Showing posts with label Dinky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dinky. Show all posts

18 December 2017

Dinky Wasn't (Dinky)

I've been digging through early issues of Joe 90 for those comics i mentioned starring The Champions, my old favorite TV Superhero show. Along the way i've been enjoying lots of other little things - like, remember the old '60s TV show, Land Of The Giants? They had a comic that ran in Joe 90, along with the excellent Star Trek series we've seen previously in this blog.

While contemplating how unknown Joe 90 is to most readers in the USA, i also ran into a nice toy ad to help explain. Dinky made some of the best old school TV toys, including their classic Enterprise (NCC-1701) with working shuttle bay and firing Photon Discs. And they made these toys of metal, not plastic.
Well, the photon discs and shuttle craft were plastic. But they were tough, solid toys, made for adventuring.

Here's their beauty version of Joe 90's car:


You'll have to make it bigger if you want to check out the special features.

Though the name Dinky might have sounded "rinky-dinky", the brand was anything but - those old toys lasted through many years of hard play. 

Looking at the other toys advertised might give one a fair idea of what Joe 90 was. It was a supermarionation series from Gerry Anderson, like Captain Scarlet and the Thunderbirds.
(Hell, for all i know, it's been revived, like the Thunderbirds)
Joe was actually quite ahead of its time in concept - the series was about a kid who essentially uploaded skills & data into his head as needed to function as a superspy, much like cyberpunk and modern scifi stories, but back in the late 1960s. So, yeah - we'll probably do a feature on him before too long.

But that's another time. For now, it's off to hunt those Champions DVDs and see if we can't grab a few screens to go with the comics...

Dinky advert from Joe 90 #1 (1969)