H is for Help! They need somebody; Help! Not just anybody...

Having received so much help last week (thank you all) with my lead/white-metal odd and sods (I think about a third of them were positively ID'd which is not bad going!), there are a couple of blog-followers who need a bit of help ID'ing things, hopefully someone out there knows who made the following two sets/series' of toy figures . . .

 . . . first up is David H who is looking for a moniker to slap on the figure to the right:

"I am hunting for one skeleton that someone else found, but has no information on it. It is the same size and shape as playmobil, but more alike to imaginext in detail. I thought it might be a European brand... would you be able to identify the toy set it might be associated with? the picture has it next to a playmobil skeleton for comparison"

My suggestion would have been Playmobil! But with the Playmobil to the left, can anyone ID the figure on the right? Did Playmobil have a redesign? Could it be Mega Bloks, their Arctic Yeti was similar? Any help gratefully received by David, who has a Skeleton page on the Facebook at the Toy Skeleton Closet which is extraordinary, his key-rings alone are a collection to envy!

Yes - I know Playmobil is spelt wrong in the Tag List, I just spelt it wrong another three times . . . it's another thing on the list!

Then we have Robert Der Arakelian who is looking for a name/brand to stick to these chaps, who may look like the above-mentioned Playmobil, (four!) a mistake I made when the image popped-up in my in-box, but they are not . . .

"I have been looking on-line for these figures in the picture attached with no avail for 2-3 years. I cannot remember what they were called and what country they were from, only how they looked. This is a picture of my own collection which had mysteriously disappeared with all of my Lego :(

Do you have any idea what they are called? I really want to try and find some again.

They are slightly shorter than Lego characters and they obviously look like a Playmobil knock-off."

My advice was that they are probably Italian pocket-money toys from the little boxes (some of which ended up in Kinder eggs, but not these?), or Hong Kong copies of the same. I know the ones with ball-sockets were both Kinder and Italian-boxed with copies from HK as 'Boggi' or something - I think one's been seen here (a gardener) on the Blog?

Funnily enough I recognise the medic, I think I have one with a foot missing in storage, and I definitely have the traffic light somewhere, but they came in with a mixed lot - possibly even Lego (a mate and I spent a while in the 1990's buying vintage Lego at car-boot sales!)? maybe they go with an early Lego knock-off?

Any help you can give either collector might help them sleep at night . . . hey - these things matter! And with Google-search results tailored to each individual user these days, everyone will get slightly different results, it's worth an hour's time-wasting, isn't it?