WHAT HAPPENED TO SPACE HELMETS!!!????

When I was a kid everyone was excited about outer space. All of us kids couldn't wait til we grew up and could go to other planets and battle monsters of indescribable ferocity.

Wally Wood nailed it in this picture (above). Every kid had his trusty tricycle and his 

Davy Crockett and Prince Valiant paraphernalia. The only inaccurate thing about this picture is the space helmet.  None of us kids, at least in my area, could lay his hands on one. 

To judge from the media of that era, toy space helmets were common as water....

...even girls had them....but it wasn't true. NOBODY had them!!!

Look at that lucky kid above,  grooving with his new helmet and a pocket full of quarters for the rocket ride. What I think of when I see this picture is, where the heck did he get it? I begged and cried, threw tantrums and fits, and still couldn't get one. I never even saw them in the stores.

My parents said the helmets I saw in magazines were probably specially made for the photographs, but I wasn't buying it. They had the look of mass market toys. See that blow-up plastic ring
(above) around the bottom? That says mass production to me.

I have to face the possibility that my parents lied to me. Maybe parents had a boycott going. It's possible that some psychologist somewhere went on the road with an EC comics-type scenario where a kid falls off his tricycle, causing his helmet to shatter into shards and disfigure him for life. It was the beginning of the age of parental hysteria, egged on by so-called "experts."

I'll bet warehouses were full of unsold space helmets, including the premium "Space Patrol" helmet shown above.  Eventually many tens of thousands of them were probably crushed and used as landfill. I and millions of other kids were left bereft. Now I'm an adult and I stand before you a mental and physical wreck. I sleep in doorways and life is what happens while I await the solace of death and oblivion. Like so many of my generation I was lied to and denied a basic necessity of kid life, and this...this has been the tragic result.