B&M is for Animal Shelfies

I first saw these about three years ago and meant to go back and get them last year, but for whatever reason I didn't get round to it and thought I'd pop-over before Christmas and see if the same store (B&M) still had them, intending get some, but on the day funds were tight.

I checked anyway and they did still have a bunch, so I went back the other day to get them, realised I was already picking them up as loose samples, so despite having budgeted for them, decided to just shelfie them - which I could have done three weeks ago, or three years ago!

These are branded to B&M themselves, for foreign readers; they are a large 'warehouse' type discount store, but not a pound-shop (these were a few-quid each), nor an Aldi/Lidl, neither are they on the same scale as a Walmart, so 'mid-range' warehouse if such a thing exists, imagine if Woolworth's had moved to 'out-of-town' to strip-malls instead of going bust on the high-street, although they also do some furnishings and dry/canned foods.

Anyway the point I'm getting at is that the contents may well be available locally elsewhere in the world, both under different local or phantom brand-marks and/or with different configurations/content counts or assortments, being generics 'off the self' and possibly picked from a larger inventory?

The other irony (after my three-year faffing about and then not actually buying them!) is that there's a Henbrandt-plus article in the queue looking at about six or seven sets of these 'mini-mals', to which I will add these, or the loose ones which are starting to come in now, in mixed lots and Charity-shop bags.

Each set consists of four-each of 12 different animals (I'm sure there was a dinosaur tub three years ago, but they didn't have one on either visit this time), but if you recall a set of poultry which came in loose a while back (yep, charity shop I think!); the suspicion is that there are more sculpts back at the Chinese factory than the 12 present here? But at least you can ID the first 12 from these shelfies . . . and note - another 'lassie'!

·         Sheepdog

·         Cat

·         Cockrel

·         Hen

·         Duck

·         Goose

·         Cow (b&w)

·         Bull (brown)

·         Sheep

·         Ram

·         Goat

·         Piggy-wig

The poultry are a super-scale compared to the others, the cat is also giant, while the cattle are subscale, the only difference between the duck and the goose sculpts would appear to be the length of the neck; body size and plumage sculpting being the same!

These are the ones that I know I picked up some of, loose, a few weeks ago, not all of them, but the zebra for certain, the moose and possibly the tiger, while the hippo' has been kicking-around for a few years I think, we may have looked at it with a foursome (?) of others last time we looked at a bunch of these small vinyl's?

·         Lion

·         Tiger

·         Cheetah

·         Elephant

·         Hippopotamus

·         Rhinoceros

·         Moose

·         Giraffe

·         Brown Bear

·         Camel

·         Gorilla

·         Zebra

Scale is all over the place here too, but the differences are not so marked - from a six-year-old's play-value point-of-view! Both the tiger and the zebra are among the better-decorated from these and the many different other sets out there.