The Trendy Troodon: Futures Past: Museum of Science and Industry Mold A Rama souvenirs

It's time for the Thursday post of the week, and I decided to do more on my vacation. Last time, I covered Mold A Rama dinos from the Field Museum. To follow up, I have a little more material. Here's a pic of a Mold A Rama space capsule, shown above with the Dinoland T. rex and the Truckstop Queen.

I got this one from another Mold A Rama machine at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry space center, where I took a video of the machine in action. It is reportedly the largest item produced for/ by these machines, which I can well believe based on height. It is, of course, based on the 1960s-era space capsules, which were frequently depicted in toys and other items that are expensive now. In that context, this is definitely worth the price if you have the opportunity to get it. It's one of at least five Mold A Rama machines at the museum. Here's pics of the other one I got with the capsule, photographed in the hotel room for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

And here's the actual machine.

This is, of course, a very 1950s/ '60s fighter jet, which I find strikingly similar to the Tim Mee jets. It is in many ways the most impressive of the little collection I built up, made of a silver plastic with what looks like built-in marbling. (Unfortunately, as previously seen with the reissue Marx Kronosaur, this has a tendency to look awful if you don't know what you're looking at.) Here's a couple more detail pics from the hotel.

Alas, this was the one that broke on the way home. The damage was a broken-off tail fin, I'm sure in part because of an unnecessary gap between the root of the tail and the engine exhaust. (A few image searches confirmed that the whole style of combining the tail with a giant nozzle for the engine was really something that was being phased out by the '60s.) For extra humiliation, before starting this post, I took another video of me trying and failing to fix it. In hindsight, I might have been better off using the glue to fill the gap rather than sealing the crack. Eventually, I did finally get the fin to stay on for the moment. Here's a pic of the repaired jet on The Couch Mark 2.

On the whole, the whole museum has a "retro future" vibe, which is why I'm writing about it here. The space center in particular is a showcase of 1960s tech. Even beyond that, it shows the same techno-optimism that found its highest and most infamous expression in the 1964 World's Fair. (Why not see the first installment of this feature while you're at it?) It's easy to say that "mainstream" society was outgrowing such things even then. The flip side is that the same easily deconstructed visions of lunar colonies and Mars expeditions that proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s were still going strong when I was an impressionable kid in the 1980s. Judging from the space center, the spirit of probably unwarranted optimism is alive and well even now, and kids at a place like the museum are the audience that should have it. And how about some more pics of the museum?