the pointless weblog

Spacecraft Top Trumps were another Waddingtons pack from the late 70s or early 80s. There were 32 cards in the set.

This was another of our favourite packs of top trumps. It’s a fairly incongruous collection of real world spaceships, famous UFO photos, excellent science fiction illustrations, and solen photos of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica spaceships renamed and reappropriated.

The Centaurus spaceship was drawn by Chris Foss. I’ve seen a different coloured version of that image used on a book cover before. I don’t know who any of the other illustrators are, though.

The Aliens and Space Warriors top trumps set was released by Waddingtons in 1992. The set contains 30 cards, plus a title card with the rules on the back.

By the 90s, Top Trumps monster artwork had gone into serious decline from their Horror top trumps heydey. This pack of Aliens and Space Warriors was pretty uniformly disappointing. With the incredible Oblit Fet card, though, it was nice to see them keep their tradition of mild copyright infringement going, so it wasn’t all completely bad.

Also at some point between the early 80s and the early 90s, packs of top trumps went from having 32 cards down to having 30. If that terrifying rate of decline has continued, the poor children of today would only get 26 cards in a  pack. It would hardly be worth it.

And I know that the Smet is supposed to basically be a Tribble or whatever, but he really reminds me of a Jib-Jib, possibly the best Fighting Fantasy monster of them all. A Jib-Jib gone all fat and pampered.

The Volg is an exciting science fiction story, written by my older brother in the late 70s or early 80s.

The Volg tells the story of The Volgs, a race of 8ft tall robots made from an indestructable allow, immune to radiation and with caterpillar tracks for feet, were created by the Golvs, blob creatures from a far  distant planet that were intent on taking over the world. Solar System after solar system has fallen to their might, and now only Keg Corburn and Chuck Johnson of the Earth Defense Forces can stand in their way and prevent the subjugation of the human race.

Unfortunately, my brother must have gotten bored and after 20 or so pages of action the whole thing fades out in the middle of a sentence, leaving us with 50 empty pages and then at the end a spaceship design and a couple of stars on fire.

I think he must have written The Volg when he was about 8. I am basing this on the Empire Strikes Back poster he has used as a cover for his notebook. I could be wrong. Unfortunately my brother denied all knowledge of writing any of this, so we will never know for certain. It appears to have been written after watching nothing but Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica for several lifetimes, which probably had some effect on his long term memory.

The most galling thing about all of this obviously is that even at 8 my brother was better at drawing and writing than I’ll ever be.

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These puzzles are all from the late 70s and early 80s. For some reason when we were little we had hundreds of puzzles, even though I’m pretty sure none of us liked them that much. I suspect they all cost about 10p from school fetes.

This beautiful Chriss Foss puzzle was always my favourite.

I also remember incessently making this Return of the Jedi puzzle. We had another one too, of Luke and Han and everyone on the bridge of the stolen Imperial Shuttle, but I don’t know what happened to that.

There was also this Star Wars puzzle in the loft, but I don’t remember that one at all. It is a beautiful thing.

There was a terrifying amount of really crap 80s TV and film merchandising puzzles, too. The Muppets I can accept, and possibly Tron, but Street Hawk? It’s a disgrace. The Street Hawk puzzle really is the most lacklustre piece of merchandising possible. I wonder if they still make this sort of stuff. I expect they do.

Much better than these are the Action! Adventure! puzzles. What more could a boy want than a picture of a battle ship being blown up? Absolutely nothing, that’s what.

There were hundreds more puzzles, too. Some of the more interesting or awful ones are in the gallery below. Also in the box I found these in were some terrible “3D” animal puzzles, where the 3D aspect was that the pieces were big lumps of plastic.

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Image Gallery

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