P is for Potpourri of Plastic Peeps! Sports & Civilians

Off and running with Chris's donation parcel from late March, and it's the sportsmen and civi's first, with some interesting bits and a couple of all new ones.

 

This is a set I'd always hankered after, not so desperately that I sought it out and bought it, but unless you specialise in Merten as a core section of your collection, there is so much stuff by them, you just grab what you see, when you see it, if it's affordable, but I'd always looked at them in the catalogues and thought "That's a useful set", and here it is courtesy of Mr. Smith!

It's one of two sets in the catalogues, and if you were a wargamer, making an Italian Army, these would slot right in to an alpine unit, with the Esci-Ertl, Atlantic and - if you're lucky - Co-Ma Alpini figures! Also, I don't think there's a comparable set from Preiser, their's are walking with slung rifles I think? Something to check for another day!

 

Note also that an untouched set has the figures in the same configuration as the catalogues, a continuation of the very early issues where they were sold with the runner (incorrectly 'sprue') still attached to their heads.

A couple of the footballers usually associated with Parker/Palitoy, but there is more to it and a longer article is in the long queue, these 'novelty' games tend to generate copies and/or get licenced out to other brands or as cheap generics.

 

The fact that the blue one was in poor condition has allowed me to show some of the components, and you can see how the bent wire runs down the spine and hooks into the thigh, allowing a spring in the body to operate the kicking action when you press the head.

 

Another of the little Spanish terracotta figurines who have been slowly growing as a group, over the lifetime of the Blog, most as gifts from Chris or Peter Evans, or charity-shop purchases, I think we are over the baker's dozen now! I believe this chap is a shepherd?

 

Speaking of shepherds', I suspect this is German, I think I've mentioned before, when we were kids, (1969; so I was only five) we had a motoring holiday of Germany, and one of my abiding memories is of this mountain, possibly on the NATO side of the Erzgebirge, up against the Rhine (?), which was called something like Dwarf Mountain, and had a kind of Greek-columned building at the top (which was buried in low cloud the day we visited), and where A gift shop had this kind of stuff. I'd love to know where it was/what it was really called, if any German readers can recognise the description!

 

10 years later the shops in Bad Tölz were still full of similar stuff, but, while the later stuff was mostly real, wooden Erzgebirge, this is plastic, after the wooden patterns, as were the little chromed-gold dwarfs we bought that day, up the mountain!

A Betterware gift spoon with figural handle, this was actually the second thing ever blogged on the Blog, back in December 2008, but that one was a pinkish-maroon (what fashionista's probably call 'cherry yogurt'!), so a nice colour variation here, and presumably more to find?

 

Assorted sportsmen, I think the riders are Christmas cracker types, they may be from a board game, but I've never found it, while these little toys turn-up in most mixed lots of small scale, and have many colours and quite a few pose variations, while also being quite crude flat/semi-flat sculpts, so one suspects cheap novelties.

The wrestler is probably contemporary/near-contemporary, and is actually a mini action figure (points of articulation), but at this size tends to stay in the collection, as the Galoob Action Fleet types survive! The blue & white footballer is a cake decoration in search of a base (with one of the earlier, better football strips?), and we've seen the athletes before, many to find in a dozen sizes and loads of colours/base types. The fallen figure is Subbuteo I think, one of the oversized players you used for defending goal or taking throw-ins?

The other civilians include a sub-piracy of the Blue Box copy of a British race official, a turquoise lady, probably from a boardgame, a Lledo baker's boy, a dimestore vehicle figure (? I think we may have seen them in other colours, so maybe also a boardgame counter-piece?), Blue Box road worker copied from Dinky and an ex-Britains zoo-keeper sculpt, whom I suspect is from a set of rack-toy firefighters.

 

Thanks again to Chris for all these.