Can any of our older members recall the space program inspired , snap together mini kits that came in cerial boxes in the late 60s or early 70s ? I was growing up in Australia at the time , but as the cerial companies were multi national , I assume that they also came out in other markets .
I would only have been 4 or 5 yrs old so my memory is a little hazy on the topic , but I seem to remember a Command Module kit and a Lunar Lander kit in around 1:144 scale and a Lunar Rover in 1:76. They came on small 4 or 5cm sprues sealed in clear plastic packets.
These would have been the first kits I ever built. I wonder if any still exist ,built or unbuilt . I would love to get my hands on one but I imagine they would be astronomically (sorry) priced .
I don’t recognize upper right, or lower middle left. Guessing those are sci fi? Or perhaps were planned during the apollo program but never built? Would love info on that.
You are right in that the lower middle left model is not Outer-Space related. It is a very small copy of the Ship ( Proteus) used in the Movie about a ship being injected after being shrunk to a nanite level, into someone to save their life. The Upper right was the Space Hab as envisioned, now known and built as the I.S.S in a totally different configuration.
Do you mean “Fantastic Voyage”, with a great cast, including Racquel Welch? Very cool!
I never saw any of these, sadly. I ate cereal with prizes, but no small kits. Life cereal had Matchbox cars that you could get, if you sent in box tops. I got a Ford wrecker in Esso livery. And I remember that the Quaker “puffed” cereals had plastic dinosaurs and modern animal figures for a while. The dinos might have been by Marx. From the modern animals, I got some marine animals-a great white, and a barracuda.
There were even some very accurate ( now I realize 1/160) models of Century Boats in Cereal boxes too. Then there were the Cadillac cars and Mustangs too. I still have my Little submarine that dove and surfaced, It still works too!
I think my oldest still surviving cereal Box prize was the Santa Maria. You sent in two boxtops and 50cents and you got what turned out to be the little model that Pyro and or Lindberg released later in sets.
An actual Glue together model! I still have most of my Boys life and Parents magazine models as well. I was ill for quite some years and they were my lifeline Before Computers. The Dinos were for sure Marx. The modern fishes were by IDEAL toys.
Not sure why it never occurred to me to paint up these things. Around 1978 the smaller versions were everywhere in lower-end toy stores (TG&Y, etc.). You could even buy a life-size helmet to wear, and a space fortress playset. I was obsessed with the things, and had separate containers for each color, and cataloged in a notebook exactly how many of each kind I had for each color, with indexing based on how likely each color was to win/lose against the other colors.
Do you think the figure on the lower right ( the turtle lookin dude) might’ve been someone’s trigger to create the " Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" ? Also, Is that R2D2 standing next to him? before he stopped his diet. All those square oil meals really got to him didn’t they?
I bought a bag of random ‘monsters’ back in the late '70s. Years later playing Dungeons & Dragons I noticed that the monsters looked a lot like critters in the game. So I assumed the monster company had ripped off D&D.
It wasn’t until years later that I found out that in making D&D the writers had used various knights etc from wargames set in the Middle Ages as characters. But no monsters. So they grabbed a set of monsters in a bag from a five and dime store- the same set I had and then wrote up a name and background for them.
So in the end it was the other way around- D&D ripped off the generic ‘monster’ figures by basing the monsters in the game around them!
Basically a little elephant, horse, dog etc which came as two body halves, four legs which somehow pivoted back and forth and a little weight. The nose of the animal had a little eyelet to which one tied a short length of thread and the weight was tied to the other end of the thread. You stood the little animal on the table, dangled the weight over the edge, let it go and it would walk to the edge and stop. The little legs made a very distinctive chattering noise as the thing “walked” to the edge of the table.
I remember trying to be clever and making the thread longer so it would walk longer/further. If I recall correctly, it didn’t work. It just got up to a point where it was going too fast for the legs to keep up with the motion and it would just slide the rest of the way to the edge of the table. It may also have been going so fast that it didn’t stop and simply sailed over the edge.
Other times they just had static animal/monster/promo figurines or some sort of collectible tokens.
