Here's something I haven't put up much about here, a look at a 1950s space figure line by Ajax and a recent acquisition from the vaguely similar Archer line. I also put in a little more about the Tom Corbett franchise, which I expect to cover in more detail once another purchase comes in. Something I honestly have wondered about, when did science fiction illustrations, films and media start showing something like realistic space suits?
https://trendytroodon.blogspot.com/2022/12/rogues-roundup-runner-up-space-guys-and.html
David N. Brown
Mesa, Arizona

On Saturday, December 17, 2022 at 11:37:23 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
> Something I honestly have wondered about, when did science fiction illustrations,
> films and media start showing something like realistic space suits?

They probably finally got around to it after the Mercury program
started... because at that point, they pretty much would have been
*forced* to.

Of course, this didn't prevent depictions of the _far_ future, where space
suits could be designed from much more advanced materials, from still
showing astronauts - especially those of the female persuasion - wearing
skintight outfits with clear glass bubbles as helmets, but realistic
spacesuits would have finally made their appearance by then in at least
*some* science fiction.

John Savard

Quadibloc wrote:
> On Saturday, December 17, 2022 at 11:37:23 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
> > Something I honestly have wondered about, when did science fiction illustrations,
> > films and media start showing something like realistic space suits?
> They probably finally got around to it after the Mercury program
> started... because at that point, they pretty much would have been
> *forced* to.

My thought, too. Toys I don't know. As Jackson Browne sings, "In '69 I was" ...five. I remember a wonderful rubber-band driven Lunar Rover with detachable astronauts, unfortunately molded in a permanent sitting position, so not much use, and the joy that our lawn chairs could simulate the astronaut seating for us kids. Otherwise it was all Major Matt Mason.

For sf illustration, I don't mind looking up old sf illustrations, so I thought the big flood of public information on spacesuits would be with the Gemini spacewalk done by uh... Ed White in 1965. While looking that up, I'd already started counting backwards from July, 1969 Analog covers. (I will now leave a space for anyone who wants to comment that Analog will do whatever its editor wants it to do, with or without reference to current science..)

These are the years of Frank Kelly Freas. He's doing realistic paintings of detailed objects, if not necessarily realistic objects. I might point to a few guns on some covers, but an interesting example is July, 1968, for the story "Hawk Among the Sparrows" shows recognizably an SR-71 and its pilot, but with the Freas flair:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?56797
from that page you can get to View the Issue Grid to see June '68 and Sep '67 for space suits mixed with armor, and Oct '66 and Jul '65 for classic rocketship mixed with towers (if "Trader Team" took place on a planet which culture had reached the point of being able to build towers, I forget). A peek back to Dec '64 will show probably their thought of near future suit. This will take some more looking.

For films, you have the case that government-supplied rocket film was cheaper than special effects. In one case, "The Queen of Outer Space," it flipped between two or three different realistic (because real) rockets before going to Allied Artist's available rocketship model, so as to be able to use the rocketship crash footage from back in their Monogram Pictures days. (This footage was from 1951's "Flight to Mars" where it was a crash on Mars, in "World Without End" it was used for the rocketship crashing on Earth, with this landing on Venus we prove that if you've seen a crash on one terrestrial planet, you've seen them all.) Jack Hagerty, who has traced the use of this model, suggests its use in "IT! The Terror from Beyond Space" in flight in strict profile is so that the wings are not seen as wings, but as a detail down the side that might be taken as some rocket plumbing.

--
-Jack

On Sunday, December 18, 2022 at 1:33:23 AM UTC-7, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Saturday, December 17, 2022 at 11:37:23 AM UTC-7, David Brown wrote:
> > Something I honestly have wondered about, when did science fiction illustrations,
> > films and media start showing something like realistic space suits?
> They probably finally got around to it after the Mercury program
> started... because at that point, they pretty much would have been
> *forced* to.
>
> Of course, this didn't prevent depictions of the _far_ future, where space
> suits could be designed from much more advanced materials, from still
> showing astronauts - especially those of the female persuasion - wearing
> skintight outfits with clear glass bubbles as helmets, but realistic
> spacesuits would have finally made their appearance by then in at least
> *some* science fiction.
>
> John Savard
I tried a little research on the "real life" side, mainly at astronautix, and what I found was that there were pressure suits from the 1930s that matched the "Space Guy" outfits in my collection. One of these was the Draeger rig I'm sure I must have used for my original Exotroopers Space Nazis designs. Another is a somewhat later 1943 design commonly called the Tomato Worm Suit, which actually seems to be the only functional, fully-built example to use the "fishbowl" helmet type. One more thing I concluded is that the Mercury suits must have been the basis for the Marx Operation Moonbase playset figures. A further irony is that these were probably among the most form-fitting space suits ever used, certainly enough to show the feminine figure if women had ever worn them. It would have been a case of progress setting a misleading precedent.