About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

H is for Heroes in Half-shells

Back in the late 1980's when these guys first picked-up momentum (and kick-started the modern graphic-novel moment (in the English language that is; the Europeans were - of course - way ahead of the Anglo Saxons on that one . . . bigoted Brexit idiots!), I'd just got out of the army and was living in Aldershot where one of those combined head-shop/t-shirt/punk-badge/comic kiosks had both the US TMNT editions and the self-censored TMHT version . . . our kids weren't to be influenced by Ninjas apparently, they had to have 'Heroes' . . . go figure!

Carded Leonardo and Michelangelo, the figures are about56/60mm, but as they represent cartoon anthropomorphic turtle Ninja warrior monks who live in a sewer and allow themselves to be trained by a giant rat, I'm not sure that their being a few millimeters taller or shorter than your favorite figure-size is much to worry about!

I picked them up in a non-chain clearance/pound shop in Aldershot the other week, three of five, the missing figures being Raphael and a 'Foot Soldier'. And this gets Finland in the tag-list again!

Donatello in his blister and a line-up of the three, I've been back to see if I could get the others, but it's clear I got the last three of an end-of-line thing! Still - three-quid for the trio? I bet Forbidden Planet had them at  +/- a fiver-each whenever they were 'high street' retail stock!

The cards that came with them made no sense; nor did the all-languages/no language graphical instruction sheet! There seems to be an element of having to give your figure away if you lose at a round of 'Top Trumps': madness! There's a video on-line that might make it clearer. . . no, I haven't and I won't be, I'm a collector, not a thrower-away of good figures on the turn of a card!

These are nice sculpts, well painted, in a tactile material, if you see some, get them, put them on the shelf next to your JIM Napoleonic's, Timpo swoppet 'Great Helms', Marx beach babes and Cherilea Mexican bandit, they all represent the same thing - Childhood.

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