T is for Toy Fair '18 Reports - HGL - Other Wildlife

Because the name changes (and two ownership changes) are quite recent, there is still stuff in HGL's stable with H. Grossman branding, while not everything is Ozbozz'ed, so all three are in evidence here.

In addition to the vast range of dinosaurs (shown on Thursday just past), there were plenty of other novelty and pocket-money toys, among which were the 'Farm & Zoo' we're looking at here.

Paralleling the core of the dinosaur range, Both the farm (domestic . . . ) and zoo (. . . wild animals) come in header-carded bags of two sizes and tubs large and small, along with other items mirroring other aspects of the Dinosaur or Dragon Domain range packagings.

All are seen here, along with budget tractors, some smaller die-casts running out of the bottom-left of the image (I wasn't focusing on them at all!) and a stand-alone (graphics-wise) bag of sea-mammals/cetaceans.

The bottom corner of the previous; here shot in better detail, with - in front of them - two counter display boxes of larger single animals. The window boxes are in the same style as the similar dinosaur and dragon boxed-sets currently in TKMaxx.

We looked at the Wild Animal tub earlier today and while the contents look similar in the current tub, it would appear that there's now a larger tiger evident and possibly new giraffes or new decoration of the giraffe, there a smaller baby giraffe in the larger tub, which following my rule of thumb is getting close to being a toob!

The same 'line' also has these sea-life sets which are a mixture of larger and smaller animals, some of the smaller ones seeming to be the same as those packeted by Henbrandt as single party-favour type things, seen last year on SSW (why have I been abbreviating that as SCW? . . . sigh!).

I think also these are different sculpts to those in the bagged set, the sealions look similar though, so it may just be a change of decoration?

The insect bag has similar graphics to the sea-life one, and giant insects are also available, except, they are probably merely life-size to some of the things that crawl out of the Amazon basin or the volcanic jungles of Indonesia!

I can say with some certainty that 'figural' - as the driving concept behind SSW these days - precludes the My Lovely Farm stress-ball sheep from ever being deemed necessary on Small Scale World and that consequently they will not appear again, ever!

There is a sub-line of rack-toys in blister cards called Fun Toy Critters with five selections on show at the end of January; Insects (6), Spiders (4 or 5?), a snake/lizard/alligator mix (also five, with scale all over the place!), dinosaurs (6) and birds (5 or 6?).

The dinosaurs (I though we'd cleared bloody dinosaurs!) look a bit generic and familiar, but the birds are new to me, the reptiles seem to have been collected from several sources, the insects are chunky and a tad-unimaginative in decoration, but I'll buy them if I see them as I'm getting quite a side-collection of them now, and with my other hobby of photographing the real ones (saw my first Bumble-bee out and about today - Wednesday) I'm growing quite attached to my polymer invertebrates! The spiders also look interesting, although - for 'interesting' read; ugggh!