L is for l'Hommes de Lune

I was going to post these a few weeks ago, but realised I didn't have one of the poses! Bonux washing-powder premium, astronauts, I think [someone said] they are based on someone else's sculpts, but can't seem to find out whose?

The missing chap, I did have him, but with all his thin bits broken or chewed-off! Fortunate happenstance or synergies lead to Moonbase Central posting a picture of a guy wearing something similar the other day and it's obviously meant to be some kind of jet-pack as rendered by space/sci-fi artist Robert 'Bob' McCall - original hanging in the University of Arizona.

As you can see they are biggish at 70-mil with base, but manage to enhance the LB figures out of Hong Kong, having similar, figure-hugging X-craft/Gemini space suits, rather than the chunkier stuff we've since found you actually need to wear; to go into space in!

The other nine poses, a decent number of 'ray-guns' are distributed among them, but there's also a lot equipment being moved about, and one chap has taken his helmet off (or never bothered to put it on!), and all poses were available in black and silver, in what's quite a soft polyethylene.

"What do you mean 'nobody's brought the machine that goes *ping*'? We're surrounded on three sides by brain-sucking alien reavers who eat humans for breakfast and all we've got is a 'good luck' ray-gun made by my six-year-old from a toilet-roll to conform with launch-weight restrictions . . . brilliant!"

Yeah, well, I was so pleased to track him down, I rather over-shot him as a result!

Herding Zombies . . . it turns out they are quite docile after they've had a whole pack of Tunnock's Caramel Wafers each! Zombie figures from the now defunct Box O'Zombies/MyGeekyGoodness (MGG) dot-coms.

Yeah! He got a .gif as well!

That's Bonux astronauts; box ticked!

T is for Two, But We’ve Already Looked at One! Capri Games . . .

It wasn't until I was looking for the folder for the earlier game's images that I [was] remembered I already had an 'Ariel' on the desktop, except, I'd miss-titled a Capri folder . . . doh! My desktop is shocking; it has 34 spaces left of a possible 126, I really must do something about it, there's stuff from Theo, Adrian, Chris and Brain, while Jason sent a load of Highlander stuff ages ago!

At the risk of repeating myself, this year will be a bitty-one and the keel of the good ship Small Scale World won't be even until at least this time next year, and stuff will pile-up, but in the meantime I'll post what I can, and here's that other Ariel Capri Game!

I always sort of knew this existed and found it on feebleBay once or twice, but never got around to purchasing it, however a few months ago I saw one going cheap and popped my cash in the pot to 'tick the box' as far as the collection is concerned and with a pitiful image count on this post, no more than tick a box here!

The reason I believed in its existence before I know of it for sure is because I found the red arm-up guy (top left-hand corner) in the alleyway next to my old house in North Camp, a bit smashed-up. In fact, he looked more like a saluting Nazi from some unknown WHW set, but I realised he must be some kind of sportsman, probably from a board game!

There are a set of hurdles with and without penalty forfeits attached to their cards and a high jump in card, and the mechanism is collecting points by attempting various track & field events, aided or hindered by dice, cards and tables. The 'high-jump' chap (bottom pose) looks like posh-guy from Scooby-doo! That's it; 12 35mm figures of sportsmen in three poses and four colours!

The box also contained a Brucie-bonus, a flat which seems to be from a mine-related or fairground board game? Klondike Pete, golden nugget, haunted mine, ghost train . . . something like that! Also these thick flats need a new name, they aren't strictly flats or semi-flats, nor are they the hollow or smooth-backed relief flats . . . coin flats, fat-flats? Token flats! Whatever; it's another figure on the Blog!

Z is for Zoo Quest

Just a quick box-ticker really - not enough to photograph, not enough to say! I looked at Trek from Spear's Games the other day and a similar set with an animal buying/bagging mechanism rather than the stores-accruing of the former marks the main difference with this set from Ariel Games.

Zoo Quest was a BBC TV series most notable for giving David Attenborough his start in presenting natural history programming, and this licensed tie-in game will date from the same time, between 1954/5-1963 I guess?

The 25mm soft polyethylene explorers are the most useful thing here and the reason it's in the collection, they are a tad larger than the Airfix Tarzan figures and while technically semi-flats, th nature of the pose and the depth of the sculpting means they could paint-up quite well with 25/28mm role-playing figures.

I got to thinking about Ariel's title with this game being TV related as was the Gillette Cup televised by the BBC for many years (cricket game we've seen here passim), and it struck me they might have been named for the aerials (different spelling) down-which TV signals were sent?

It turns out that while there's no evidence for such (they were a division of Philmar Publishing, eventually bought by Gibson's), they did produce a large number of mostly children's television program related card games (snap, happy families etc), featuring both ITV and BBC staples of the late 1950's and the 1960's, so it may be the reason . . . I like the idea it might be!

B is for Bwahaahaahaahaahaahaahaahaa!

 No comment!

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/333954611338?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-134428-41853-0&mkcid=2&itemid=333954611338&targetid=879842586457&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=9046429&poi=&campaignid=9445986154&mkgroupid=95782681917&rlsatarget=aud-381667280803:pla-879842586457&abcId=578896&merchantid=232685721&gclid=Cj0KCQjw16KFBhCgARIsALB0g8JbsOMnDG7zITAAvlwOAYk_tKeSVpFi6Kssd_miDJToN87RcTb5cHQaAu3_EALw_wcB

 and for when the listing has long gone . . . 

 

Madness!

And that's with 5% off . . . Bargain!

T is for ♫♪♫♫ Tank Heavurn for Leettle Girrrls! ♫♪♪♪

Bit of an odyssey on this one, so we'll start with the 2000/2001 Archie McPhee catalogue, sent free when I purchased the YT re-issue Giant knights and Mongols from them . . . twenty years ago (where does it go?); a small, black and white image . . .

. . . but it peaked my interest, even though at the time I was 'small scale' only, clearly harking back to the rubber jigglers of past gum-ball vending machine capsule prizes, while also being scantily-clad 'babes' of some allure, what's not to like!

Fast-forward about twelve years and Brian Carrick put four in a bag of cheepies for me at a PW show - one of the first at the new venue - and I was holding them from the blog thinking there were eight in the set so four still to find, but the other day I saw the same four on evilBay and though "Oh. maybe it was only ever the four?", so shot them to Blog - here above; Draconia and Reptilia!

Here we have Sarapede and Tarantuella, they are all 'Stab & Hope' painted, which only really adds to their retro-charm, and are manufactured in a very soft silicon-rubber, so could be called 'strechies' as well as jigglers!

However I'd then found the catalogue and realised there were six pose and after scanning the catalogue, quickly found one cheap BIN on feeBay and fired-off some of my shekels to receive this a week or so ago! I'm not opening it, as I'll find the two missing ones loose at some point.

Note that it's actually branded to Accoutrements, Archie McPhee is the headquarters with a large store, Accoutrements is the retail branding, rather like our Tobar/Hawkin's Bazaar, but I don't think Accoutrements have a chain of stores like Hawkin's did - until recently!

But I did shoot them in-situ, to finish the article and this is Vampira, the vampish bat-lady, harbinger of Covid!

And possibly my favourite; The Scorpion Queen.

In looking into these, I realised I should have known there were six, not just because the catalogue was in the archive, but because Littleweirdos and Shean's fantasy Soldiers posted them ages ago and I've always followed both blogs, but just as you can't physically own everything, so too your brain doesn't retain everything! So, a shout out to them and I also found the designer of the follow-on product's artwork.

Little Weirdos Blog
Shaun's Fantasy Toy Soldiers Blog
Kurt Hanks, Designer

In a hobby-world where nearly all the product represents male figures, it has to be said that Archie/Accoutrements have flown the flag for women since their inception, with Rosie the Riveter, flying nuns, flick-nuns, grow your own hookers, nuns, tarts and girlfriends (well, maybe not always the high-point of feminism!) found in the catalogue over the years!

They also produced (or commissioned) the above; 70mm red-carpet 'fans', 70mm glow-in-the-dark zombie women and one of the few true action figures in my collection; the Crazy Cat Lady . . . for the six cats of course! And there's a set of B-movie panicking victims, with several females, somewhere, who go well with the zombies!

Zee is for Zylmex is for Motormax is for Redbox!

I can't remember if the takeover of the Zylmex factory and tool-bank came out in the initial rebuttal of the nonsense from TJF and his onanistic monkey-lizard back in 2016, or if it had already come out, but suffice to say the demise of the Z's was good for Tai Sang!

I'm fairly sure this is an Argos code but it could have been Index? Not that it maters particularly; these sets were available elsewhere at the time (early 2000's? I'll probably have the date in the old book manuscript, or the Argos pages to scan sometime), and an outer liner is A) not pretty and B) hard to get a paragraph out of, which I seem to've done . . . phew!

I'm also not sure where I've got the idea (die-cast site somewhere?) but I believe Zyll produced some of these (or the Motormax brand), right at the end, and Redbox took over the stock as well as the tools etc . . . certainly the logo bottom-right would appear to be a generic's 'phantom' sub-brand, bearing no relation to Zee and not much to Redbox, although it is an R, while the only thing tying this to Redbox is a small, white, paper sticker on the back.

Figures were rubbery PVC copies of Matchbox American Infantry; 2-each of five poses, these have a very muted camouflage, others [in the collection] have more obvious contrast between paint and plastic, we may have seen a few here in the past, but I also think a second marque has been associated with them at some point - bought in?

The lorry has hardly changed in 40/50 years, the wheels have had a redesign and the markings/decoration are sharper!

We looked at the various half-tracks once or twice here at Small Scale World (most notably in this overview) with both Zylmex-marked and blanked-off belly-pans. The tanks are for another day, but those of a certain age will remember them butterfly-clipped to a piece of sloping landscape in their window-boxes, I have several AMX30's somewhere, which had obviously gone-cheap at some point! But there are others in a tub with the knock-off mini-mites (Cragstone or Kresege?) and Tomy minis. The helicopter is an improvement on some of the earlier Zee Toys stuff!

These are still out there in various configurations depending on the contract and Redbox are better labelled on this exact set, or were a while ago in TKMaxx. Now; there are too many question marks in this post, but I shot it because I happened to have it in front of me the other day as everything is in a bit of turmoil here at the moment (boiler died yesterday!), and there is one more question mark - I mentioned in the previous post they might be Macau not HK production . . .

There is somewhere, some data tying Tai Sang and Zylmex to die-casting factories, or a factory in Macau, yet you never find that mark on any products by any of the marques (Tai Sang-Blue Box-Redbox or Zee-Zyll-Zylmex), so I'm not sure about any of it; however they (or some of them) may have originated in the Portuguese colony rather than Hong Kong? As all marks are now 'China' and most of the tools still in production; I guess it's a moot point!

MASH is for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital

4077^th is for a lot of fun! If any service-based comedy (and there are lots, it's the perfect set-up for a situation comedy) comes close to Dad's Army in my heart, or pokes the nostalgia-button quite like Mainwaring, Wilson, Pike, Jones & co., it's MASH, and there have been several sets/toys over the years based on the long-running TV series and Movie, this is one of them . . .

. . . the Hong Kong (or Macau? See next post) maker Zee Toys (Zyll, Zylmex)'s sets, nominally 1:87^th, the figures are a reasonable 1:76^th while some of the vehicles scrape in at under 1:100^th! This set contains the latrine vignette and some of the more common Zylmex vehicles, and was found and saved for me by Peter Bergner many years ago, in fact; the year I started the Blog!

We saw the Jeep recently when I was putting them on the Airfix page, but here's another! The truck is a sub-scale thing, but which goes quite well - size-wise - with the Indiana Jones German lorry from Galoob! It's red-crosses are looking a bit tired! The figures have been home-painted and consist of two guys emptying 'thunder-boxes' and two guys running, who double-up as a stretcher-bearer in one of the other sets.

Peter actually found the missing, folding-propeller unit a while later and brought it to the last show I did before the move here, sadly it never got married to the helicopter and they went into storage separately, and while I know where they are, this has already gone away again and they'll have to wait for a future Chinook round-up - they weren't in service for Korea, but we'll ignore that!

The little Bell 47 / UH-13h Sioux is a delight, one of the first convertions I ever attempted (with some success) was a pair of - rather crude - outboard stretcher-beds on the Airfix Westland Scout which I made from stretched-runner and loo-paper when I was about eleven-years old! This, too, is a bit small, but it does the job; so long as you make the "chugga-chugga" noise as you swing it into the valley and line-it up with the little hillock!

The latrine!

I don't recall now if it was a joke in the series (or the movie) but picture the scene, the camera reversing in front of them in a long panning shot, Radar and one of the officers are walking down from the main camp, deep in chat about that episode's plot-thread; they arrive at the enlisted-men's door and in goes Radar; the officer turns to his own door, mid-sentence . . . cut to aerial shot of interior; the conversation continuing from where they left off! Maybe there's also a chalk-line on the floor?

The doors are cut to hinge-open but it's an old, un-played-with toy and I didn't want to force them. The 'wriggly-tin' roof would make a useful scratch-building piece in any fixed-position/defense-work modelling, or a parasol on an Ork war-machine!

The pre-issue, publicity material all show the half-track in place of the latrine - more usually available as a smaller blister-carded set (as seen on the PSR page) - but it was dropped for something more connected with the tie-in branding by the time the set hit the retailers, note also: the 'group photo' shot is different between mock-up and finished artwork; often the way - catalogues and packaging are only ever a guide!

T is for Two - Tarzan

King of the Jungle, Lord of the Apes, Whisper of the Animals, Prince of the leopard-print underwear!

Half this has been in the queue for a couple of years, indeed I think I lost the folder a couple of times, and it nearly got written-up over a year ago but things shifted - as they do, while the others were shot the other day, but together they make a nice 'T is for . . . ', and quite different treatments of the subject between the two!

Sent to the Blog by Brian Berke - as I said - ages ago (possibly after we'd looked at another Tarzan or jungley thing here?) and totally new to me; large PVC single-moulding figurines in the style of Bullyland or Papo, Plastoy or Schleich, but actually clearly marked-up to Disjorsa.

Google has so far failed to find any other products, or a history of the company, but the Tarzan set had a third pose; flexing arms in a half squat like a bodybuilder, which appears to be less common. The use of the J in the company title/brand suggests Portuguese or Spanish as a starting point and while that could point to Central/South America, most offers are on European sales sites?

About 100/110mm, and some of the sales descriptions I found mention Jonny Weissmuller as the target of reverence in the sculpting, being not familiar with such things I can only presume the likeness to be such . . . ! That turned into a pompous sentence rather quickly!

Perhaps I should continue the blog in the habit of an Edwardian gentleman? "And forsooth, the real surprise of this fine morn's investigations is the incredible likeness of these novelty trinkets originating from the colonies of the Far Orient to the prodigious output of the company owned by the widely regarded William Britain Esquire!"

A safer size for PW's fans (other branches of the hobby do exist), is Kinder's little Tarzan pop-together's, variation provided by (yeah! Pompous-head on today!) different coloured bases in red, green or brown.

Every Tarzan deserves a Jane and Kinder's gets one! She has no weapon to speak of, but that parrot looks pretty sharp! She has a more obvious variation, the green runner was also issued in Yellow, I may have one somewhere (the Kinder box is still in the depths of the garage, but may be found in the next few weeks?) but fear it's an incomplete green one!

Both are of eight pieces, and the Kinder numbering suggests they were paired in the order-forms with other models; the Zorro set were of the same source with similar bases and are also of a TV/Movie theme?

Cheers again to Brain B for the Disjorsa examples.

News, Views etc . . . Herald Toys & Models

Two messages from Barney this weekend, both went to junk-mail for some reason, but are still only a day or two old;

"Yesterday [Thursday 14th May] the site was down for most of the day due to a technical issue (the storage was full). This has now been fixed by osCommerce who provide support for the site. Going forward a whole system upgrade may be required as the php version is antiquated and in need of an overhaul. Once done it should improve your user experience and security of the site."

and;

"We have just added to the website the last of our Trojan Farm Series animals, a standing Bull (copy of a Timpo hollow-cast model) from the Bradford collection of early plastic farm animals. Identified by their slightly odd pinprick marks, these Trojan farm models are extremely hard to find and our understanding of this range is very much in its infancy. Most were copies of Timpo, Tim-Mee and other makers."

So pop-over and see what's still available! 

F is for Follow Up - Soviet-era Napoleonic Russian Cavalry

Moskovskiy zavod plastmassovykh igrushek  (МЗПИ  - MZPI)