This year they had a themed display on each
shelf, concentrating on construction toys, ancient and modern and I will be looking
at each shelf on a separate post to limit the images to manageable 'lumps'
It's not just Lego that copied (stole, pirated . . . ) the Hestair Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks of Hilary
Page, many other clones have come and gone, some compatible some
[deliberately?] not, while the search for an alternate system also goes-on, K'nex having come closest so far.
The top shelf of this seasons display
contains various other makes, and here we see (from the left) a Minibrixs signal box for O-guage model
railway layouts (11), a farm loader (or 'tele-porter') from Click Brick (6) and a Kreo 'Transformer' (1) and one imagines
there was no more care paid to a Transformers
license as there was to a Lego (or Kiddicraft)
license!
Sta-Lox soft-plastic polyethylene bricks come from the former colonies
(Canada) and we all seem to have had a few kicking-about in the toy zone when
we were kids, although I suspect a fair few of them were actually Hong Kong
sub-copies, or locally produced under license by Merit or Peter Pan or
someone like that? They were meant to represent real house-bricks, they made
better stone forts (as here) and were quite useful, if you wanted something
simple, in red, as that was the extent of their invention!
Ignore the blue thing, that's Lego on the shelf below (next post) and
starting with the tractor (2); we have products from an unknown contract
manufacturer for My Toys/Kandy Toys,
an importer seen here at Small Scale World a few times now, a
mini-jeep/ATV and gun, also from Click
Brick (3), with modern architecture (well, when I say 'modern', I mean a
mid-century/post-war, Bauhaus/post-modern Walter Gropius style of modern!) in
the centre, from Bell (8), Merit (J&L Randall) would inherit the moulds, and there are both
Spanish and Italian copies or licensed-versions of this simple polyethylene,
stacking, infant toy.
Behind it is an Ice Castle from Mega Blocks
(also Canadian - 13), with a pirate ship from K'nex with the new(-'ish) blocks bringing it closer to Lego (12) off to the left, Click Brick's
tele-porter in front. While going right we have a Block Tech (Poundland, The
Works etc...) Rock Drill (4)
with a Wilco (also Block Tech - as contractor) dinosaur in
the background, there's another, baby one on the corner.
We finish with Airfix's Eurofighter
Typhoon (9) and Character Options
Challenger Tank (14) with two from Nano
Blocks - Big Ben and Tower Bridge, a sort of half-scale or
miniaturised Kiddicraft/Lego block
system from Japan (5).
A look back down the shelf for a better
angle on one or two of them, the gun and dinosaur are probably better in this
shot.
Still on display in Fleet library.
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