The summer of 1970 saw this beautifully illustrated advert plus variations in black & white appear in Striker, a magazine devoted to football and thus a good place to advertise to boy readers or their dads.

I obtained this page online from a cut-up merchant, and once I had it in my hands I wondered if there might be a second page. Reason was that the text mentions "over 30 action models" whereas the illustration only shows 16 of the original Stage 1 range of 18 toys, so to make up the numbers the text must have referred to the later Pippin-produced series as well.

However, Kim Stevens was most kind to look through the magazine at the British Library to find issues and dates, and confirmed this single page was all there was to it.

This now makes me wonder whether the illustration may not have been recycled from previous adverts introducing the original Stage 1 series, which we so far haven't found yet. Because no later models are shown, esp the attractive Moon Base (which we know was amongst the last Series 1 toys to be available, shown as it is on card backs with the original Lockheed illustration), this could very well be possible.

What is also interesting is the appeal to readers (shown in detail below) to write in with suggestions for a Spacex Club to be formed. I don't know if this ever actually happened (there's no evidence to prove it did, and the next series of comic adverts doesn't mention it any more either) but it's certainly a nice idea, and a good way of involving the target audience.

To complete the story, the advert shown above turned out to be the second version to be published. The first version is slightly different (shown below), with headings in black text on white bars in the illustration, and without that mysterious letter A next to the helicopter.

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