D is for Dunkin, Disney and Deutschland!

Reader/follower 'Gerhard' of Germany sent me some interesting shots the other day and although he's missed my return email and plea below somewhere, I've cobbled together a couple of posts round what he sent.

This is entirely collage'd from Gerhard's images, and is very interesting as it shows the Tito logo on an Americana gum envelope. It also states MADE IN SPAIN when the Americana company is centred near Aachen south of the Ardens (although Munich is stated on these packs), so I guess they were all part of a bigger multinational that also involved Dunkin, Tylers/Mundi and Jopar...all part of the Sanchez group????! - In the end it does your head in!

Anyway - nice shots of the envelope and a full set of the Disney figures, as Gerhard stated in his eMail; these were originally Marx Disneykins, manufactured in Hong kong in hard styrene. At some point the Marx arm in Europe; Heimo got sets of moulds for a fair few of the TV, Movie and cartoon character sets in various sizes and produced them in unpainted softer ethylene's, even shipping some back to the states.

Somehow they - the 'kin' moulds - seem to have gone to Tito (and/or Olá?) where they were supplied to all sorts of bubble-gum, ice-cream and other food companies as premiums from the mid-to-late 1960's until the early 1980's, after which some (Tin Tin) ended up in Mexico, others got as far as Taiwan (Asterix) where some of the original Marx Miniature Masterpieces had been made!

I meant to knock-up the notes for this post at home and forgot so I can't remember the name of the show from which the characters in the two lower left shots come from! It was an European TV cartoon though! Some kind person chuck the name in 'comments' if you know it, I won't be back here till next Wednesday! Added 24th Feb 2013 - Jan Koolen has let me know they are from the European TV cartoon Nils Holgersson, thanks Jan.

The other shots are either colour variations from Portugal (Olá) or Spain (Tito) or other characters from the old TV Tinykins range, taken from the oeuvres of Warner Brothers or Hanna Barberra.

Although distorted by my collageing them together these are pretty much all between 25/40mm. Again - because I didn't pre-load the article, I'm sitting here doing it off the top of my head in the Library and will NOT attempt to name half these critters!

Marx originals; Top is a Swansea large scale ethylene Panchito and two colour variants of the Disneykin.
Below him we have various Peter-pan characters, again all Disneykins. The last shot shows Hong Kong and Heimo treatments of Captain Hook in both Styrene (small) and PVC vinyl (Large) respectively.

Larger Vinyls at top, these are mostly unlicensed HK copies of Schlich, Bully (Heimo's modern trademark) or Papo, Daisy Duck is Heimo to the left and Marx to the right, Gerhard mentions getting the Schlich ones every time he went to the Dentist, any other German readers remember freebies. Also it wasn't clear if he was talking about the larger vinyls or the smaller ethylenes?

Below are some more old Marx figures to the right and a Heimo character who's name I've forgotten, but she was a US TV cartoon from the 50's (Little Orphan Annie, Dagwood? - something like that!)

Pecos Bill - one of the most pirated figures in the history of toy figures; Top row are all Marx/Heimo (Swansea ethylene is the unpainted yellow one on the left), bottom row are all Christmas Cracker/Lucky bag giveaways, with various stages of remoulding or decrepitude from 4 different sources!