icture it. It is 1950 and you're 10 years old. The Martian threat is at its height. With the menace bearing down as sure as fact, there is only one thing to do. Rally the neighborhood troops. Arm them well against the technological terror that prepares to invade the Earth. Arm them with the best weapon available to fend off hostile invading aliens. Arm them with Cosmic Space Guns.
No doubt the most memorable era of science fiction is the 1950s, when writers now revered were struggling to be published, art for pulp covers had a distinct style, and this vivid visual imagery extended everywhere from cars and kitchen appliances to radios and televisions. And on television, your favorite cartoon characters were wielding guns that looked like sleek teardrop-shaped appliances with large disk barrels.
Rocket USA's specialty is tin toys. They bend tin and shape it to make toys and novelties that evoke a time gone by that surely shaped our very culture and society. Wind-up robots, banks and clickers are their stock in trade, and while they also create some die-cast items, like their recent Gort robot, their main claim to fame is their wonderful retro-designed toys. These toys not only look like something from a past era, but act, sound and feel like the genuine article.
Their latest gem is the Cosmic Space Gun, a tin toy made along sleek lines that are as simple as they are timeless. Formed mainly from a large teardrop-shaped chassis, the design includes a small handgrip with logo pressed in; small, round porthole-like windows; and a wonderful clear plastic, multitiered flanged energy barrel. Topping off the whole design is a fin that juts up from the back like the rear of a 1957 Chevy Belair.
The heart of the gun is something not often seen in this day and age—a friction-driven gadget that sends sparks flying when you press the trigger.
The Cosmic Space Gun gleams in a totally black bed inside an attractive box with appropriate art and a window flap for display.
A blazing blaster from the past
The visual design of Rocket USA's Cosmic Space Gun is reminiscent of ray guns from that wonderful age, which can be seen on everything from cartoons of the time like Duck Dodgers to movies like Forbidden Planet, and the design has survived to today, to appear on books recalling the era, such as Berkeley Breathed's Red Ranger Came Calling and great films such as The Iron Giant.
The reason is that the simple elegance of this ray gun is comfortable and familiar, like the car fins and boxy robots that play a part in defining our very culture and our very existence, and were the very pinnacle of design in the 1950s.
The simple bent-tab construction holds the pieces of tin together like tin toys of a bygone time, and this construction is sturdy and reliable. The traction mechanism is solidly in place, and the split between body halves is covered by the extra effort of running a smooth capping molding strip all the way down the gun's line of bisection—a touch of class that shows caring and thought, as well as pride in the product.
The one thing the folks at Rocket USA didn't add—which to me it is obvious they were intentionally avoiding for stylistic reasons—is a splash of color. There is something to be said for the gorgeous, simple chrome and clear elegance of this gun's design, whose purpose seems to be to evoke a nostalgic representation of a classic, almost as if it were a museum piece. Similar models from the time would have been modeled in bright primary colors, mixing sky blues with bright reds and greens. To me the one thing missing from this minimalistic design is a small bit of red.
If the porthole windows or the front flange were red, it would have added a little something extra, and would have given emphasis to the sparks, which almost get lost in the monochromatic scheme of things. If the panels were clear red plastic, the sparks would light up the entire panels, rather than getting lost inside the clear ones.
Yet this is simply a nit that should probably not be picked, as this is one of the finest examples of retro-styled nostalgia I've seen in many years.
