Space Patrol Cosmic Smoke Gun Advertisement on You Tube

In the early 1950s, Space Patrol was science-fiction television. At its peak, it aired every single day and drew millions of viewers -- both kids and adults. It also launched a zillion tie in products, more than enough to satisfy any space cadet.

One of the best was the Space Patrol Cosmic Smoke Gun, which I wrote about here. It's a bona fide classic; Leslie Singer, author of Zap!, the first book about ray guns, has publicly declared it his favorite gun. I know it's definitely high on my personal list, too.

Well guess what? While watching some old Space Patrol episodes on You Tube recently, I stumbled on an ad for this very gun! Yep, there it was, in stunning black and white, available for nothing more than a box top from some Rice Chex and "twenty-five cents in coin." Hot damn, that's the kind of deal you just can't pass up.

To see the ad, fast forward to the 2:37 mark.

By the way, this is the second part of a three part serial. Since Space Patrol is awesome, I suggest going back and watching the first episode.

Space Patrol Cosmic Smoke Gun (U.S. Plastics / 1950s / U.S. / 3 x 6; 3 x 4.5)

The TV series Space Patrol, which ran from 1950 to 1955, helped usher in the space craze of the 1950s. It's no surprise, then, that it also spawned a mountain of merchandise, including the wonderful Cosmic Smoke Guns.

This was the type of toy you can have fun with. It fires a puff of powder that does pretty much whatever kids in the 1950s needed it to do depending on what type of alien or evil overlord was attacking them. Of course, since the alien or evil overlord was probably being played by the kid next door, the most likely affect of the powder was temporary blindness and a face that looked like the third day of a cocaine bender. But all in good fun, right?

The Cosmic Smoke Gun was a mail-away cereal premium; send in a number of box tops and a couple quarters, wait six to eight weeks, and the toy magically ended up in your mailbox. It was available in two sizes: five and six inches. Each size also came in one of two colors: red and metallic green. However, the small green gun and the large red gun are both exceedingly rare; the reverse colors -- large and green, small and red -- pop up on eBay all the time. (A large red one did, however, recently appeared on eBay -- I wrote about it here.) However, even the common versions of the toy can still fetch good money since so many different people want to get them: Space Patrol collectors, ray gun collectors, powder-shooter collectors (seriously, they exist), and cereal premium collectors.

Leslie Singer, author of Zap!, has said that the red Cosmic Smoke Gun is his favorite ray gun, and it's easy to understand why. The toy's creatively designed, compact, and has great play value. Personally, I like the green one more -- I'm a sucker for metallic colors -- but regardless, I wholeheartedly agree that this toy is one of the greats.

I snagged my green one off eBay -- of course -- but the red one was an honest-to-goodness antique store find. That's rare in this day and age; and often, when a toy does show up in a store (or at a toy show or a flea market), it's way overpriced. Not so with this one, which sold for a couple bucks below what it usually gets online. I should also point out that I own my good buddy Donald Conner a tip of the hat -- he was the one who actually found this piece and then gave me the heads up so I could get it.

By the way, if you'd like to learn more about Space Patrol, check out the excellent Solar Guard Space Patrol Web Site.

Shooting Man From Mars (Irwin / 1952 / U.S. / 11 inches)

No vision of the future would be complete without a few space heroes to help keep those planetary colonies safe. With his ray guns, bubble-helmet, and spiffy uniform, the Shooting Man from Mars was the right guy for the job. Never mind his bright, freshly-scrubbed, child-like face -- this was a man of action!

I've always liked this toy; he captures the wide-eyed wonder of Fifties TV space-adventure shows like Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Space Patrol. The Shooting Man from Mars, despite his violent title, has a naive, gee-wiz quality that often defined children's science fiction during that period. It inspired optimistic dreams about the future, dreams that included rockets to the moon, robot friends, and flying cars. (I'm still waiting for that last one, by the way.)

The Shooting Man from Mars was made of an early, brittle, cellulose plastic. It features a wind-up walking mechanism similar to the pin-walking mechanism found on many early robots. Instead of pins though, it uses two off-center wheels that move in and out of the toy's feet as they rotate. This moves the toy forward while also giving it a slight side-to-side wobble. At the same time, the arms move up and down.

The toy was available in two colors, a reddish orange body with a clear dome, and a much rarer yellow version with a green-tinted dome. Mine, which has a green dome, is a rare variation that probably resulted from someone in the factory not paying attention to which dome they were grabbing. 

The domes themselves were made from a cheap form of acrylic and often "spidered" with age, a process by which thin surface cracks appear vertically across the surface. Finding clean domes isn't difficult, and I'd normally have waited for one without any marks. However, the green dome is so striking, I just had to have it. In this case, aesthetics definitely trumped condition.

A final thought: The Shooting Man from Mars embodies some of the weird ideas that people in the Fifties had about the future. For all the optimism, there was an expectation -- among regular Joes and Jills -- that outer space would be a lot like the Wild West, and that astronauts, like the cowboys before them, would need a nice pair of pistols to defend the orbital homestead from marauding aliens, interstellar bandits, and rocket rustlers. Reality proved very different, though I'd argue no less exciting. We're not getting into fights with aliens, but the exploration and discoveries made by astronauts in space and scientists down on Earth have helped expand our view of the universe, and our place in it. 

Throw in a green bubble helmet and I'd call that just about perfect.