Spotted Online – Outer Space Men
I’m a fan of toys, but my knowledge of toy lines before the seventies is severely lacking. Fortunately, I have access to the internet, so when I get time to poke at Google I dig deep into history. Usually I waste time, but sometimes I find cool toys. Toys like The Outer Space Men (official website) from 1968.
Produced by Colorforms — yes, Colorforms — The Outer Space Men was a series of (as Wikipedia tells us) 3.5-inch to 7-inch tall bendy alien creatures. And while I can’t say that I’m a fan of “bendy” toys, the look of these guys makes me wish I could get the designs as action figures. I’m betting someone out there could use these concepts and characters to produce an awesome custom toy.
Unfortunately, this line is too obscure and ancient for anyone to actually produce them as toys today, but it’s still fun to find new things online.
The official website lists toys for sale in their store, but at thousands of dollars for a carded figure and hundreds of dollars for a loose figure I’m going to be forced to go without. That’s a good thing, though, because if I got just one of them I’d be tempted to grab two or three more.
My favorite design has to be Astro Nautilus (above, right), who gets the following flavor text on the official website:
“Not content to see the sun as but a glimmer and the stars as tiny ripples floating on the surface of the sea above, Astro Nautilus and his band of Triton mariners venture forth to sail and chart that greater ocean, Outer Space.”
A fun toy design, goofy background, and obscurity combines to make this something I would love to own in my collection. Not gonna happen — I’m not spending hundreds of dollars on a 40+ year old bendy toy — but at least I can enjoy the photos online.
And now, by clicking the links, you can have as much fun with these toys as I did in finding them. And we can all buy our own copy of the graphic novel if we want to explore the world of these bendy alien toys.
For even more fun hit the Skooldays website. You know, for such an obscure series of toys there sure are a lot of webpages devoted to these guys. That’s good for me.
With the graphic novel and the rep these characters have, maybe they will come back some day. The world can never have enough bendy toys.
The gallery on that website is great, thanks. I’ve always found it cool that Bullmark made vinyl versions of a few of the characters under the title of “Space Kings.”
Kind of reminds me of the work between Onell and RxH today, come to think of it..
And now that these are coming to the Glyos System I can be extremely happy. This is going to be a great addition to the Glyos toys. Those tentacles on Astro Nautilus are exactly what I need for some crazy customs.