It comes before I've had time to fully
sort-away the last lots from Peter, Chris and Jim, and a frantic photo-session
left another bunch of fledgling articles in the queue and a host of mental
notes to dig-out this or that for more expansive posts at some point.
The trouble is - and it's a nice trouble to
be in - I'm adding lots of nascent articles to the queue, photographing loads,
bringing the two collections together and such like, but . . . time moves on
with hideous rapidity, it's only a few months to RTM, ie; a year since I got everything
out of storage, it's already four months since Christmas!
Yet I've barely begun to get on top of the
consolidation task (I've been sorting Hong Kong AFV's this week, alongside the
Peter parcel, an eBay lot and several charity-shop finds) while those who have
contributed stuff will know how much of it has yet to appear - I can only say
what I've said before - it all will, eventually!
What I finally recovered from under the
nose of my sleeping assistant! You will recognise the vehicles as having
previously been 99p Store or Poundland (about three or four years
ago), now in new packaging/brand marks, the animals in the other blister-card
seemed - from a cursory glance - to be from the old unpainted Rado Industries mouldings, but they are
actually different, just similar, especially the big cat with spots.
In a plain-white polymer with some whacky
paint (the elephant and lion are over-sprayed silver and gold respectively!); we
will look at them closely along with the contents of the pack underneath in RTM
- if I remember!
The Simpson's
character set (some capsule toy/blind-bag thing?) is lovely; they are
'unit-scale' so Marge ends up smaller than her baby, due to her large beehive
bouffant! And as Simpson sets go, a
good selection of characters with 24 of the most common here in 25-35mm.
The two 'detective' rabbit babes (the one
on the left is holding a magnifying glass) seem to go with the Sherlock Homes type in orange with the
gun - all three are PVC and marked Yolanda.
The 'mouseketeer' is a crumbly-rubber and unmarked, he's lost an arm and his
sword, but goes with another - already sorted - in blue or green somewhere, so
a growing 'sample' nevertheless!
Some other highlights include a couple of Phidal princesses we may or may not have
seen here. It's a fact that those who worry about the state of the 'hobby' need
to understand the hobby is a collective of 600-2000 individual ideas about what
'The Hobby' actually is, while the toy industry is quite healthy and
full of figures - Phidal are
producing more new sculpts per year than Airfix
ever did, that they aren't WWII combat troops is of no interest to today's
kids, who want TV/movie related stuff!
Three Crocco
for Wheetabix figures are next to the
Phidal's and a blob of Fischer PVC is on the end of the upper
row - Paulinchen from Fix und Foxi's
Pauli family.
The lower row consists of mostly older
characters, including another of those French (maybe Pif Gadget) figurines, two Kinder
Smurfs, a Miss Piggy from The Muppets
a couple of unknown (to me)'s and the annoyingly sensible one from Scooby Doo as a pencil top. The key ring
is from one of several anthropomorphic insect movies (Bug Life, Antz, or the
other one!) from the rush of them awhile-back.
These are interesting in that I have a London
Toy Fair report in the queue for a Totaku,
which shows another healthy aspect of the 'industry', with the Schleich/Papo/ELC (et all) action-figure
sized, synthetic-rubber solids, and here are two others, obviously based on the
worst franchise ever (I saw the first and they can't have got better!) - Alien V's Predator.
Further - on the subject of 'hobby' health
- consider the vast ranges of incredibly accurate and beautifully decorated
animals (wild, domestic and prehistoric) from Schleich, Papo, Safari, Plastoy, Wild Republic,
and so on, and measure them against the staid and eventually stale offering
from Britains? Or the simplistic
sculpts of Charbens, Starlux or Reisler . . . nothing wrong with the Britains range - for or in its time - or any of the others, but the
picture is vastly improved and far more dynamic now.
Cheers Peter, another eclectic collection
of things to entertain loyal readers going forwards!
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