Premier Products Space Men

The Golden Age of Space Toys has been defined as the period from the 1920s, specifically with the start of Buck Rogers in 1928, until the 1957 launch of Sputnik. During those years some of the absolute coolest toys hit the market, some in pot metal, some in pressed steel, some tin litho, and many in plastic. Ajax, Archer, Lido, Best, Marx, and Premier all jumped on the space bandwagon during the 1940s and 50s producing a wide variety of plastic space toys including the space men we'll look at today. Premier Products of Brooklyn, New York is probably best known for their series of Flash Gordon space ships (which we blogged from April to September last year) but did produce four space men from the early to mid-1950s. Of those four I currently have three and they are three of the hardest to find figures as they're molded in a clear plastic rather than the normal opaque plastics used for most figures of the era. At 3" (7.6cm) tall they are about medium sized when compared to Lido (about the smallest) and Archer (the tallest). No book I have gives them any particular designation so I've simply listed them arbitrarily as as Pose 1, 2, and 3. Pose 4 is currently on the way to the Berg Space Port but won't be ready to post for a few weeks yet.  Enjoy! Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina

Pose 1

Most Premier Products space men were molded in bright colors

Pose 2

Pose 3

The weather outside was kind of uncomfortable today - cold, windy, very damp from rain the past day - and was perfect for staying inside and playing with Photoshop. Today's photo montage utilized Premier Products space men standing on a Marx Galaxy Command playset play mat while a Pyro X-200 Space Ranger flies through my hand painted space background. 

I like the graphics on play mats but they have some serious drawbacks for taking really good photos. They almost always have big creases/folds in them making them impossible to lay flat and hard to pose many figures on them (without the figures falling over). Older mats like mine also end up with holes and tears. In addition, they're generally not that big which limits the area you have to photograph if you have a large set-up to deal with. This photo was heavily Photoshopped to try and take out creases and add a little interest to the horizon.