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!

Retrobots Revisited: Lego Creator bots!

 

It's my usual day off, and I'm just getting into a career transition. To fill the time, I decided to go through some more Lego material (see the giant 1990s robot and Lego dino post). As it happened, I acquired not one but two sets recently, including still in the box. To kick things off, here's the packaging for the Space Mining Mech set.

Usually, I would make fun of packaging, but Lego does a good job.

This is a set that's been out for a while and clearly popular. For a little while, it looked like it was off the store shelves, and prices online were going up accordingly. In the last month or so, however, I sighted it and picked it up on a return trip. I finally built it the same day as this post, and it was good fun despite a few unnecessary complications. It looks cool enough that there's not a lot else to say, beyond the fact that I find it a little odd there wasn't a pilot minifig included. Here's a lot more pics. And yeah, I figured out the hand is upside down.

I think this was the best position of the saw thingy.

Meanwhile, there was another set I had gotten earlier, along with the dino set. This is just called Super Robot, and if you're wondering what anime they're ripping off, the safe answer is all of them.

Despite my usual disregard for keeping things in the packaging (see above), I have usually been saving the boxes for Lego sets, if only because it's the easiest way to keep track of manuals and extra pieces. This time was an exception, as the box came very roughed up. Instead, here's pics of the manuals.

And here's a few more pics of the bot. The hands are... weird.

Also, here's another bot I have had for a while, and the extras from the mining mech set.

About the style of these sets, it's certainly debatable if these are "retro". The anime bot obviously calls back to the 1980s and perhaps the 1990s, The mining bot and the tracked guy above (I think of the not-uncommon configuration as "centank") are less specific. They're a little more sophisticated than what we were getting from Lego in the 1980s or the early 1990s, but they would still fit in with sci fi of that vintage. That  is really the trademark of Lego Space and its successors; outside of movie tie-in sets, the style is always just generalized enough that it doesn't feel self-dated the way more typical toys do. One of these days, I'm sure I'll do a more detailed post about it. For now, I'm in no hurry.

And here's something I thought about including with the dino set. I have had this around a long time (apparently it came out right at the beginning of 2015), and finally built it as a way to convince myself that buying more sets wasn't going to be a waste of time. It's the kind of thing I get once in a while just to have something that isn't sci fi, military and/ or paleo (see the saga of the Truckstop Queen). Until I unpacked it, I thought this was a lady and her boyfriend, then I realized that one set of legs is for a kid. I had a little bit of fun trying to figure out a relationship. A mother and her son? A teenage girl and her little brother? A teenage girl and her little sister??? Even I really don't need to know.

And that's enough for me to call it a day. Needless to say, Legos have been my lifelong interest/ obsession. More recently, things have been a bit cyclic, but I've never given up entirely. And here's one more pic just for fun. That's all for now, more to come!