All That My True Love Gave To Me

Hope you had a very merry Christmas. Today, I want to look back at some of the gifts of Christmas past. As a child of the Sixties and a teenager in the Seventies, they shaped me as a fan of sci-fi and fantasy.

The earliest space toy I can remember is this tin talking robot. The internet says he's from 50s Japan. The phrase I remember was: "I'm going now ...to explore the furthest galaxies...goodbye..." declaimed in a booming, faintly melancholy Yank voice.

 As a wee lad, I had a Major Matt Mason figure in his hourglass-shaped space suit but in the mid-60s, I got his equally-bendy alien ally too:

The following year, I was given Zintar, the silver Zeroid (but probably had to wait til the day after Boxing Day for the batteries that would eventually corrode his motor.)

This 1970 Space Safari set included a knock-off Matt Mason Space Crawler and four comical, grotesque ETs to capture. It probably came from Goldbergs in Candleriggs.

The fairly life-changing gift of Xmas 1974 was all three UK Marvel Annuals.The Spider-Man annual introduced the Punisher and the Jackal while the MWOM/Hulk annual featured the grisly Captain Omen tale. My favourite was the Avengers Annual: the tiny panel of Magneto's Savage Land Mutates fascinated me, especially since Englehart dubbed them the Beast-Brood. There was also a glimpse of Mantis, a character I'd never seen outside of  a tiny b/w cover repro in Foom.

Seventy-Four was also the Xmas of Muton- I'd got his adversary Cyborg that summer in Glasgow (and later, they were joined by the missile-firing and lesser-known Android). I had a few of the Cybo-Nators and all the Subforms. I gave the figures away to a kid in 1990 after working with his lone parent mum on the Metropole Memories Project at Maryhill Community Central Halls. I regret my largesse now because I could have passed them on to my nephew. Or just kept them myself.

Seventy-Five was the year of the Doctor Who Monster Book and an iconic b/w glimpse of Ian, Barbara and Susan in the Tardis. The Tom Baker annuals of the mid-to-late 70s were, famously, utterly bonkers: none more so than the giant-sized 1977 edition.

Speaking of giant-sized, The Six Million Dollar Man also made a Xmas appearance in our house in 1975.

The bionic man towered over the other dolls and robots and sadly, my brother and I never got Maskatron.


In 1978, I was given Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of The Worlds on a double-pack of cassette tapes. Later, as a would-be Equi Cafe hipster in the 80s, I shunned it as prog nonsense. Hearing it again at the raucous party for The Crucible in 2003, I fell back in love with David Essex's messianic Artilleryman scene. For the last five or six years, I make a point of listening to the discs every Xmas.

In 1979, I got the landscape-format Atlas of Fantasy, at the height of my craze for Moorcock, REH and ERB; I must have spent hours and hours drawing maps of Mars and Lemuria. I drew a new one about ten days ago, for inclusion in our S2 exam!

By the early 80s, in my first stint as a University student, I bought comics throughout December, storing them up for a binge on Xmas morning. It's another tradition I keep to this day. Here are two from the Designer Decade that always say Xmas to me:

As a callow and self-centred twenty-something, I never appreciated the time and trouble my Mum and Dad took, never mind the expense, to make sure my brother and I had a very abundant Xmas. So, I'd like to thank them now. 
Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2012 (with the aid of Ye Olde UK Bullpen of yore)

All images are presumed copyright of their respective owners and are reproduced for purposes of nostalgia and comment.