Whenever I go to the flea market I have a mental wishlist of things that'd it be cool to find that might also actually be possible to find. Before heading out this past weekend I thought it'd be cool to find some more members of the Galaxy Laser Team. These plastic figures are right up my alley but I only have a couple of the turtle-crab guys. I'd been thinking about ordering a bag of the reissued figures (and still might do so) but thought it would be totally possible to find some of the older figures at the flea. There was a vendor who had a number of older plastic figures and sets for sale. He also had a huge Rubbermaid tub filled with miscellaneous grubby plastic figures for 50 cents a piece. I knelt down and dug in.
The tub was mostly filled with stuff that held no interest for me (plastic army men, cowboys and the like). I dug and dug and finally caught a glimpse of some pinkish plastic - the Darth Vader wannabe guy from the Galaxy Laser Team! I kept digging and eventually extracted 9 figures...
I got 2 wannabe Darth Vaders, 3 more turtle-crabs, 1 wannabe astromech droid, 1 wannabe Chewbacca, 1 wannabe Luke (with broken pistol), and 1 semi-boring (in comparison) regular old astronaut guy.
Wannabe astromech droid is definitely my favorite. He looks like a cross between R2-D2 and a Speak & Spell and is just a cool little figure. Given the obvious borrowings from Star Wars I thought it'd be great to take some pics of the Galaxy Laser Team figs with the similar-sized figures from the now (sadly) defunct Star Wars Command line by Hasbro. So here's R2-Speak&Spell with the real R2-D2 as well as Chopper and an Imperial astromech...
My wannabe Chewbacca is missing the little antennae on his head but he's also a cool figure. I love that he's wearing pants. I remember hearing or reading something about the executives at 20th Century Fox being concerned about the fact that Chewbacca was naked when Star Wars was being made. They'd have been very happy with this figure. Here he is with Chewbacca and Zeb from Star Wars Rebels (who is based on early concepts for Chewie)...
Here we have wannabe Darth Vader taking on Obi-Wan and Luke...
I'm still missing a couple of the Galaxy Laser Team figures, but I'm loving the ones I've found so far. I definitely want an army of R2-Speak&Spells.
While I would have been content with finding just these figures, the cool finds continued at another vendor's booth. I was lured into the booth by a RoboForce figure. The figure was incomplete and priced higher than I was willing to pay but there were other items hiding on the other side of the table. First I spotted a big bag of plastic astronaut figures...
The figures were made by MPC and came with bits and pieces of what was a moonbase of some sort. While the set was incomplete, the figures were nifty. One white figure was mixed in with a bunch of red and blue ones in a total of 7 poses. The figures are a mix of quasirealistic pre-Apollo era astronauts with some sci-fi elements like laser rifles.
A couple of the figures had some molding issues that made it look like there was some sort of huge alien parasite inside of or attached to their torsos (take a look at the right-hand figures in each pair below). It's a manufacturing error that I think actually adds to the play value of the set. It totally works.
In the same box as the bag of space guys were two awesome bags of old eraser/rubber figures. There were three Buck Rogers erasers made by Imperial. I absolutely adore the Twiki eraser (the green one). The Draconian Marauder starfighter eraser (the blue one) is cool but the yellow one is far less interesting.
The other figures were all made by Diener and are fantastic. This first bunch, the Space Raiders, are made of very soft rubber and include four robots/aliens and four spaceships. I like Dard (the yellow one) the most...
The second bunch were part of a group called Space Creatures and are made of a slightly firmer plastic. Eight different creatures were made and I got four of them: Vampire Bat Monster, Tree Trunk Creature, Insectman and Lizard Man...
Prior to the flea market I had just one of the Space Creatures, the Gill Face Creature, and here he is greeting the new arrivals...
Insectman and Lizard Man hold a special place in my memory as I had green versions of each of them as a kid. They lived in a small, metal Easter pail with the two M.U.S.C.L.E. figures I owned. It's great to have them back again...
The same vendor also had this yellow pencil topper eraser robot and a Buddy L RoboTron figure. I love GoBots and other similar 80's transforming robot toylines and this is my first RoboTron figure...
Flea market season is quickly coming to an end and with finds like these it's ending on a great note.
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