B is for Bah! Humbug!

 

 

Here's to those that wish us well,

All the rest can go to Hell.

Here's to those that wish us luck,
All the rest can go to phuq.

 

I snuck both the last two posts of 2023 in, with seconds to go! Fireworks are muted this year, but we beat the previous third-best year by eleven posts, and got the first hundred-post month, so that'll do me!

Q is for Question Time - Unknown Plastic Truck

 Can anyone help ID this to a maker;

It's unmarked, about 1:50 or 1:64th, and I'm hoping someone may know it local to their territory - US, Canada, Australia . . . to work out who may have carried it or imported it here, or indeed, where it came from?

E is for Essem!

I knew I knew! It's Essem, by Morestone! That coach which had the little plastic cowboys we keep seeing here, with the 'I know but I don't know' caveats, anyway, I had a folder with this in, and I've found a link to tell you everything else, as I don't have the stagecoach yet!

 

Gets them in the bloody Tag-list at last! That link - Nicholas Martin Diecast;

https://www.diecastvintagetoys.co.uk/essem-stage-coach

 

And while the brown plastic would appear to be rarer (the link poster has a darker brown one), the red-plastic one would appear to be even less common? They are a type of phenolic or early styrene, a dense and heavy plastic.

F is for Follow-up - Novelty Animals

I obviously lost this in the pile, or they would have been in Augusts post on the subject, and as most are duplicates, they are here now purely as a fillip to that post;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/08/n-is-for-novelty-animals.html

Some of these may even be in that post, but I don't think so? Points to note: 'tabby' version of the common cats, a tiger, new cow, pigs in two colours and a penguin! Also, a new chick with a beret, which makes him an anthropomorph! That's it!

M is for Multicoloured Medieval Men

Having briefly seen some of the Hong Kong pirates the other day, we might as well look at the original donors, the Timpo medieval knights, and because Michael Maughan has done all the work, and the 4th (or 5th?) impression of his work is on Amazon for not very much money, I will keep text to the minimum, and/or chatty!

 

These first two shots are from my small sample and were shot in the session back in 2013, and have nearly been Blogged numerous times, but one thing or another stopped me, usually that I'd forgotten what the numbers were for, and scrolled on for something easier, but (I've redone them) they are the poses - 6 different torsos and three different legs!

 

Some variations I have, I don't think any of them are going to excite anybody, and indeed, I think they are mostly the standard variations? Size of chest-eagle is an obvious one, shades of yellow and red varying, etc . . . and note; the shields are over-moulded, not the plug-ins of the copies, so shield variations can excite to!

The rest of the shots are from the archive, and depict various other versions of most of them, scanned from old photographs, and not mine. I think there are some rarer variants here, which might well excite those prone to such excitement.

I'm sitting here, full of my 3rd Roast Dinner (4th full meal) off the Christmas bird, which is now finished, waiting for the fireworks (happyface), not having to worry about the cats (sadface), and seeing how much I can post before midnight! I'll wish you all a happy . . . ? Better New Year, this run of shit-show years has to end sometime, or is this our new normal as we decline into extinction?

F is for Follow-Up - Hong Kong Circus

Having finally tracked-down and Blogged the plate-spinning Gorilla, earlier in the year, my Christmas-present from Adrian was a loose lot of the Marty/M-Toy/Maysun (May Moon) circus animals, with duplicates of most of the performing animals, including a second Gorilla and the, then, still sought Poodle with tyre!

 

Seems a bit cruel really, but that's why animals have been all but phased-out of most circuses, certainly those in developed, enlightened countries/regions. I thought it was missing from the forehead, but it's perched on the nose, and it's not a small tyre, it's a whole wheel/tyre assembly of wheelbarrow, or bigger variety! Below are the rest of Adrian's with one or two I had here/screen-caps, for a visual check-list.

With three of the previously seen animals.

More paint on the plate!

Commoner Crescent piracies.

Ex-Crescent people.

The main sample are in storage, except the female animal-trainer who is here on the carded set, I am still seeking the rearing Giraffe, a Britains baby-giraffe conversion, which should be the last to find, but new sculpts do keep turning-up!?? Thanks, Adrian!

M is for More on Minikins

Adding to the small scale railway stuff we looked at earlier in the month, here's a couple of dodgy pages from a Corr's catalogue, of the larger scale stuff, most of which is listed in O'Brian, but not all of them illustrated, although he has more, and better pictures, but ti all adds to the whole.

The war elephant is - I think - the important visual-addition to the hobby?

 

While I don't think this adds anything to the hobby's knowledge-base, but I might as well get it up here while I'm going through all this stuff! Dates and times for this is all, probably, 1950's? An eclectic collection of stuff, in a variety of scales, and a lot of it seemingly aimed at the gift market or museum shops?

T is for Tail Ends

Well, more card Buses! You may notice that these are from P-Z, and think that's it, but you'd be wrong, I forgot to check N and O, I think, so there may be one or two lurking there, while a slew of them are in the queue from across the pond, although some have travelled there from here! And I've only been showing you those which fit A4 storage slip-cases, so there's still a box of bigger stuff to come at some point in the future!

Another giveaway from a Bus company, this time Strathclyde's Buses, and printed by Gordon Petrie of Stonehaven, a simple design, but with nice floor-pan reinforcing, and a complicated fold under the front windscreen!

 

I also have a full-sized (well, original?) sticker for the driver-operator's window, so I could start a fake Strathclyde Buses service . . .all I need to do is buy a bus, paint it to match the defunct company's buses, make sure it has a 'slot' and drive around collecting fares until I've got enough to drive-off into the sunset - flawless plan!

 

 

The other card of this two card model is behind, and there's no clue as to who supplied these to Richard Kohnstam (RiKo), who were importers/wholesalers to the hobby for many years, but it will be some small garage operation. It's complicated/detailed enough to be a Micromodels reprint?

Another chocolate freebie, from Suchard / Milka in Switzerland, this time, where it seems to have contained a stack of milk-chocolate 'tiles'? Simple construction, like most of the 'container' buses we've seen.

The windows are unfortunately filled with postcard images of the Swiss alps, which rather detracts from the usefullness of the otherwise well renderd and colourful card bus model!

A couple more corporate freebies, these for Tayside, and no other details visible, so might be in-house or printed by a third party, nice colour-scheme, for a regional bus/coach firm, I thought, all ruined by the Tories of course!

 

Thornton's toffee box! Nice inserts if you can be faffed with the folding, which I couldn't for the photo-shoot, and yes, I've since cut my nails! the wheels stick down, which must have made stacking them a bit of a nightmare? But they may have folded/packed them, per-order, behind the counter?

A very complicated one from Tramalan, with a decorate-it-yourself motif going-on there! Hardly surprising it's a tram, given the publisher's name, and a Blackpool one with two pantograph gantries and something else delicate looking - I'm not a tram expert!

 

 

As mentioned above, some of the card buses are too-big, or too-built to be in the folders, so I suspect the bus for this little diorama is in the big box. But we have small scale card-flat figures, which is the best yet! And coming at us from West Midlands Travel.

Tom Smith, cracker toy, Whimsey from Wade and Thunderbird figure purveyors to the masses for many years, also did indoor fireworks, which came in a box, that looks like a bus, bargain!

I love indoor fireworks, apart from the fact they leave the house stinking like a war-zone and your saliva tasting like rendered-down sugar-candy, and the best one is the volcano, which churns-out a grey rubber-worm, feet-long, if it works right!

Welcome Break! When we were kids, the few and far between Motorway Service stations were an excitement akin to the Starship Enterprise, now they are mostly run-down and/or hideously expensive places to stop at, for a snooze or to empty your bladder. And only the overly paid, or overly stupid actually purchase anything there!

 

It is probably the second-biggest single lie in Britain after the efficacy of TV detector vans, that somehow these sites, which were suually built on compulsorily-purchased green-belt/agricultural land and get their deliveries straight off the road-network should somehow be the most expensive petrol and retail outlets in the land? Yet, no one with any power or influence has ever questioned this obvious anomaly, of capitalist greed, writ large!

 

Go phuq yourselves Welcome Break, go phuq yourselves with your phuqing over-priced, ersatz happy-meal, from your ersatz phuqing 'pantry'; Julie? Schmoolie! In a green bus - which I have to admit - does have a nicely printed underside, da' phuq anyway, greedy bastards!

J is for John Piper

A strange one this, for a short while in the late 1970's and early 1980's, this firm - John Piper - seemed to flourish, with smart, well illustrated adverts across the modelling press, railway, naval and military, I don't know if the aircraft modellers were similarly enticed?

Yet, the paucity of stuff they seem to have actually left behind, the lack of familiarity people have with their products compared with, say, Scale Link or [Françoise] Verlinden, suggests they didn't actually ship much product for the cost of all that glossy advertising?

And one has to assume there was a major investment by someone, a backer or the eponymous Mr. Piper himself? The trouble is, even the model railroad hobby, much bigger than vintage toy soldier collecting, can only support so many small, 'garage' businesses, with those that start to struggle in the regular downturns, selling to one of the slightly bigger concerns, so that they might ride-it-out with an increased inventory, while the small guy escapes, hopefully with a small profit, or breaking-even, or at least still with his shirt?

Courtesy of Jon Attwood

(I love the Lettraset font!)

I may have a few of the figures in the unsorted/unknown section of the whitemetal tub in storage, but don't recognise any of the above, off-hand, while I lusted after the AFV's, as they would have gone with the Roco and Roscopf stuff, Dad's instructors had given me in Neuhausen! The 'Grey Goose' apparently turns-up occasionally, usually for a lot of money! The choices of odd scales can't have helped with the military sales?

 

I have a feeling John Piper over-extended with the launch and marketing, found the markets weren't that big and folded with the sort of debts that require the assets being weighed-in for scrap? Does anybody have any solid info' on what happened to them, or their tools, how much business they did, or what their history was? Is there anything in G2 or On Parade in the back-catalogue of Military Modelling? For now at least, box ticked.

F is for Follow-up's - Various Recent Things

Running over a few additional details, info or images of a few bits we've seen here in the last few weeks, no particular order or sense to it, just things I fancied doing extra/more/follow-up shots of!

The sports pencil top Chris sent, alongside one I had here of a boxer, we both think we've seen a football one, and it would be interesting to find out what others there were, as a set they probably went to at lest four sculpts?

 

The Hong Kong-marked KT figures I have here, about half of them went to storage a while ago, including the pen-stand thing which started the whole odyssey, so one day we'll look at them all together, as there are probably pencil-sharper and stand-alone versions of all of them, along with other novelties for some of them . . . I haven't found a sand-timer yet, but I'd happily put a tenner on one being found.

 

And the pencil sharpener version of the guardsman with its replacement figure. Luckily the old one just popped-off, but I had to do some careful knife-cleaning of one of the foot-studs on the replacement, who had a lump of his old stand still attached as that bubbly-glue patch stuff!

 

Also, while the damaged figure popped-off, he did leave one locating-stud rattling around inside, which I caught by well-glueing the hole with liquid-poly, and shaking it around, upside-down, until it sopped rattling, meaning it had got stuck to the glue . . . something to confuse future archaeologists!

 

That green Tatra figure from Chris, next to the two most common colours, although, these days, you see more and more of the red and blue too, but you can see just how green he is, under the gold-residue?

 

Following on from something in the comments, these are the athletes which have come-in over the last 18-months or so, we looked at them originally as mostly small scale here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-post.html

And revisited them more recently here, to look at the larger scale;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-is-for-athletes-vintage-plastic.html

so with this sort of quantity being added every year or so, when we return to them properly we should have a better idea about which sets/types had which poses, and are therefore, in the two or three seperate 'families' of piracy?

Remember I said I had another Morph, well here's Chris's donation, standing on himself! Too cool for art school! And the brown colour which Morph was made in (his later mate Chas was a neutral beige-gray), is the same brown everyone's Plasticine went after it had all been mixed together in the toy-box!

Plasticine Flash Mob!

 

Oh yes, TJF had such fun correcting my 'brain freeze' when I said they were from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, when they were from some Disney knock-off, but they were also from a different-again board game, and having found the four copies a while ago, I now have a slightly damaged Lost in Space original, also Remco, in yellow, with the missing figure, and 3 more board-game pieces to find we will return to these!

 

Left to right;

 

4x Homecast resin/3D-printed (?) copies of Remco - Lost in Space figures

1x Remco - Lost in Space original

1x Remco - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea