T is for They Keep Turning-up For Duty!

Those who have followed the blog since the start will know I like any excuse to return to LB's space sets and derivatives, and while LB is still contentious as a title, time will tell, and those still using LP will have to come-round in the end.

Funniest was someone still using IDL till well after last May (2020) who then quietly switched to LP and within two months was lecturing Erwin on Faceplant as to why it was LP as if he hadn't spent the 20-odd years since LP was coined, continuing with IDL!

He's trying to hang it on the Lik Be Plastics' hook, but it's Lik Be Plastics and Metal, so would be - under any rule of nomenclature - LPM, LBPM, LP&M or even LBP&M, it's none of them it's LB for Lik Be. Only for Erwin - a few months later - to lecture someone else on LP as if he'd known it all along! They are awful, that PSTSM-lot are awful!

Anyhoos, four lots of LB recruits have come in the last 12-or-so months . . .

. . . including a new Moon Exploration bagged set (from the Antipodes - I think he's still listing one), four more chromium-finished chaps and two pop-ups . . . we've seen the erasers already but they can be the fourth! Bag is LB marked and - along with the four loose figures - contents all have the usual LB base-mark, the others are derivative/pirates.

I'm not opening these yet, but a few shots to show that you get all eight astronauts in plain white and all six robots in 'atomic-green', all in soft polyethylene and all carrying the full base mark, but of interest is that the robots have all have their conversion to hangers for key-chains and the like, as have the pink ones in the blister-carded set seen here previously, so the key-ring iteration (see Wotan Bill's posts on Moonbase) was definitely an interim phase.

The four loose ones were in a mixed lot with some other stuff which I was more interested in (even though I couldn't now tell you what that was/they were as it's all been sorted away in the chaos here at the moment), the lot only added one figure-pose  to the chrome sample (upper row), but I stripped the paint off the other three to add to my 'plastic variants' sample, and the lower row is that sample, now.

Because these are coated with a powder (probably aluminium or a zink-aluminium alloy?), when you strip them (which takes about four seconds on immersion in concentrated ammonia - TFR [Traffic Film Remover] or Silver-dip), they leave the varnish/glue coating with which they were covered before coating; it  doesn't show so much on the dark figures but which is obvious on the paler ones.

I know people bang-on about 'vacuum-coating' but that's a different process found on more expensive toys from big-brands and which peels in sharp-flakes, this is more akin to flocking, but with a substrate which is naturally polished (as granules or molecules) and settles in a shiny coat, to the human-eye. I've said before - you can get a similar product ready-mixed in cans as an aerosol.

Upper row are the new additions, lower row are some of the variants of the same pose. Except, the new ones are actually replacing my older samples as they were worn, through handling, while the incomers were pretty mint, so it was all change of the old guard! Although the full sample is larger as I've kept a few each of the chromium ones and the brushed-aluminium-looking ones over the years.

If you think I'm cheating by counting the erasers as the fourth addition when they've already been seen here before, you can count the middle guy here as the fourth-addition instead, but he was actually in the 'Unknown Space Men and Humanoid-Aliens' box, where he's been for years! He's missing his base-section.

The other two, a paler pink - came in with a mixed lot of identically-mounted rubber-jigglers (also marked HF) and a couple of Imperial Toys-marked similar rubber stuff, all-else of which we'll look at another day. Clearly they are 'after' the LB sculpts, both robots and spacemen, but how many were so copied I don't know. And you can see that without finding the more-obvious robot, the astronaut would have languished in the unknown's box for a while longer!

All three of these are hollowed, relief-sculpted semi-flats in polyethylene, and I doubt the HF is for Hing Fat . . . wacky novelties? Not really them; they have nailed their colours to a different mast, and anyway, I suspect these pre-exist Hing Fat's dates by a decade at least, however I don't have another candidate yet?

19th June 2021 - Correction! The other - darker pink - one had only been in the unknown box since December (possibly why I didn't remember having him!) and had come from Chris Smith as my mind was on Mum's illness over Christmas, so apologies to Chris, they all came in quite recently!