H is for How They Come In - April I - Chris - Animals and Media Related

I've twined TV/Movie and animals in this post of Chris Smith's April donation to the Blog, and we'll start with the animals (and monsters!) as there are some very interesting items among them . . .

. . . starting with the hard-plastic giraffe at the back, in need of the liquid-poly vet - whom it has since been seen by! The only damage in the consignment, and probably courtesy of Royal Fail! It's cartoony but not a Lik Be (LB) or Colonial sculpt, as far as I know, it's also frangible polystyrene, but both Culpitt and Wilton carried 'styrene versions of the aforementioned animals, so I'm guessing a similar history for this chap - fun cake decoration for younger celebrants?

Two lovely dogs; one Airfix (? See forthcoming post) 'styrene flat, the other a chalky polyethylene sculpt of some quality, but a larger scale than the usual suspects, so probably a dolls-house set? The small deer will also return in a further post.

The kit giraffe is probably from a R&L circus premium, but could be Italian, they had several issuers of such stuff, while the sheep is Precepi/Nativity. The elephant is a US Cracker-Jack premium, I think, over here - Christmas cracker?

Which leaves a lovely owl in soft silicon-rubber and the grey horse; it is a copy of the Britains stage-coach/prairie-wagon horse I think, but scaled down and used with cake-decoration carrousels/roundabouts/fairground gallops.

Ahhhh! "Gygax Monsters"! There will be a whole page on them in the fullness of time, and these are two of several from Chris while Peter Evan's has sent one or two over the years, but I have lots (you need lots as there are many variations!) including the LB 'minis', here we see 'Bulette' on the left and a swamp-gator who Gary Gygax ignored!

For now suffice to say, they aren't as rare as people would have you believe, and they definitely aren't worth the $400 that someone was paying for them a decade or so ago, indeed, as we saw a few years ago, thanks to Brian Berke; you can still find the ex-Holly mouldings in seaside kiosks now, but there have been many iterations!

I hope/believe, these are the sea-animals which accompany the Nabisco take on baking-powder divers, which are to be seen here (toward the end of the article), they aren't the plain colour of my pair of divers though, being all marbled to some extent and there's no obvious hole for baking soda to be packed in, just larger hollows, so maybe they sat at the bottom of the vessel being used, or floated above the bobbing divers?

Assuming I'm right (never assume! Heehee) they are an extraordinary things to find in a box of mixed chuck-outs!

Disney's Pocahontas, Santa' rocking on a double-bass, a Coca-cola polar pilot, Roy 'Chubby' Bear "Yeah, but those fockers was Messerschmitts!" Boom Boom! and a Kinder Gnome make up the characterfull element!

She's not actually a superhero; 'gold lady' is DC's Lois Lane, I think from a fairly recent magazine part-work adult-collectable, we looked at the funny, semi-flat 'bat-bots' here and this silver one is both a new colour and a new pose!

While the otherwise quite typical eraser space-warrior type (yellow rubber) has wrap-around armour in polyethylene which is unusual? The Star Trek Worf is Playmates' take on Micro-Machines I think, while the other figure looks like one of the lesser Turkish or Spanish capsule toys - LZ or Maraja?

leaving this 'till last, it's fun! A Baywatch pick-up truck with muscle-bound hunk driving and puny sidekick in the passenger seat! Non-turning wheels suggest modern cake-decoration, and it must be 1980's/90's now as that craze is well-over, isn’t it, say it is . . . please!

I know! Some people loved it, I couldn't bear it, those fake tits of Pamela's looked like balloons! And how many believable story-lines can you get out of a strip of beach in Southern California? But lovely toy with two figures - cheers Chris!

Indeed; many thanks for all the above, especially the sea-creatures and the rack-toy robot! Full-combat Toy Soldiers next!

Next day - Chris reports it's Burger King 1987, and came with a similar speedboat and a quad-bike, I should have taken notes on base-marks before I sorted them away - similar note on the skateboards in the previous post.