Like a Horseman, but a monkey . . . obviously! And so to London for the Toy fair at Olympia today, but this was already in the queue, and pertains to the previous post.
Picked this oddity up a while ago, recognised the code/marking as standard Lik Be 'Funimal' branding (No.A30 MADE IN HONG KONG in a typewriter style/engineers stamp font), but it was in hard styrene and obviously a tad more colourful than the usual Funimal fare, however I have a big folder with all that stuff in, against the final A-Z post, or an interim 'page', so quickly ID'd it.
Here it is in the Culpitt's 1985 book/catalogue image, you can see it carries a similar code to the Lik Be astronauts previously cropped-out of that page, but that doesn't count for anything, the BV prefix is used for a lot of unrelated products! BV5319 is described as 'Assorted Circus Animals', which at that time it seems were issued as a set of five.
Mine came individually packed in a cellophane envelope, so probably dispensed from a counter-top box with the other four similarly packed, but whether that makes them much older, younger or just a year or two either side of the catalogue is anyone's guess!
You can see the soft 'ethylene ones (blue) are hand-painted with the good-old stab-and-hope style, in two colours (typical for Funimals) while the Culpitt one is stencil-painted in five colours.
In the 'States Wilton included the more common polyethylene one in an expanded line-up of 12 of the Funimals around 1977 (the date of this catalogue image), although interestingly I have that cat/fox . . . foxy-cat (white plastic, top left) somewhere, also in hard polystyrene with the same stencil decoration, so Culpitt's may have issued two smaller groups of 6, only one making it into the book? Or bags of five randomly taken from the twelve?
2 comments:
Your cartoon characters are lovely.
They're a bit of fun, Jan, but it's nice to tie a brand to them!
H
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