Hush the Noise and Still the Strife

"The world in solemn stillness lay"- as far as the public library is concerned, on the 24th December! In the New Year, I hope to blog about Star Wars on the Materioptikon, with a passing tribute to the Star-Hoppers of Aduba-3. I would also like to post here a "Best Of 2015" review- since I almost never discuss my reading outside comics and really want to express my enjoyment of Josephine Tey's books.

But today, I want to take the opportunity to thank my hard-working parents for Christmas Presents Past. One of the earliest I can recall is this:

As a child of the 1960s, space exploration toys featured prominently. I don't know exactly when I made the acquaintance of Mjr. Mason ( although I do recollect wrapping a Stingray toy in tinsel "kelp" when my brother was born in  January, 1967).
 The "revolving" backpack thread soon snapped and the "waldo" rubber arms of the space suit perished rapidly.  I do remember, therefore, being more excited by Matt's alien allies:

The stiff, inflexible and towering Captain, clearly remodelled from some other range, outlasted the cerebral green being by a good decade or so, when the batteries corroded the power-pack. His shield and lance were long-lost. For many years, though, he still lit up, emitting a chittering, juddering sound.

I'm guessing that Captain Lazer was a present from 1968 or '69, which makes this pair of Zeroids hard to place:

My brother was given Zobor, the brown one and I had Zintar, the grey one. Unfortunately, their little motors gave up the ghost very quickly. Zobor was soon broken apart too, I think.

US comics advertising places suggests Christmas 1968 but we'll probably never know. I am still attracted to toy robots, however and bought a clockwork Forbidden Planet Robbie at the pop-up automata shop in Forres last Saturday.

The Hot Wheels race track was a huge hit with two competitive wee boys: I collected Matchbox cars for several years and this garish orange plastic track could slot together across the room, presenting a hazard as painful as an unseen plug.

My dad, having spent at least a term at Glasgow School of Art, seems to have been keen to encourage my  artistic impulses with this rather feminine gift from 1970:

I can actually recall the chemical odour of the felt tips all these decades on. A similar, more boyish toy and perhaps a slightly earlier gift was Paint Wheels:

The wheels soon ran dry and since you could only draw straight lines, their appeal was more limited than the Colour Witches,

The supernatural theme continued with a rare board game:

This attempt at sibling harmony was immediately thwarted: I rarely wanted to play with my brother- four years younger, which is a huge gulf for the very young- and I wasn't interested in the rules of games, although I liked constructing the "set".

At some point in the mid-70s, a more ballistic game harnessed competitive spirit:

But, back at the beginning of the decade, the Space Safari set, from around '70 or '71, resembled the earlier Matt Mason toys but was less detailed, more fanciful (and cheaper, I suspect).

 Capturing the gnomish little plastic critters and hauling them away (to dissect, we might presume) was the object of play here.

The Space Race continued into the early 1970s  of course, but we'll see from my presents how the US fantasy/ sword-and -sorcery revival permeated kids' culture as society interpreted and marketed the anxieties and attendant mysticism of the middle classes.

At the height of UK Marvelmania, as I've often said in previous years, the most memorable haul was this trio of annuals:

I'll be revisiting the Marvel/Hulk annual soon, since I just bought another copy, to complete the set again.

Aside from Star Trek and Dr. Who annuals (of which, in researching this post, I  found I had received fewer than I imagined), the most important book for years was this one:

It was a magical glimpse into the (as-yet) unseen prehistory of the show, Almost eclipsing this black-and-white time trip that year, was my obsession with these Japanese sci-fi action figures and their accessories, on sale in the bazaar of wonderment that was the flagship Glasgow John Menzies branch:

The dastardly Muton was a gift for Xmas 1975 and the ebon Android followed in '76. "Dolls" like these were a worrying portent for a twelve-year-old in S1, I'm sure, in the mid-70s. Forbidden Planet's collectibles and memorabilia fairs were  quite unimaginable at that time.

And the gradient of childhood to adolescence is a steep one- in school, I've watched moppets go from sobbing to scholarships in six years- so, by the end of the decade, a couple of years later, my own interests were largely literary:

My first foray- and the only one, really-  into musical theatre and Prog could be played on the portable cassette player/recorder ( which my dad had bought to listen to Billy Connolly's Atlantic Bridge- a recording that seemed scurrilously filthy in 1976.
Of course, I bought the "New Generation" version a few years ago, but the tragic howl of Phil Lynott is sadly missing.

Three years later, I saw this landscape book reviewed in Starburst Magazine and such was my boyish craze for maps of sword-and-sorcery realms, it was the first present request I made, based on a critic's response.

By Xmas 1980, my S6 dissertation on Tolkien prompted my mum to buy me this volume:

I was attending university by the early 1980s and guided by periodicals like Amazing Heroes, I was buying myself my own Xmas presents: books on fan-favourite comics like this one:

Parental presents now tended to be more manly gifts, like digital watches, an electric razor and, one memorable year, an umbrella. By the end of the decade, however, I was still staunchly buying myself comics-related product:

That's too dark a note to finish on, however. I hope that Santa's good to you this year and that you have a peaceful Christmas.

Coming soon: The War Doctor, Moon Girl and the Vigilante

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