C is for Chris's Autumn Parcel - Animals

Some lovely stuff among the animals this time and I've thrown plants and scenery into the mix too! And with ten images to get through, we'd better make a start, in the order I shot them . . . flats first;

The trees seem to go together but the one on the left is common in several sets and we looked at a variation of it here, slightly better sculpted than the above, but the one to it's right here (Scot's Pine?) seems unique to the pair's set.

The seal may well go with the silver rearing horse seen in the ceremonial/historical post, they both have a flared body-part 'base' rather than a flat sheet base, which would make the previous suggestion of a circus set more likely, although this one must be from a circus set, he's balancing a ball on his nose!

A slightly frowning cat observes several toy dogs! Yeah, that was an attempt at a joke; poodles . . . never got the poodle thing! Anyway, a matching pair of cracker toy charms, another in bright yellow who looks like he's got a damaged charm-loop, but it's just a bit of runner, while the painted one is Corgi I think.

The cat is aping older chalkwear stuff, and may be a direct copy, although the chalkwear type wear on his ears is just coincidental, but certainly helps with the over-all effect!

Modern China goose and a really nice pencil-top of some tropical, North American (?) or imaginary species, sandwich a new duck which is a copy of that duck with the solid, conical base which keeps turning up, this one has a thinner, diamond base and might be French.

Lovin' these . . . a few years ago, you may remember I bought a huge lot of capsule and cracker toys for next to no money in one of those not-often-in-a-lifetime deals and Blogged them in thematic posts over a whole December, well, it is my intention in a year or two, once I'm settled and everything is sorted, to re-run those posts in the same order/same days, but greatly expanded to reflect everything which has come in since and everything which has been hiding in storage, that Frog post will now get these three, any others we've looked at and a fair few more besides!

The one in the middle here is one of those jumpers but without innards (or a lump of bitumen!), whether he lost them or was retailed as a cheapie, without them I can't guess, while the one on the left is from one of many frog versions of tiddlywinks, and I think the one on the right is a finger puppet type, his hole is too big for a pencil?

Again a nice top up of cracker novelties (red giraffe, camel, elephants, ostrich) here, a breakfast-cereal premium (bottom right, bison), goofy (or Goofy?) walker, Preiser (?) deer and a novelty panda who's seen better days! The bear is probably newish, but a nice sculpt, and there's a bag of similar items waiting for the snake! I think the rabbit is from a board-game; he keeps turning-up in different colours and materials. Which leaves 'Kong' . . .

. . . who has two sprung mechanisms, one of which doesn't return and I can't work out how to get into him to replace what is probably one of those small dentist's brace rubber-bands? He's unmarked and too big for a Kinder egg, or even most similar products, but he's not the one I'm also on the lookout for from the board games with the mountain and the running players, so anyone know where he's from or who he's from?

Meanwhile the ostrich has the same framed-base/base-mark as my favourite Christmas cracker guardsmen, so while we may never know the Hong Kong maker, at least we can lump two products together in their otherwise anonymous oeuvre!

Best thing in the box . . . alongside the Aluminium artillery! An Ichthyosaur/Dolphin hybrid with a pencil-sharpener up his poop-shoot! It just doesn't get any better; A Swoppet knight? Mounted? Pink caparison? Fuck-that, I've got a googlie-eyed dolphin who sharpens pencils via his bum!

The shark's quite nice too, he's a classic 'gape mouth' counter-top, pick-box toy from anytime between 1968 and yesterday, but with some age! AND, it's quite a good representation of  . . . a mackerel shark? One of them anyway! A Shortfin Mako?

Vac-formed accessories, I imagine probably space-fillers from a dinosaur and/or cave-men play-set tub or toob, with the upper two the same moulding and the lower two more unique (to the group), one clearly painted-up as a volcano, the other more caldera-like - it's what an Atoll looks like if you take the water away - which has been given a cursory slash of lava in red-orange/oxide paint!

Speaking of Dinosaurs, there were three in the parcel, one modern mini, one modernish gape-mouthed Chinasaur and a old rubber job from the 1970's done as a key-ring.

Key rings are a funy one, this is so rusty (and looped)  it's obviously genuine, but these days a lot of stuff, both animals and other figures (Phiadal for instance) and toy soldiers (including crappy rack-toy lumps) are all being given key-rings (with threaded eyes screwed into the tops) by Etsy or evilBay sellers, while the companies (Schleich, Papo, Polytoy et al.) are putting key-rings on their smaller sculpts, so it's getting hard to tell if a modern-looking key-ring started life as a key-ring or not!

Last but by no means least, and we've visited insects several times here at Small Scale World, we have two Christmas cracker/gum ball spider rings and a similar bat, with four flies which seem to be from three sources (1 and 3 from the left are the same, 2 and 4 have differences);"Ooh, flies" go the top three, "Oh shit" go the bottom four!

All good stuff and as always - my profound gratitude to Chris, for saving all this stuff and sending it here, for me to share with the rest of you.

A lot of this stuff gets chucked in the bin, not just by eBayers or car-booters', but some of our fellow collectors, who will just gash it, so when someone chucks a tropical-bird pencil-top in a lot of mixed toy soldiers to bulk-out the lot, and it wends it's way to here, it's been saved, whether it's your 'shtick' or not, whether or not it's mine even, so I am always very grateful to the likes of Chris or Peter for sending these things to me.