Of all the "generic" toys in circulation at any given time, none are more ubiquitous yet ephemeral than novelty erasers. The whole idea seems to have been to motivate kids by giving them erasers in the same shape as toys, on the theory that it would keep them interested in school rather than just playing with the eraser. In the long run, it was always a Catch 22. If you used them for their intended purpose, they were literally rubbed away into oblivion. If you tried to save them, then sooner or later they would shrink into dark, cracked and distorted husks of themselves. This installment is about a little line that beat the odds, at least for a while, Diener Space Raiders. And while we're at it, here's a couple more pics:
I first caught wind of Diener products during semi-random searches for vintage toys. I quickly realized the company was responsible for a number of toys I was long familiar with, including a line of rubber dinos I expect to get to another time. I quickly confirmed their status as a very prolific manufacturer of novelty erasers and other rubbery generic toys. Their finest hour was producing toys for McDonald's Happy Meal toys (something else that should fill many installments to come), and these included the present selection, which first turned up in 1978. This consisted of both ships and an assortment of rather generic robots and aliens. For the moment, naturally, I will focus on the ships.
Moving forward to my personal story, I knew of these guys for a very long time without trying to obtain them. I did finally acquire them recently in an uncontested online auction. My first and immediate reaction was that the lot was almost certainly of recent manufacture, due to the very soft rubber. I have found handling somewhat unpleasant, due to the soft and almost (but not quite) sticky feel of the rubber, but I had seen badly aged erasers far too often to look a gift horse in the mouth. What interested me was the ships.
As seen above, there are four ships, each with a name and number imprinted on the toy: Altair (2), Ceti (3), Lyra (4) and Krygo (5). Whether the absence of a ship numbered 1 means anything is unknowable. Of these, Ceti is the one I deemed a dud from the beginning; it was clearly intended to be "realistic" but merely looks clunky and not in the style of the others. Altair is far more interesting. It has the lines of a "classic" rocket ship and details that hint at a much larger scale, particularly a nose that looks like it could be a detachable smaller ship. Then there are Lyra and Krygo, which I knew as the basis of two ships covered in the last installment. Here are the Space Raiders ships with their counterparts.
What was surprising about these was the inconsistency in size. Krygo is clearly larger than the plastic ship, but the two saucers are identical in diameter, though the rubber one is greater in depth and mass. It will also be apparent that the plastic ships have substantially greater detail, undoubtedly in part because the rubber versions were effectively disposable, but I think also because they were influenced by an older aesthetic. Before Star Wars and its ornately detailed ships, science fictional vessels were clean and sleek (and in many ways more realistic), and that is what we still see here. One more rabbit trail to cross my mind is that Krygo would be just about the right shape to dock with the front of Altair, if the latter were vastly greater in size. This was clearly not what the designers intended, given the clear presence of windows, but it's exactly the kind of thing I might have thought of if I had grown up playing with these things.
I can't avoid some comment on the creatures with the set. The lot I received included 3 out of 4, called Brak, Zama and Horta (!), and all that I have to say is that I found them oddly uninteresting. In fact, I find them inferior in detail and quality to the slightly later Diener Space Creatures (which will be covered in the reference links), which even feel more creative despite being fairly obvious knockoffs of TV and movie monsters. Here are pics of my group.
For the usual postscript, Diener thrived for a very long time, and they kept the Space Raiders and related toys alive. Various accounts record sightings of the things throughout the 1980s and even to the 1980s, including examples given away with kids' meals at the in-house restaurants department/ big box stores. As for Diener itself, it survives today, albeit as part of a larger company, and continues to offer erasers and other rubber toys for sales. Some things change, some things stay the same, and some always find a way to turn a profit.
For reference links, here's Little Weirdos posts on Space Raiders, Space Creatures and Mythological Creatures. Again, they have everything.
You can also see, among many, Retro Dad and Neato Coolville posts on the Diener Happy Meal releases; a 2 Warps to Neptune lineup of packaged Diener Raiders/ Creatures, with some info on the company's (relatively) recent history; and another 2 Warps post on Space Raiders notebooks.
Finally, you can see previous installments on arcade prize ships and the Spaceman Spiff ship.
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