M is for Minestrone of Marine Marvels

A post which has slowly grown through contribution (Mr. Berke - thank you), accident and delayed deliberate action!

Brian sent this in reply/follow-up to the previous post on the subject (itself a minestrone of things gathered together on a theme) back in May 2016, which he also contributed to and it was sat in his folder for a while, not because I couldn't have posted it at the time, as a follow-up, but because I wanted to shoot the stuff in the attic to go with it.

It shows his collection of the 1990's Kellogg's re-issue (really a re-hash?) of earlier baking-soda powered bath toys, the submarine being based on the old 1960's one, the PT-Boat, all new. The boat in the same red as the divers (also looked at here) is not so common; usually it comes in the apple-green.

I already had the upper image left over from some other photo-shoot, possibly the multi-parter on vessels years ago? Anyway, they were put together and given their own folder, where they sat for a year and a half! The lower shot was finally taken the other day.

Mine are all in the green, the PT-Boat being called BarnaBee's Boat (is he a cereal character?), with; to the left of the upper shot, some of the older versions with their four periscopes/aerials.

The larger sliver/gunmetal one is from an unknown (to me) source, probably also cereal and interestingly has the same mechanism as the boat, with the exhaust gasses (produced by the baking-soda mixing with water) being channelled out of the scoop at the back to provide forward momentum.

Then this turned-up in a bag of mixed bits from Adrian the other-week, and I was so busy looking at some of the other things in the bag, at the show, I didn't notice it until I got home! It's a whale (obviously) with the same suck/blow action as the larger submarines and divers we looked at in those earlier posts.

A whale! It's a whale! I've never seen one before, so I'm quite excited by it - I'm easily excited!

So that called for a new 'family photo' comparison-shot, with the two larger (but smaller of the larger-) submarines also visited before here at Small Scale World. The grey/gold submarine also being a suck-blow type, the bottom one being a baking-soda one - I think; the bottom piece seems wedged-on and I don't want to force it.

In the meantime, and a while ago now; Brian had sent me these to chivy the post along, it's the re-issue for Hawkin's Bazaar (et al) of the old cereal diver, who accompanied the submarine, although as we saw last time they were also sold as stand-alone 'pocket-money' novelties - as were the submarines.

From the neutral language and artwork on the card it looks like they re-issued the Submarine as well?

When I call them suck-and-blow toys, we were either doing it wrong as kids (as I always wondered at the legality of a toy which resulted in regular mouthfuls of bathwater) or they have changed the design slightly, as the instructions seem to suggest they sink themselves and you blow them back to the surface? Maybe we were impatiently accelerating the Dive! Dive! Dive! But mouthfuls of soapy water were a feature of my younger days.

Seen in the links above and here for completion; the previous, and the fact that I'd finally got them out of the attic, meant I took this just for the hell of it. The Tobar is a copy of the old British moulding on the right, as pointed out before - the Hong Kong clone has been updated to a more modern helmet with single-piece window-glass.