Coreyshead - Looking at the World 1 Pixel at a Time

Okay, this toy isn’t all that strange but it is ~ ooo-eee-ooo! ~ mysterious.

About a year ago, a friend of mine, the kind of guy who’ll send me a link to an ebay auction for a Pepsodent riding toy in the middle of a dull work week, handed me a toy.

It was a red-suited, silver-helmeted little schnook posed in a stance of overweening confidence and I was immediately in love (and, no, it wasn’t the way the tightness of the suit emphasizes his little tuchus … I hadn’t even noticed that yet. Harrumph.).

It was an advertising character, he said. His sense was that it was for a pharmaceutical product of some kind. The detail on the side of the helmet and the “B” on the figure’s chest made Bayer Aspirin jump to mind but the product the little guy is shilling for remains a mystery.

I initially thought my friend was giving the toy to me. He knows my love of vintage advertising character toys and is always giving me strange and cool toys. This particular item was really spiffy, a beaut, covered in nift as it were. So cool, in fact, that there was absolutely no way in hell he was giving it to me: the toy was missing some parts, and he was wondering if I could reproduce them for him.

I’d done work for him before, along the lines of getting some superglue fingerprints on the dome of a rare, vintage piece he brought up for me to repair one drunken weekend, and he had hopes for more of my stunning handiwork on this other item.

It seemed that the toy I was fondling was missing a plastic face-plate and a metal antenna shaped like the old atomic energy symbol. Did I think I could make those?

Now, I owe the guy about 300 years worth of favors – how could I say no?

I said: “sure, no problem!” even though I was already freaking out a little bit about the antenna.

Could he provide me with pictures of the toy in a complete state? He could – and did. I received many angled shots and even a template for the face-plate

The face-plate was a snap with that template to work off of. A pair of scissors, an X-Acto blade, and some plastic from a cookie container did the trick nicely: voila. I was surprised at just how good it looked.

Then there was the antenna. I knew just what to do: I’d take some light gauge wire, build a nail jig to bend my shapes, and solder it together like the original. Simple-peasy … or something like that. So easy, in fact, that I procrastinated for damn-near a year.

Finally, I could take no more and sat down to the task. It was almost as simple as I had hoped. The nail jig worked well and my ham-handed needle-nose work, while clunky, pulled off the rest of the bending with little to no cursing, which was a good thing as I needed all the cursing I could muster for the soldering. This latter took two attempts, another jig to hold everything in place, over an hour of labor, and about ten years off my emotional life.

The end result had me thoroughly disgusted until I looked at the original again and realized that it, too, had chunky wads of solder. Hokay, then.

I filed the worst of the solder gunk down, cleaned the wires, and fitted it onto the spike of Mysterious Atomic B Boy’s helmet. Damn, not bad! If only the solder wasn’t so shiny … Maybe it will oxidize in time.

I showed it to my friend and he was thrilled – I wasn’t a useless bastard after all, just an incredibly slow, selfish one. Yay!

Now the hardest part: mailing it back to him. Bummer.

As to the mystery of the Mysterious Atomic B Boy: if you know where the character hails from, have related materials, let me know! I’m really curious about its origin and hope, someday, to have one of these little buggers for my collection …

Tags: Advertising Character Toy, DIY, Space Boy, Vinyl