The Farm Friends trope was a sort of under-branding carried by quite a few sets, some generics, or supplied and otherwise branded to other firms, but this set is fully marked to Lik Be (LB) and is the first of two we're looking at for now (I might dig out all my evilBay/Worthpoint shots later!), and having been in Picasa since '21, is well overdue.
The full set, the Farmhouse is actually a money-box/bank, with the smaller pieces stuffed inside, along with a blow-moulded grain-silo which also has bits in. The artwork suggests the traffic-light sticker, placed here, on the roof, should be engine 'detailing' on the tractor!
The artwork listing is also not quite complient with the contents, a 'pony' is actually, clearly a donkey, no matter how cartoonish, a pink and white farm is also hinted at, and the farm-girl has been replaced with a farm boy! There's two dogs and an extra chicken, too.
The other dog - if we assume the referred-to one is the sheepdog - is this small black puppy, and the boy is pretty dwarfed by both of them! The boy and girl are in the style of, and may be by the same sculptor as the Native American Indian kids, seen before here at
Small Scale World.
The smaller animals, the problem with researching these is that as well as at least three sets of knock-offs (nominally, at the moment;
Betta Toys,
Colonial and
Holly), some of these are not marked or numbered in sequence with the A-codes, while the odd piece has a B-code, so I'm rather keeping my powder dry on that score, to which end we've seen the rooster on his log/stump a couple of times without me letting-on his
LB connection!
The larger animals, all 'funimals', with the pig being one of the commoner finds, and the cow being among several versions, clones, and a reversed-sculpt, in several sizes. A cat as big as a sheepdog, why not?
The money-box farm-house, a sort of Dutch-American design, with a simple key to open/close the flap, also equipped with a carry handle, it's not bad for a bit of Hong Kong tat, and would have made a poorer kid happy, even under the tree at Christmas!
The tractor has a driver who is channelling the
Fisher-Price 'Little People', who were themselves mirroring the earlier wooden infant toys, like our racing-car driver (seen here passim), the whole design, scale-reduced, is taken from
Fisher-Price, a rare instance of plagiarism from
LB, who usually designed their own stuff?
The grain silo; made of two blow-moulds which just sleeve together, the silo-body being decorated with relief sculpts of corn-cobs, a deer and something in a nest which may be a catdog or a dogcat, it's not clear, and it might be a pig!
The farm-fencing in hidden in the silo, and with only four pieces, not much cop! Having been sticking these in the 'unknown' fence section for years before I knew they were
Lik Be, I have quite a few of them somewhere, and one day we may have a photo-session of a proper set-up with all the
LB farm - there's another set of chickens and a pair of kittens on the yellow plastic, and more animals, including some realistic sculpts.
The much-missed and not-yet replaced Boysie-boy helped me investigate tractors!
And Godzilla monsters!
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