Galaxy Laser Team: the greatest gumball machine plastic toys ever cast

Kirk Demarais of the Secret Fun Blog looks into the series of space monster plastic figurines from the late '70s known as the Galaxy Laser Team.

Since then, clues about the series have popped up around the web, and now they are commonly known as the Galaxy Laser Team (except for the time they were packaged as Star Patrol.) They were initially produced at the Processed Plastic Factory in Illinois and sold by Tim-Mee toys in 1978. Five-inch jumbo versions of the characters showed up in 1979, and later they became a product of Mexico. The set combined the fun of classic, plastic soldiers with our unquenchable craving for all things Star Wars, thus, during the handful of years that they were available they generated countless fond memories in young brains around the globe.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Oscar Sanchez Santana

damn!!! I remember them… a very foggy memory
johne2

I had li’l turtle man there in a bright fluorescent green.
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

Yep – I had those in other colors, too. Pure white, and pink, I think.
Learethak

Wow… just wow… I had totally forgotten about these, but I had them too!
Matt Staggs

I had some of these guys, but had completely forgotten about them. Thanks for this trip down memory lane!
mongo bigmuff

I am from Mexico City. I STILL have these somewhere. I remember that turtle guy, particularly.
Steve Taylor

Best thing about this photo: the R2D2 guy looks like an amp, and that makes the gun the guy behind him is holding look like a guitar - and all of a sudden you’ve got the hardest rocking band in the plastic figurine universe.
- graou
  
  That’s true ! There’s a drummer too !
noah django

the consensus at my school was that the martian gorilla guy was the cool one.
http://twitter.com/coherent_light Scott Elyard

I love these dudes. They’re sort of recent thing for me since I never owned any, but I must have seen them on pegs in stores near the Gayla kites.

I’ve always loved generic space men, and I’ve been collecting them for a while now, long enough to mount a full-scale generic space war. (Or I could mix it up a bit with the Dimensions for Children playset figures.)
Andrew Singleton

Pity you dont see this kind of awesome in gumball machinese these days. Well I suppose in japan you might but not here.
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  Gashapon stuff is mindblowing.
http://jere7my.livejournal.com jere7my

Oh, is that what those things are! I’ve got a bunch in my Red Suitcase of Rescued Youth. Just pulled out a baker’s dozen.
SpongeBorg

Damn, just when I thought I was finished buying plastic figure s to animate.
pupdog

I always felt sorry for Ms. Boobsy McShortSkirt there – everyone else got a weapon of some sort, and she’s apparently, uh, holding up the console?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Was she the model for Gwen DeMarco?
  
  Gwen DeMarco: Fred, you had a part people loved. I mean, my TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my BOOBS and how they fit into my suit. No one bothered to ask me what I do on the show.
  Fred Kwan: You were… the umm, wait a minute, I’ll think of it…
  Gwen DeMarco: I repeated the computer, Fred.
Warren_Terra

I had at least four of the figurines above; I think I had more than one of some. Fond memories.

Oh, and at the link you can apparently try to repurchase your (recast) youth if you’re so inclined.
sdmikev

I love those.
Reminds me when we lived in FLA for a couple years in the early 70′s. We used to go to the Busch Gardens in Tampa fairly often and they had these machines that would spit out cast plastic toys in the shape of animals for 50 cents.
http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

Wow, I had a bag of these, my grandma bought ‘em for me 33 or 34 years ago (from a Woolco, IIRC). Mine were all pink, though. At least one thing missing is the X-wing with the jet scoop under the fuselage.
Noah Brand

Huh. So I DIDN’T hallucinate those.
- noah django
  
  lol, but also pic related
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Dude, there are 23,000 men in the US with my first and last name.
    - noah django
      
      oh yeah? what name was that again?
dorkhero

OMG! I had these, and I still have the X-winged F-16! It sits on my bookshelf between the Playmobil Vampire and a trophy for winning the Battletech Gunslinger event at Comundrum 2000…
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

I had some of these. No idea where I got them. The robot was white and the and Flash Gordon wannabe was pink.
Bucket

Holy crap. This just uncorked a metric monkeyton of forgotten childhood memories.

I had tons of those guys. I also had the Fookiee’s laser rifle, the human guy’s helmet & pistol, and Darth Knockoff’s sword in full-size. Well, kid-sized anyway. The laser guns were a serious classic sci-fi design, and they had flashlights in them that would turn on with a pull of the trigger.

And the knockoff X-wing in a scale a lot closer to the figure size. It was really just an F-16 mold with goofy wings.

ETA:
Another blog about these: http://angstandspeed.blogspot.com/2012/07/processed-plastic-company-star-patrol.html
Jay CSC

YES! I heard they were making them again. I gave two vintage figures to Jon Scalzi when he came to a signing here in MPLS:
http://exonauts.blogspot.com/2012/06/saturday-space-opera-with-scalzi.html