasticized Made In Hong Kong space toys which I was familiar with as a lad.
I was too young for Spacex & Golden Astronaut, being all of four years of age come 1971 when the toy lines fell into decline, five years old in 1972 when production of all but the copies and ripoffs of the Sx/GA toys had disappeared. I never had a scrap of any of it, or if I did the pieces were destroyed so quickly and completely that those purchasing toys for me didn't go back for more. 1972 also saw the introduction of the American Consumer Protection Act which amongst other things pretty much forbade toys which launched small hard plastic projectiles, had firing pins or other devices which kids could use to put each other's eyes out, choke on, or otherwise inflict lawsuit inviting injury upon themselves -- All of which were the bread and butter of not just the Spacex creations but important (and now hotly contested over) forms created by Marx Toys and Multiple Toymakers which were designed to let kids launch rockets across the room.
The fun wrecking mitigated somewhat by the emergence of the G.I. Joe "Adventure Team" toys which became the focus of my 6 year old imagination by Christmas 1973. Space toys fell out of favor after, the static representations of astronauts engaged in exploration work not being able to hold a candle to G.I. Joe excavating mummy tombs, piloting semi-functional helicopters, probing the ocean depths and then the Kung-Fu grip. My interest in space toys re-ignited briefly by Kenner's "Star Wars" franchise but by the summer of 1978 I was listening to Queen records, wanted an electric guitar, and had developed a fascination with girls. Toy collecting in general sat on a lower shelf in the refrigerator of life until last winter when searching for artistic inspiration & stumbling upon Hot Wheels cars in the modest toy section of a local grocery store.
They were little painted sculptures on wheels, strikingly decorated and usually departing from reality in ways which are immediately engaging. An early vision for the "Toy Project" this blog concerns itself with was constructing a race track for the art gallery I manage to race artist-painted cars down its length. I'd still like to, but ran into a brick wall with collecting die cast cars round about February due to our Central New York location -- We don't get "new releases" here, and Hot Wheels + Matchbox fandom are wrapped up in New Release Frenzy. They don't just make the same 200 cars every year, and every month there are releases of newly designed Mattel vehicles which you simply have to stay on top of. You also need to accessorize with track components, devices to make the cars not just move but keep moving once in motion, and all of it costs money. I was going to write a grant to raise money to pay for a gallery-length track, materials to construct it and a carpenter to help me make it modular enough to take to other locations.
I still may, though at current I am more content to let the toy forms seep into my art and less with arbitrarily preparing for an exhibit. And round about last February decided I needed to add figurative elements to the images I was making as digital pictures, and decided to create the juxtaposition of these far-out looking semi space vehicles with astronauts next to them. Long story short is that I went on a quest one weekend to find spacemen forms which involved several trips to various retail toy outlets to find anything suitable. I ended up buying a couple blocks of oven-bake clay, intending to just make my own damn spacemen, before quite by chance coming across a listing for some on the well-known online auction platform. The result was an instant change in perspective about not just what interested me as an artist but a conflict with contemporary consumer culture, which for the most part is no longer interested in celebrating the exploration of outer space. The matter worsened somewhat by our own NASA's miserable track record with their Space Shuttle program which I openly despise. We have to hitch rides with the Russians now just to get to the ISS.
So it's no wonder nobody is stocking Space Bucket astronaut sets -- Only Lego (and their copyists) seems interested in making space toy creations. You have to go "vintage", and within a week or two of landing my first space figure acquisitions I knew the Hot Wheels thing was over for me. A couple months of initial acquisition of spacemen just for use in art had a side-effect of igniting within me a passion to reclaim the long lost space toys I'd had as a kid. I wanted more, not just to use in my art but to have an example of each, or at least each of those which interested me. And time after time the forms which were catching my eye were those made during the 1960 - 1975 glory era of NASA's Go Fever. And of them the ones which really made me squirm in my seat were the colorful cheap Made In Hong Kong toys like the Triang designed Spacex / Golden Astronaut toy ranges. By May it was all space toys all the time, and I began to ravenously consume online resources to try and find the ones which would loan themselves best to the space art visions which had been waiting in the 'fridge all this time.
Three websites (or web forums) became the primary hunting grounds for ideas: The stupendous
Space Toy Index at Alphadrome, Paul Vreede's
Triang Spacex / Golden Astronaut website, and Paul Woods'
Moonbase Central, the latter simply overflowing with enthusiasm for the collecting habit and bursting with pictures to fuel any overgrown spaceboy's wildest dreams. I cannot see enough of the stuff and will likely never be able to afford to have the real standout pieces created. So the websites are important, not just for suggesting which forms to track down but serving as a compendium of imagery that will help make do until it's within my grasp to obtain a complete "Operation Moon Base", identify those pieces I can manage to latch onto, and trace the lineage of their design elements back to common sources. The ultimate goal of the Space Trucks project isn't just a gallery exhibit, it's designing my own space toy forms. I'm starting to get an idea for what I want to see and look forward to my "Toy Hour" every evening when I can sit down, pull out a few pieces, arrange them in some manner suggesting a pulp scifi moment and get some pix. The best get saved to be painted in some manner.
Those coming of age in our culture haven't for the most part been trained to buy art. They want consumer products including toys which harken back to their own childhood; Major Matt Mason is the hottest collectible around. Sixty dollar starting price for a figure in OK condition, double that for one like it came out of the box. Quadruple it to add the box, and it is people my own age who had the toys as kids who are driving the prices. The Project Sword creations are also red hot, and so gorgeously perfect in their combination of space exploration with military applications that I can't let myself even
THINK about wanting any just yet.
But we can look at them.
