Back in 1969 when I was a little kid I saw the above advert on the back page of Smash! and TV21. It raised my curiosity as I was a fan of Gerry Anderson's shows but I assumed the Dossier would be just a small booklet and not worth saving the meat paste lids for. As that was the only way to obtain a copy I never saw the publication with my own eyes.
Skip to a few months ago and I saw the Joe 90 Dossier up for grabs on eBay so bought it. Pleasingly it turned out to be a much more substantial item than I expected. A4 in size, with a card cover and 32 glossy pages inside, it was designed and published by Century 21 Publishing. The result was a classy looking publication on par with the TV21 Annuals of the time. As it was produced by Century 21 (who also did the Joe 90 TV show) it meant they had access to the official photographs and background info on the Joe 90 characters.
The magazine is comprised of character data, cutaways, activity pages, prose stories, and one 4 page interactive comic strip (interactive in that it includes a dot-to-dot, and other clues for the reader to discover). All in all, a very good package considering that back in 1969 it'd only cost four meat paste lids!
Here's a selection of pages from the Dossier...
The Joe 90 Dossier was published around the same time that Century 21 launched their Joe 90 Top Secret weekly. You can read about that comic at this link:
3 comments:
The first time I saw the Joe 90 comic was about a week before its release date in the back office of the newsagents I did a paper round for.
It looked interesting enough to buy it for a while.
Interesting and enjoyable times.
I wanted the Joe90 Dossier so I ate a lot crappy sandwiches to get it - it wasn't bad compared to some 1960's promotions, but is there any wonder I turned veggie a few years later!
I remember the paste was tasty but it sometimes had bits of fat in it. Not ideal but we didn't have a lot of money so a jar of salmon spread was cheaper than a tin of salmon.
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