T is for Toy Fair 2019 Reports - HGL - Rack Toys and Counter Displays

As I'm well behind with the Toy Fair '19 stuff, and as it's Rack Toy Month, it seems to make sense to combine the one with the other by clearing one of the UK's bigger Rack Toy, novelty and pocket-money plaything importers from the 'Toy Fair '19' sub-queue!

POS (point of sale) novelties included wind-up robots (becoming another perennial favourite here at Small Scale World) in red and black (left hand bin) although there were several color-way/design combinations on the two base-plastic colours, for a four or six 'set-count'; two or three black and the same - red?

The right hand bin is larger scale - several times life-size - insects, which may be of interest to insect collectors, but they may already have found them, January was a while ago now!

Smaller blister sets and larger, bagged sets with header-cards containing all the common tropes; insects, reptiles, farm & zoo animals and dinosaurs, there's also a single - Halloween-ready - bat (sans blister), and a slight departure on the normal fare; a set of flying birds, or birds in flight!

Some close-ups; I didn't think to get the birds properly and the bat was a balancing afterthought crop! The birrds are a departure and you can see the mallard clearly, I think/suspect the others may include an eagle, vulture and owl? But the orange one may be another duck-like bird and you'd half-expect a sea-gull?

I think a few of the dinosaurs have come-in over time, in mixed lots, and while these are technically generics, with the animal collectors often having the China-maker's name, it's nice to be able to round a few up next time I sort the 'unsorted' and scribble an HGL moniker on their bag!

Larger scale farm and zoo sets include counter dispensers for the biggest and tubs for medium-sized animals (54/60mm compatible stuff in the main), while the little zipper-satchels with their animal-pining, vac-formed trays bear a striking resemblance to the small-scale horse sets from Brayer!

When the biggest animals come-in they tend to go back to charity, but I always photograph them for the archive, and shots like this might help ascribe them all one day. The bigger insects we saw at the top also have a counter-top dispenser, huge snakes were a regular in the toy-box when we were kids, often an 'attendance prize' when leaving someone else's birthday party - and a pack of cetaceans, which brings us to . . .

. . . the oceans! Sharks! It's all sharks for 2019 . . . I think there's a dolphin in there somewhere, but basically sharks are it! They all seem to be the same line but in a variety of packaging options. Then there's the cartoon one with a pink-monkeys foot in its mouth!

Pan-out and it's still 'all sharks' on the left, while on the right we get down to the serious animal for the serious young animal collector to seriously collect - My mother volunteered for many years at the Bernardo's charity shop in town and reports that there were several small boys who would come round buying the dinosaurs and nothing but. And they knew all their proper names, no "kerthunkersaurus" from them!

I think we've seen most of them before, but to note are the larger squidgy ones and the small rack-toy bag of older 1970/80's sculpts still going strong.

Again, these were all in last year's shots I think and I know I highlighted the Magasaurs branding across the lines/range then.

The smaller bag and the tubs have the older sculpting while the larer bag looks to have all new sculpts with the more on-trend decoration taken from the more colourful lizards and birds alive today, rather than the dowdy twin-tone or monochrome, often muddy decoration of the past.

Note: HGL has totally replaced H. Grossman formally (corporate usage), but Megasaurs.com has not replaced Ozbozz, just sits alongside it!