This
week at Flashbak I recall one of my favorite model kits: Starcruiser! This toy comes from the great year 1979, and
the imagination of Gerry Anderson.
Here’s a snippet and the url (http://flashbak.com/enact-story-assembled-kit-gerry-andersons-starcruiser-1-1979-56091/
)
“One of the greatest spaceship model
kits of all-time -- or at least my childhood from the 1970s -- comes from the
stable of the late, great Gerry Anderson (1929-2012), creator of UFO
(1970), Space: 1999 (1975-1979) and other dynamic cult-television. And
as a kid, I first learned of the kit in Starlog #21, from April of 1979.
On the back-cover of this magazine
was an advertisement from U.S. Airfix called “Starcruiser 1.” A “new-snap
together space kit,” this model arose from Gerry Anderson Marketing Ltd.,
1978, and featured a spaceship that, uniquely, was actually four vessels in
one.
In its entirety, Starcruiser 1 consisted of a forward
command module, an interceptor or fighter unit (armed with “neutropedos”), a central main unit with
seven powerful engines powered by a “Kryten
Reactor,” and a command base which could detach on planet surfaces to serve
as an all-terrain transport.
This was not all of the Starcruiser
1 goodness, either. On page 32 of Starlog # 21, an article
titled "The Birth of Starcruiser 1” revealed more data. The article featured an "Interstellar
Command Technical Profile" of the ship and crew.
Specifically, Mr. Anderson imagined a crew including Mission
Commander, Captain Christopher Stevens, Navigator/Astrophysicist Lt. Andrew
Dehner, Medical Officer Dr. Brian Moore, and Technical Officer Professor Melita
Alterra who was "also responsible
for the design and construction of Starcruiser
1." The Head of Interstellar Command, meanwhile, was
"Commander Edward Damion."
I purchased a Starcruiser 1
almost immediately after reading all this material, at a Toys R Us story in
Paramus, New Jersey and saw that that it came complete with an 8-panel comic
strip, revealing a “typical mission
sequence.” The final comic frame noted: "You can enact the
story once you have assembled your Starcruiser kit and then....why not make up a
Starcruiser story of your own?..."
Starcruiser also ran as a weekly strip adventure in the British weekly magazine Look-In. I created the adventure for quite a while, and still have some of the original artwork.
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