C is for Catalogue Cluster

Variously taken from the 1972, 3 and '75-79 catalogue scans the other day, they are sort of eye-candy, but mostly low-res, or not that clear, so to draw the curtain on the recent miniseries, and to get them off Picasa, here they are with a few notes, and in no particular order!

 

Larger playsets.

 

1st version Americans, with 2nd version in the boat, but they seem to have been given 1st version German helmets! I refer you to my previous comments on art-departments m'lud - muppets!

 

Ist version in the box, 2nd version outside the box! Americans again. It's not clear what the Bren-carrier crew have on their heads, but I think it is British helmets.

 

This shot was reversed in the 1976 catalogue, obvious from the red beret!

 

Window boxes.

 

Big beast, post-war British Chieftain Tank it was also issued in German grey, along with this one in a big-box play set, it's expensive when you find it, and rarely complete!

 

More art-department shenanigans here, some of the bases are wrong!

 

A bit silly, the Centurion turret is underscale and won't go through tunnels!

 

More art-department shenanigans here, some of the bases are wrong!

Have I already said that?

 

I think this is a mock-up too, the kneeling guy doesn't look right in the card-art, or in the blister?

 

That's it, I could have done a few more, but the effort of cropping them all was a faff!

L is for Last Ball

There are some follow-up or related posts, but this is the last of the samples of my figural inclusion-balls, with a summing up shot, comparing those we've seen over the last few days, and a non-figural 'also-ran'.

 

There were soldier balls!, At about 15/16mm, they were a tad small for compatibility with other popular scales (except 15mm war games stuff), but, being baseless would be really useful for filling open-topped vehicles, which are always short on space, due to overscale slab-sides reducing scale 'space'.

 

I don't know how many poses there were, as I found the last few, but I would imagine with three here, at least four would be a starter, probably eight or ten! And they are late-1980's US/NATO type,s in the then still newish, kevlar 'Fritz' helmets.

 

Using the left-hand of the 'mirror' as a key - on the left we have, at the top, the Keycraft Global dinosaur egg, with a plain red opaque background half, and the same issuers semi-transparent green ball. In the middle, a pack-ice/slush inclusion scenic Polar Animal ball, the footballer ball, with a half football as the other half of the ball and a full iceberg Polar ball on the right. While the lower pair are a skydiver ball with multicoloured chunks, and the soldier ball with camouflaged chunks. All branded to Hembrandt.

 

The FA ball (link in earlier post) was larger, and included a larger figure, a previously seen snowman Santa (with icing pick), had a clear ball with glitter included, while Keycraft were offering butterflies last year at the Spring Fair (I didn't attend this year, but may try the Autumn show), and wild animal balls, alongside the dinosaur eggs back in 2020.

 

While this non-figural, franchise-licensed, movie tie-in, came in with a job-lot from a charity shop (I think? Or one of Chris's parcels?), and you can see it's beginning to delaminate along the plain of the card disc, which would have caused it to fall in two if the previous owner continued to use it as a bouncy-ball! 

 

It looks to be a two-phase pour, like the dinosaurs, or FA ball, while most of the others would have required three phases to suspend the figures above the other inclusions/scenic discs.

J is for Jeeermuns!

Except these Jeeermuns are enemy Fokkers! An oldie, but a goodie, unless you're a German reader, in which case my apologies, but in the original, it is funny! The internet can't agree whether Roy 'Chubby' Brown or Stan Boardman were responsible for the original, but I first heard it from Brown, so tend to credit him, however Boardman himself, credits an episode of This is Your Life, with Eamon Holmes, while other sources claim WWII Ace Douglas Bader, or the RAF in general for an apocryphal wives-tale!

 

Having removed the Plasma tent and British stretcher-team, we're left with a few shots of the Timpo Germans, so as a bit of a box-ticker . . .

 

. . . the 'eye candy' is the German stretcher-team and casualty, who is the same as the British one, but in grey plastic, the figures with their cross-straps and high-boots were a new sculpt.

 

Variations on a theme, the MG-34 gunner as issued on the left, in the middle a No.2 has been created with the ammo-box from the Vickers MG vignette, while a No.3 guard/spotter carries a rifle, he should have the tripod, but he seems to have lost it in the fog of battle, spare barrels and marker poles would be the responsibility of the No.2. Last version, over-moulded head on the left, with less-common oxide-brown base.

 

This shot, courtesy of Theo Van de Weerden shows a few more poses, including my favourite, the MP-38/40 SMG chap, also with one of the less common late colour bases, and this was the only set with two obvious officers - no infantry Y-straps, and a Luger/Mauser holster.

 

The 1976, '77 and '78 Timpo catalogues reversed the infantry set's image, so we get several left-hookers, something Airfix managed to do with their WWI reissue box-art a while ago! On the left is the donor for the rifle in my MG team!

 

Always worth remembering; the art & design and press/marketing departments are jobbing employees, not geeks, not historians, not modellers nor toy soldier enthusiasts, if they were, we wouldn't still be getting the Airfix Sd.Kfz.234 with those ridiculous toy mudguards!

A is for Animal Balls!

No, not a study of gynaecological gonads, so you can fuck-off, you weirdo! But rather, a continuation of the overview of inclusion toy bouncy-balls, through the imports of Henbrandt and their Harlequin lines. The guys who started it, as I found them first, and actually two lots, the Polar Animals, whose tub I kept, to keep them all in, and a set of cetaceans, which, with other issuers/carriers can be intermixed, either with each other, or with other sea-life, sharks or more conventional fishes.

 

There are three types of these, and, after the card disc type and PVC landscape type, represent three other types, of four really, being plain, large iceberg (upper-left), pack-ice-slush (lower-right), iceberg with snow (below) and half-and-half clear and opaque, with the opaque half providing the backdrop, which we have seen already, with dinosaurs.

 

Airfix Zoo size! But only if they are all juveniles! So small, so easily lost, and with probably 90% of them either incinerated or in landfill already, it's lucky I've got some to show, although they are still available, from Chinese wholesalers and importers like Ravensden.

 

Snow over iceberg, two seals, and unfortunately, the method of construction, or properties of the materials means that while I could extract the tiny animals, or figures, the other inclusions were fully melded with the clear ball material, and broke-up with it, instead of coming out whole.

 

Although described as PVC in the Tags (the animals and figures are) the balls are made of something else, like polybutadiene, or polyvinyl acetate (PVA (like white glue/woodworkers glue)) adulterated with borax, (sodium borate), or a silicon/cornstarch mix, and even when formed in separate layers, they become one entity, which I had to scalpel to pieces, to extract the inclusions of more interest!

 

Underside of one of the icebergs.

 

My full sample, less the cetaceans, a range of sea lions, seals and a walrus, with penguins and a polar bear, most of them not longer than the width of a thumbnail, yet really quite well-decorated. They would have been an absolute in our Christmas stockings as kids, but seem to be a late-1980's-onwards thing, unknown to the parents or kids of the 1960/70's?

 

Another sizer, 'ball scale', the penguin's maybe 10mm?

 

Tub sticker!

E is for Eye Candy - Flamethrower

One of the rarest of the Timpo WWII or 'Modern Army' vignettes, and also, with the flame, one of the most imaginative, but it's the flame which helps make it rare, being marbled orange/yellow, the very fine locating stud at the hose end of the flame tends to fault-lines or brittleness, as does the quite thin silver hose, resulting in very few complete survivors.

 

Lacking accessories, and lacking the imagination of thinking they could use the shrub from the German mortar (in case it caught fire?), they - instead - added the bazooka rocket pile, which was more than a tad anachronistic!

P is for Pint-sized Players

The more interesting of the inclusion-ball figures, being near HO-gauge compatible, and I managed to find quite a few, liberating most of them, keeping a sample in his ball, and not the first time we've seen them, the British Football Association (FA) having commissioned a larger one, which we looked at years ago!

 

I found nine, each in the same strip, but it was one tub, and I would guess that over time the factory may have produced other batches in other colours? Nine is an odd number for a set of anything, so the suspicion is I may have missed one, or even three? Check-out the teeny balls!

 

Obviously with the sizer being one of Airfix's smaller figures, at around 18mm, these footballers are a bit small, but as a background on a model railway layout, a bunch of them playing a game behind the marshalling yards would still look grand! Although Preiser do full teams!

 

Backgrounds have little relationship to the individual figure in the ball, and are cut-card discs with library photos of actual teams/players, among which, the Dutch national team (I think?) seems to dominate!

 

Variation of the first shot, no balls!

 

Here you can see how the magnifying effect of the ball makes the figure appear larger than he actually is, by some degree. Note also how the still-included 15-shirt has a red numeral, rather than the black numbers on the two I've removed from their balls . . . Ouch!

E is for Eye Candy - Infantry Mortar

Back to the Timpo Germans, and their 80mm mortar, and the other of these little vignettes which you can switch-out the figures and swap (or swop!) for British or American troops, and given the differences between mortars at this scale, and the simplistic design, means it makes no difference who's serving it!

 

The shrubbery, or - more accurately - 'shrub' is as unique as the mortar, I thought it got further issues with one or two of the wild-west vignettes, but it didn't. Somewhere I have one reattached to a standard figure base, but it tends to fall sideways on the long-sides of the slightly ovoid base!

 

If you look carefully you'll see the fine crossbar is broken, it wasn't when I got it out of the tub, but it's definitely a weak-spot with this Timpo weapon-sculpt, and went the way of most others, I just hope the other end will stay attached, and one day I'll try a miniscule blob of superglue, off a pin, to try and hold it long enough to get a better shot for the final archive/A-Z Blog post.

S is for Smallest of the Small!

Well, you may have thought we'd got as small as it comes when Brian B sent us that mixed lot of space/sci-fi kit figures', from New York, a few of years ago, but I think we're going an increment smaller now, with the smallest of the small, here branded to Henbrandt's Harlequin Brand, although these are available elsewhere, and in other branding, we saw the more recent Keycraft Global iteration of these inclusion balls, a while back too.

 

The first few posts of this new series will be looking at Henbrandt, simply because I bought an initial sample, over a few years (1997/8-2005/6'ish) from the same party shop in North Camp, long gone now, called The Balloon Shop, if memory serves (I think it's a Kebab place now), they also carried the last version, smooth-based iteration of the Lik Be (always, and still LB!) 54/60mm spacemen.

 

They let me have the tub, when I bought all the remaining arctic animals, so I keep all the 'inclusion balls' in it! As well as the Arctic animals, there were soldiers, footballers, and the smallest of the small, hobby skydivers, practising formations over micro-scenes!

 

As you can see, from the Airfix ceremonial sizer, they are about 3.5 or 4mm, no more! With the magnifying effect of the clear PVC ball, enlarging them to 5 or 6mm to the eye! The scenery, looking more like a 3D map, is made from PVC, as are the diminutive little figures, and I only found them in red and blue jump-suits.

 

Where/when I accidentally, or deliberately bought duplicates, I would dig them out with some scalpel-surgery, and apart from this set, most just have a card disc, or an opaque/solid-coloured 'other half' of the ball, as a curtain-backdrop, while a few have further 'scenic' inclusions. The parachutists are set a couple of millimetres above the disc, to further enhance the 3D impression.

 

I produced this little 'heads and tails' sketch (R = red, B = blue) of the four arrangements I found, at the time (2000's), for the archive, while the shots above were taken in 2021, when they turned-up during all the moving/sorting, which means the Keycraft Dinosaurs jumped the queue, but then, there's always order in chaos, if you follow quantum science!