L is for Let's Have Some More!

A Bit of a follow-up to the previous posts, but once you've got the Phidal's and a few Kinder or other figures on a given theme, they rapidly get their own 'zone' and become a side-collection, so I guess that's what we're looking at here - the bulking-out of two side collections!

 

Encanto again, from Jakks Pacific, I think we may have seen these in a B&M shelfie post sometime over the last 12/18-months, but clearly I weakened when they reappeared in TKMaxx for a pound-twenty a figure! They look like the stampers (coming to the Blog soon) which are everywhere at the moment, but are just stand-alone figurines with very thick bases, for little fingers to manipulate, and weight against fluffy surfaces so they stand up, I suspect!

While I think these, The Nightmare Before Christmas figures, were from B&M? We've been looking at these on and off for several years now, Jada's line of Nano Metalfigs, with various franchises already seen here, I though what is probably a seasonal-special 'whole' set was worth grabbing at the time.

 

I know I've said it before, but it's worth saying again, or I wouldn't say it! I really love these, not because I used to be a small-scale collector, but because the metallic paint is so . . . . thick, deep, lush? I dunno', it's like you can dive into the finish; you won't understand until you've handled a few, but they are very different to anything else I can think of, and among that rarefied class of hard-metal figure which includes the Monogram WWII/Vietnam sets and the equally uncommon Kenner Star Wars die-casts.

N is for The Nightmare Before Christmas

Mentioned a couple of times in recent weeks this particular Phidal Busy Book is more up our street, being the movie-related set of Tim Burton's mad creations from the film I still haven't seen, but A) keep meaning to and B) feel I have, because of the amount of merchandise and/or clips I've seen over the 32 years, since it hit the theatres!

Cover; this was actually in a supermarket, as part of the Christmas stock/promotion, with the kids' annuals in a card display stand, between isles, Sainsbury's, I think? And must be a new title in the range. Scale/size is a bit meaningless with this one, but they are fun figures nevertheless.

 

The properly bad guys - Oogie Boogie, the rambling bag of bugs! Lock (a poorly disguised Loki doppelgänger), Shock and Barrel (geddit - lock stock & barrel), Oogie's trick-or-treating sidekicks.

 

 

The barely good guys - Zero the dog, Jack Skellington (American spelling!) and his love interest Sally the witch, a creation of Dr. Finkelstein's - another poorly disguised doppelgänger; for Dr. Frankinstien!

 

The rest - the aforementioned and evil, Dr. Finkelstein, a rather dodgy Santa Clause, known to the locals of Halloween Town as 'Sandy Claws' and the two-faced Mayor. I forgot to shoot them from the rear, and that's your Nightmare Before Christmas characters from Phidal!

 

A year ago this wasn't in the Tag list, now it's got three Tags and about five mentions, so there's a definite attempt to re-boost it somewhere, for some [commercial] reason - expect a sequel, a streaming thing or a director's-cut!

E is for Encanto

This is another 'we buy this shit so you don't have to' piece, and I knew straight away what it was, but it was pennies in TKMaxx, so I bought it to prove the point.

 

Like those arch-shaped 'Mini Busy Book' ones a couple of years ago, this 'Tattle Tale' is barely half the contents of the original Busy Book set, but repackaged as a smaller effort, with an even more juvenile 'early reader' board-book. Three of the principal characters and a supporting one.

 

I've tried to find the other figures in similar books, more with the earlier arched ones, and it seems there were probably two tools per original set, and only the one is used on these re-hashes, so you're never going to track down all the figures with these smaller sets, and over time, the other 4/8 items from the original sets will become less common.

W is for World of Horses

I thought it must be about ten years since Phidal first featured here as an unknown, but a quick look at the Tag list reveals it was 2018, so, seven years to the month, in that time I've had cause to use the Tag some 44 times, and they have featured as 'likely'/'possibly' in many donation and show report posts. Over those years, I would say that A) we've managed to track down and cover most of the sets worth commenting on, and a few which aren't!

 

While I think it's also fair to say, that while the odd new set does still come out, they have lost momentum on the Busy Books specifically, and moved the concentrative efforts of their core product to other areas, but I've found a few recently, which we're going to look at today, a couple briefly and one in more depth.

These are pretty much 54mm compatible, and apart from being great for 'farm kids' where it's probably always been a bigger 'hobby' or childhood theme - our farming cousins hardly had a toy soldier between them, but their Britains farm, with a smattering of old hollow-cast and the odd bit of Corgi/Dinky, inhabited a huge wooden farmyard in one of the sheds - they will also prove useful for modellers/figure painters looking for breed-specific mounts.

Going on the accompanying book, those breeds are (clockwise from the top left), I think; Pinto, Shire (white, in the reflection, and possibly the poorest sculpt?), Percheron, Appaloosa, Mustang, Icelandic, Shetland (or Shetland/Icelandic; whoever has the smaller one!), Thoroughbred, Arabian, Friesian? You can see it's one of the newer ten-figure/item sets. They went straight to storage, so we'll look at them again in a future horse post/page I'm sure.

L is for Loose Ends

The last of the Christmas figurals, and it'll be back to more normal output, if equally occasional at the moment, but that's life! A mixed bunch and some of them from last year . . . 

 

Hobbycraft were clearly selling the end of the line we've seen over the last year or two, as they only had a few, back in November, and once they were gone, they weren't replaced, not even with a similar line? I managed to grab this deer family, as one day, a cake-decoration deer page is on the cards; there are loads and loads of them! Poured resin and about 40mm?

 

I also picked up this snowman, which reminded me that while we looked at the line two or three years ago, last year's post went to archive when I ran out of time, inclination or whatever else contributed to quite a lot going off to the long queue. It meant I could get this year's out as last year's is still in his [net] bag, along with the Santa' in a poly' bag.

 

The Mushrooms were from The Works, a bit of fun for a possible future project (fantasy secenry), and this year I saw them or similar assortments in several places including The Range and possibly either B&M or Home Bargains?

Can't remember where I saw this, but I think it might have been the aforementioned Home Bargains, along with The Nightmare Before Christmas, I saw a lot of Grinch 'Merch' as it's called these days - by a dying civilisation which insists on abbreviating everything - JLO, LOL!

 

I mentioned that I thought there might be a sequel to Nightmare in the offing when I started to see that everywhere, back in, sort of, Oct./Nov., but I think with both, it's just the inexorable commercialisation of Christmas, particularly by the toy and home-furnishing industries off the back of Holywood? But it was a very inexpensive white-button walker, which is a slowly-growing side-collection, in main-part thanks to robots and Halloween!

 

I think we did look at the Malteezer deer last year, this year's edibles included this Santa Clause from Marks & Spencer, which was illustrated as being like an Aero inside, but was actually the more solid and disappointing texture of a Wispa - which I've hated from the day they were launched!

I forgot to properly check out the edible cake decorations, this year, but managed to find this in Sainsbury's a day or two before the big day, we looked at all the ranges/brands a year or two ago, but this was a new colourway of one of the Santa's from Cake Decor.

 

While I think this lead flat is similar to the set we looked at a while ago, this one possibly coming from Chris or Adrain last year sometime (2023), and also held over, I brought it forward with the Hobbycraft images! I think a similar sculpt can be seen at the back of the upper set's image in this post, which, it turned-out, are Hafer, but this one has a different base and will be from another set, how many were there!

 

Finally, while the above are mostly in some sort of chronological order of when they acme in or were shot, (or make narrative sense to me!), this was an early purchase which them hung around, unshot, and uneaten until the other night, when I managed both! Hence, the fogging of the chocolate, I think?

A departure for Kinder I think, I don't remember seeing them before, but they may be a year or two old as a concept, the prizes are meant to be tree-hangers, and obviously it's a Christmas-specific thing, being a merry festive snowman!