Futures Past: Off-brand brick set retro junk spaceship!

 

As I'm writing this, I've realized I'm at a milestone: There's more of a backlog of toys and collectibles I've been meaning to write about than there is for movie reviews or fiction. So, I decided to try to get something out of the way that's been backlogged a while. Over the last few months, I've made several ill-advised purchases of building sets and toys, both old and new (see the Bristle Blocks). Here's the one that's ended up using up the most time, a set I purchased with the promise that it could assemble into a space station thingy. Here's a few more pics of the glorious packaging... which actually is pretty good.

For the backstory, I ordered this at the end of last month after another, entirely disappointing purchase as a 1980s-retro spaceship/ space station/ thingy. It was a consideration that certain elements resembled my still-mutating designs for the Neptune-ship Janus conceived for the Space Guys adventure. I ordered it for a ludicrously low price that actually went down a little more after my order was in. It was advertised as a set that could be assembled as smaller ships then assembled mecha-combiner style into something vaguely resembling either a space station or a long-haul starship. What I didn't expect was that they came in a carton with eight individual boxes, as if this was planned to go to stores as cases of sets for kids to collect. What interested me was that it was pretty easy to arrange these end to end, which really came closer to a "realistic" design. Here are a few of my initial experiments, on a set of shelves I just recently assembled. Yes, those are the Truckstop Queen and the Evil Space Guys.

I took long enough assembling these that I had already tried several variations of the ship before I had assembled the last of them. Initially, I tried to modify some of these, particularly a module with a radar/ satellite dish attached, which is "supposed" to orient with the dish sideways. There were a couple that just don't fit in. One of them is the space shuttle, which simply doesn't look on scale, especially in comparison to the "gravity ring" segment, which would be at least 20-30 meters wide if it is what it looks like. The other is a particularly awkward satellite/ probe thingy, which doesn't look much different from the rest. When assembled, however, its individual sections are prone to rotating in different directions. It's also almost impossible to keep on a stand. Here are closeups of the offending ships.

After a few days of experimentation, the ideal configuration that emerged was 5 or 6 "modules", with what I think of as the wing ship up front, the ring towards the back, and the fattest segment around the middle. I settled on removing the nose of one ship to make the connections easier. I also had to deal with the fact that the front of the fat one wasn't properly moored to anything else. Here's the "ideal" ship, which is something like 2-2 1/2 feet long. (Oh, and there's the packaged Spiff ship...)

And here's the winged ship and the one I modified in original configuration. The latter has an ingenious sort of hangar bay and a raising satellite dish, which naturally jam or come loose with any amount of handling.

And here's the ring. It's worth further note that the instructions usually show this perpendicular to the central axis, exactly where it would make the least sense.

Now for the fun part, in the course of this post, I finally broke up the  wonkiest ship for extra parts. It was enough for an extra mini-module and several stabilized connections. Here is my upgraded ship, viewed from the other side.

All in all, this is a very good set for basically nothing. It has just the right combination of "retro" and realistic. The crowning irony is that ships that look like collections of junk were always the closest to real life. I am choosing not to link to where to buy it, mainly because there are a few different sources out there. Do comparison shop a little, because I've seen at least one listing for twice the price I paid, which is not worth it. To rap this up, here's one more shot of the shelves. Hello, giant Predator! And the City Predator! And Connie...

That's all for now, more to come!

Mystery Monday: Reissue off-brand vintage building set/ carpet fuzz collection system!

 

It's a Monday that wasn't slated for a movie review, and I decided it was time for a different kind of mystery. In the course of retro future/ pop culture, I decided to look into the history of construction toys, a field long since dominated by Lego. That was enough to dredge up many memories of a large category of toys I have owned, played with or sighted in the wild, the knockoff/ "off-brand" building sets. Even by my standards, these things are ephemeral and usually untraceable without the clearest of recollections. The flip side is that here and there, I discovered that a notorious example was never a knockoff at all. This post will be on  just one example, something a significant randomized sample of correspondents remembered seeing without any idea what they were, the Bristle Block! And here's what a highly questionable purchase got me...

But first, the backstory. By consensus, construction toys started in the late 1800s. By the 1910s, recognizable brands began to pop up such as Erector, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs, all made from either metal or wood. In the 1930s, plastic sets began to appear such as Bayko, Minibrix and Kiddicraft, the latter two of which suspiciously resembled designs Lego first sold in 1939. Another runnerup called Krazy Ikes, made initially of wood and later plastic, assembled into both vehicles and jointed humans and animals that approximated the action figure niche; needless to say, I have acquisitions I will be getting to. In any event, the ecosystem remained crowded but competitive through the 1960s and 1970s. It was only at the late date of 1978 that Lego inaugurated their "modern" era with the introduction of the minifigure, along with a profusion of theme sets.

Meanwhile, an unassuming inventor named Denys Fisher patented a toy called Stickle Bricks in 1969. The name appears to have passed through the hands of several manufacturers in the 1970s, before being bought up by Hasbro. The basic design was ripped off by a number of additional companies, especially Playskool, which sold them as Bristle Blocks. I have no doubt that this well-funded knockoff line accounted for the vast majority of what was circulating from the '70s into the '80s, and most of the sightings that I and others remember. It was this name that came up when I went looking, sold as "official" Bristle Blocks by a company called Battat, needless to say a familiar name to me. All of which means I bought a reissue from a manufacturer claiming to have bought out the name of what was technically the ripoff version of the toy. Hey, I'm the last one to judge. Here's a few pics of what I got with Connie.

I'm sure there's a joke I could make about bristles, but it's late...

Plus, a comparison shot I forgot until I was finishing this. These are big; Construx are still champion.

For the details, I bought all you behold for just a little over $10, billed as a 112 set for about half the price of others I saw listed. It was obvious there was going to be a catch. In fact, the big one was simply that it came in a bag instead of a box or one of the carrying cases shown with the more expensive sets. The package came with a card I saved but haven't photographed that listed the parts. It became clear from this that they had fudged the numbers by counting each of the wonky wheels as 3 pieces. That still came out at 96 pieces, which is nothing to scoff at, especially with components this big. That left the question, are these remotely functional as a construction toy? Well, here's a pic that will start to answer that...

I know, the lighting is worse than The Couch Mark 1...

As you can probably see if you take a good look, these aren't exactly as versatile as they appear. Where they might appear to be able to adhere to each other from any direction, which would be novel indeed, they do in fact have differentiated surfaces. You can still make your own choices about orientation, and if it came down to it, you could probably make most of the surfaces and edges interlock. However, results will definitely vary. It's definitely more problem-solving than you would count on from a kid at the low end of the 2+ age range given on the packaging. (Yes, I bought and am reviewing a toy literally for toddlers; have you NEVER read this blog before?...) Here's a more pics of what little Eighties kids were up against.

Now that's actually cool.

With these parameters, I gave myself about an hour to try and build something out of these. If there's any virtue to them, it is that it's not too hard to make a construction that does indeed look like a structure with a definite function. I quickly observed in the process that these are very bendy, probably to a much greater degree than vintage specimens would be. There were few if any points where this was a problem. Here are pics of my first few efforts.

Okay, so maybe "rolling temple thingy" isn't so much a function...

The most interesting thing about the set are the "topper" pieces, which were definitely not part of the vintage lines. They're nicely done, and the dome thingies would have been futuristic enough for kid me to use as parts for spaceships, superweapons and the like. Alas, it's a bit tricky to fit them on anything. Here's a quick experiment.

The Couch Mark 2 hasn't been the greatest, either.

How about something bigger? Trust me, these needed my help...

And it's still less stable than my first attempt at making my own walker...

And why not a little retro futurism???

So, it should go without saying that these things are horrid. They function only within the narrowest parameters, with perhaps slightly better than a 50% chance of sticking together in any given configuration. They barely form recognizable structures, and anything but buildings is a waste of time. As a bonus, it's impossible to look at them without immediately picturing them deeply embedded with carpet fibers, pet hair, dust, broken bits of each other and other toys, and less classifiable junk and gunk. The best thing to be said in their defense is that they always were what they clearly are, an intermediate phase between simple blocks and an actual construction set. The verdict of history is that they did their job well enough for people to remember, without inspiring anyone to do anything but leave them behind. And for the extra pic, how about a Krazy Ikes guy?

Hey, she's dated Alien, Predator, and King Kong; she's got an open mind...

That's all for now; more to come!

Mystery Monday: The Marx Moonship!

 

It's time for my 2nd planned week of posts this month, and it happens I have something backlogged. As an extra twist, I had already prepared both pics for a blog post and a video on the matter more than a week ago. Rather than do an immediate post, I included a photo with my Space Guys adventure demo. I used the intervening time debating what to do, and of course decided nothing until it was almost too late. What I settled on was to put up the video first, and use this post to follow up with a deeper dive. This was indeed a long, strange trip worthy of a feature that started with a figure I needed 30 years to identify. To kick things off, here are pics of my unassembled Marx Moonship.

Now for the details, for this adventure, I actually started off with the bare outline of the facts, which is more than I have often had to work with. This is a reissue of the Moonship, one of a ludicrous number of accessories originally included with Marx's Operation Moon Base playset in 1962. I had already featured the two other most noteworthy specimens in a previous post outside this feature, the space station and the Flash Gordon-y tower thingy. Unlike those venerable fixtures, however, the Moonship did not have an afterlife in the later Marx playsets. As further recounted by my lapsed correspondent Steve Nyland/ Space Trucks, the original Moonship has long since sunk out of sight except in astronomically expensive complete examples of the Moon Base playset. 

That brings us to the present specimen. It has been offered online for a while now. What is obvious is that the craft is black instead of blue, and the mold for the upper half was substantially modified, turning what looked like tail fins on the original (I have thought of them as retractable) into a more filled-out and decidedly redundant set of wings. It is also apparent that this was done to make the craft look more like a stealth bomber, which was in fact a part of the tailless/ delta wing lineage that presumably inspired the original toy.  That puts the origin of these things around the 1980s, if not later. The modified design is also missing two openings that appear to have been part of a firing mechanism for a pair of rockets/ missiles, which fits the controversies over such things in the early '80s timeframe. The most curious part is that these are coming out unassembled in sealed bags, with the included missiles still attached to the frame. This means either that someone is making these things from recovered molds, or (as I have opined to be far more likely) they have just been sitting around for an indefinite amount of time. The bottom line is that even the person or persons selling them probably don't really know. Here are a few pics of the unassembled components with the Truckstop Queen, who hasn't been coming out much lately; she's still definitely bigger than the thing she's being a reference model for, but it's much closer than usual.

And here's the absolutely awful missiles, which fall right out without the springs.

Another detail here is that the nose piece (actually half of one since it's only in the upper part) is definitely an addition. My initial assumption was that this was a replacement for a lost piece, but when I looked into it, I confirmed that original specimens are simply open at the front, reportedly so kids could aim through a corresponding hole at the back. I very seriously considered knocking the added piece right out, but I quickly concluded it's not going anywhere without using a knife. I will also mention, there is a horrendous amount of flash on the modified leading edge of the wings. After accidentally putting a notch in one trying to remove it (after all the photos were taken), I took a file to them. It helped, but they're still rough. Here's some shots of the assembled plane, usually with the nose visible. You may notice a couple ships to one side that will figure below.

Wow, you can really see that flash...

Now for the actually interesting question, just how did Marx get the idea for this conceptually very advanced design? It really does anticipate the space shuttle, and in fact is in some ways more  sophisticated. With my usual encyclopedic random knowledge and further research, it wasn't hard to find precursors. The bare idea of a triangular tailless aircraft was put to use in the Vulcan bomber among others. The further idea of turning such a design into a returnable air-to-space craft can be traced at least back to the semi-infamous Silbervogel Nazi drawing-board superweapon (see Jalopnik, if anything), which I turned into the Tottenkarte for the Exotroopers adventures. (I just might have to reuse my joke scenarios from that anti-series for the Space Guys adventure to make sense.) Of course, there were intermediate outgroups in this conceptual lineage, most intriguingly the Convair shuttlecraft concept from about the same time the toy came out. The picture that emerges is a toy that did incorporate some very good ideas, without coming out too far ahead of its own time.

Then there's one last thing. Ever since I discovered its existence, I have been absolutely certain that this was the basis for the arrowhead ship in my immortal arcade prize collection, which I had already traced to the Diener Space Raiders line. Here's a pic to illustrate my case. The funny thing is, in many ways, the prize ship fits what I've been picturing better than the original.

And this is where I wrap this up. This really has been fun, despite the frustrating Wall of Nothing on many of my questions. As I said in the video, If you like Marx space stuff, get this one while you can. That's all for now, more to come!

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Jurassic World Ceratosaurus revised!

 

It's time for the weekend post for the second full week of the month, and by my obsessive-compulsive scheduling, that means it's time for a dino post. As it happens, I had something backlogged that I had already done a video for, which you would think would make this quick. To start things off, here's a pic of my new find just out of the box that I kind of forgot I covered in a previous post.

For the backstory, this is part of a Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous line called Roar Attack, apparently first released around June 2021. I got this when I saw a good deal. It only belatedly crossed my mind that this looked more than a little like the Ceratosaurus I already had. That set off a suspicion that this was a recolor of the earlier one, though this was dispelled as soon as I got a look at it. Here's a couple more pics of the thing right out of the package, obviously before assembly was completed.

Now to back things up, since childhood, Ceratosaurus has been my favorite carnosaur (maybe tied with Dilophosaurus). It usually gets portrayed as just a second banana to Tyrannosaurus and/ or Allosaurus, and the latter has some truth since it was a smaller and far less common contemporary of A. fragilis. On more careful consideration, however, Ceratosaurus was really a very unique dinosaur that was probably far more common than the known fossil record would indicate. (In fact, the main reason we have so many allosaur specimens is a few sites where they outnumber even the herbivorous dinosaurs, which clearly could not represent a "normal" ecology.) Among other things, it had unusually large teeth, proportionately if not absolutely larger than Allosaurus. Certain arguments have been made that ceratosaurs were faster and more agile than allosaurs. Their comparative rarity is in itself a plausible indication that they were at least less prone to getting stuck when on muddy ground. Despite their third-class status, they are very frequently represented in movies and paleo art, even if they often are secondary or "background" dinosaurs.

Returning to the present dino, the big surprise was that, while the new ceratosaur is definitely heavier than the one I had before, they are about the same length. Unfortunately, this also means there's a big difference in stability. I've gotten the "old" ceratosaur to stand up before (even with the Truckstop Queen on his back), but I had absolutely no luck this time. The new one, on the other hand, has been surprisingly easy to work with. Here's one more pic of the pair together, I'm sure with my hand propping it up.

And a pic of the old one.

That leaves the big gimmick. Instead of just snapping the jaws and making noise, the new dino has a kind of  ratchet deal. If you push a slide above the hips, the jaws open and then lock in place. If you keep pushing, the jaws open wider, until they reach maximum gape at the third spot. Each time, there's a different roar sound effect. (See my Valley of Gwangi review for my rant on why we know dinos didn't roar...) It's an interesting idea that doesn't work quite as well in execution. It's definitely handy to take pics without using one hand to keep the mouth open. However, having the jaws open all the way just doesn't look right, I'm sure in part because it "should" be held only briefly by an animal in motion, a problem that has cropped up with "action" poses since the days of the Marx dinosaurs. Either of the intermediate poses do look quite a bit better. Here's a sequence of the gimmick in action.

And one more...

"You can tell me, doc; do I need the root canal?"

All in all, both of these dinos are what they should be, good representations of a very cool dinosaur. If it comes to that, it's the kind of thing that just might raise the profile of a species. And how about one more with the Truckstop Queen/ Kate?

That's all for now: more to come!