L is for Late Show Report - Vehicular Elements!

Onwards and upwards and we get to transports of delight! One way or another, I came back from Whitton with a lot of the smaller novelty stuff, in part thanks to the donations from Trevor, Peter and Brian C, whose bags all had a few, so let me stop waffling and we'll have a look . . . 

These are lovely, well, I mean you can see with your own eyes, they are shite, but, they are new to me, new to the collection and new to the oeuvre of mini/micro-mini rack-toy shite! They were in Trevor's bag, and are so clean they might be quite recent, but could equally be old stock, looked-after? Quite wacky and two have a sort of 1970's US muscle-car lines to them, with the type on the right looking like some semi-demented cartoon armoured car, I know nothing else, but love 'em!

 

I think I had one of these scout cars from Barney a few years ago as an 'I've never seen it before' type thing, since when, several have turned-up and with these two I have a troop now, with some spare parts! What I love about them and the similar jeeps is that the little drivers are in scale with Airfix, even if the AFV's aren't, so they could be used in 'old school' wargaming! The Jeep is a modern rack-toy thing!

 

You've seen this stuff coming in, time and time again, if you've followed the Blog for any length of time, and, in ones and twos like this, the master samples continue to grow to workable sizes. We've looked at the semi-flats (front pair) before, both as French premiums with a variety of marks, and as these Hong Kong staples of Christmas crackers, but the Chinese only copied one of the original sculpts.

 

I think the pop-together green car (top right) is an early Kinder (there were similar military vehicles), the silver one may be new (cereal premium?), while the other green one goes with a growing handful of 'chunky' ones, we saw a while back in a mini-season of integral-moulded-wheels 'minis'. The red car in the centre is from the early-learning collection we've seen before, and the solid blue sports-car is another one joining mates in the stash!

The other two sports cars, with pierced bodywork are again somewhere in the pile as a larger sample with more colours, and have something (poor quality) in common with the first image above, while the one with separate wheels is a HK copy of an old Jean/Maurba/Siku type thing from the 1950's/early 1960's, and belongs to the genre we haven't looked at here, yet, but will - those with running wheels. There's many more of them, and several of the samples have outgrown their bags and moved up to takeaway tubs!

 

Again, we have looked at these in an overview, but there's plenty more to tell and plenty more have come-in since. Today we have a banana-plane (bottom right), two which are supposed to be SE5's I think (Biggles was still very big when I was a kid, I read them all in the school library, old hardbacks with glorious, bright, coloured lithographed covers and thick pages which were almost card!), and a small pale blue . . . Albatross? Some iterations of these have the supposed make on the underside, but I didn't think to look with these four, too much else going on!

 

A mix here of rack-toy tat and cracker/gum-ball tat, but again, all grist to the mill, all adding to existing samples, with a possible game-playing piece bottom right, and a possible new sculpt in the little primrose-yellow cracker-toy?

 

Two generations of cracker motorcyclist in the red pair, the third mine-wagon to come it, it must be from a railway scenery kit? One is complete with a cross-bar/brace, the other two like this missing the delicate piece, but when three come-in over 40-odd years, they must be from something relatively common?

 

The large motorcycle is another early Airfix one, and has lost it's handlebar tips, but the other marbled-yellowish one I found was the one we looked at with a crumbly area in the centre of the engine, so they must have had a duff batch with that colour?

 

The final piece looks familiar, but I can't place it, I think it may be the nose wheel from a possibly die-cast mini-plane, but that's pure guesswork, and it will join the spare wheel stock in the hope of being reunited with something, one day!

 

Gisby kindly ID'd the free sample of a Warlord Games 'Cruel Seas' British MTB from the fuzzy image in the Intro-post the other day, which he thinks was given away with Wargames Illustrated magazine, and to go with it are various other vessels.

 

The four silver ones are common, and we've looked at them before, the left-hand submarine is very useful, as it's the last one I needed lose, from the carded set of 1960's hard 'styrene naval vessels we have seen here. The other sub' is a 'Made In England' beach or bath toy which I think is new to me/the collection. 

 

The little white one is from the set of mini 'tree' crackers we have seen before, while the deck at the front is a useful spare from the various sets of Hong Kong copies of such Western makes as INGAP, and I may already have a bereft hull for it, somewhere.

Finally, a novelty white-button railway set, we've looked at a few in one or two posts already, and there is a bunch in the medium-to-long queue! I think the B&TAR is a madeupname railway company! I also think it's quite recent, if not still out there somewhere, it's the kind of thing you see in Poundland?

 

Many thanks again to Adrian Little, Barney Brown, Brian Carrick, Chris Smith, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul Stadinger, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin, for contributions to this year's plunder-pile.