T is for Toy Fair '18 Reports - Jada

Another company being handled in the UK by Amerang is Jada, a Hong Kong based Chinese toy manufacturer, clearly with some clout as they are in the business of buying into licenses for franchises like Harry Potter and . . . The Bat Man!

A set of 1:24th scale Batmobiles, from the original TV series and running through the movies of recent years. Each model comes with a figure which technically should be around 75mm for 1:24th, but they didn't look that tall to me, closer to 60mm maybe (1:30th), but I'm very bad a judging size away from a measuring stick. Still, the catalogue states 2.75-inches, which is about 71-and-a-bit millimeters by my measuring stick, when I'm near it.

The TV Batmobile is a nice little model, and - unlike the NJCroce one, does run, as a freewheeler. The boy wonder who is fixed in a sitting position seems to be on the [orange] Batphone!

There is also, as can be seen; a smaller version, as there seem to be for all (five?) of them. I can't remember if a scale was given but it looks to be half-size, so around the 1:48th mark and there don't seem to be figures with the diminutive models.

The back of the box suggests five man-bats to collect at the moment, and note that while they don't have the bases of the Harry Potter figures we looked at earlier; there does appear to be one on the pre-production figure used for the box-art!

'Hollywood Rides' suggests that if not Batman's enemies, there will be further extensions of the range into other film franchise characters. I think it's about time we had Clint Eastwood and 'pal'with a Confederate Wagon-team! "Three-cheers for the Confederacy!" . . . Pat . . . pat . . . pat .

Or . . . how about "The Laaast of the vee-ate inn'tercep'tuz", now - that's a toy I'd like to see!

Meanwhile, the catalogue has photographed them better than I did, but their snappers are probably paid well for the task, so they should be better! And it's another version of Batman.

Jada are also marketing these . . . sort of super deforms; in die-cast? Let's be honest here, this stuff is purely for kidult's man-caves, I mean; who wouldn't want 4-inches (that's half a small foot!) of deformed Halo Space Marine die-cast metal falling on their glass-topped coffee-table, during cleaning or because they caught the sideboard with an elbow in passing! If you drop that Hulkbuster on your foot; you're off to A&E!

However - my cynicism aside, any move away from polymers is a good thing, no matter how much we might like our vintage plastic figures . . . let's get them all to that position - vintage.

And that's four-more licenses! If there was one stand-out point being made at the Toy Fair it was that licensing is everything and everything can be licensed. For instance Monopoly (as we will see in a future post) is no longer just a board game from Hasbro-Parker (or even Parker-Hasbro!), it's a licensable brand-mark to be hired, with conditions, for specific periods, to third parties, hence the literally hundreds of versions out there, some of which don't even use the original play-mechanisms . . . but many of which have nice figures!