T is for The Last of the Balls!

For now! Somewhere I have a tub of conventional Bouncy-, Super-, rubber-, Jet-balls, which include a marked Wham-O original, so they will need a box tick, one day, but for now, as a prop to the solid inclusion-balls, here are a few other novelty balls out there now, or recently.

There is a useful thread on the STS animal-collectors forum, which adds a distinctly European flavour to the stuff posted here in the last few days, and both more brands, and a couple of originators, vis-à-vis sculpts, or even product-mouldings;

 

https://sts-forum.forumieren.de/t25502-does-anyone-collect-animal-bouncy-balls?highlight=balls

 

You will probably need to sign-up, but it's well worth it. As an addendum to what's been said/shown there, the above, from a recent Bullyland catalogue shows, not only a range of teeny-tiny animals, but some of them in key-ring balls! I suspect the balls might be liquid filled, with the vignette free-floating?

 

As these babes are! Bought in the small-chain Bargain Buys, a few years ago now (2021), and they are more squishy than bouncy, filled with an inert liquid filling (probably a mix of glycerine, water and a small amount of bleach - to prevent mould/fogging), along with the figure and a pinch of glitter.

 

Something in it, has, nevertheless, reacted with one of the two purple misses, to cover her in a calcium-like deposit? Note also, the arse-injected ball-bearings, utilised to keep their heads up, in a liquid of similar density/specific gravity!

 

I'm not sure if these are liquid-filled, or solids, and the shading on the two at the back (green and orange) would suggest the latter, but I have a feeling that might be part of a bicoloured case, with free-floating contents? Find Hope are probably an Ali Baba or Amazon type phantom brand (image downloaded/obtained in 2005); there's nothing else on the Internet about them!

 

Back to Ravensden for an quick overview of the other stuff out there, and we've seen similar stuff in Show Reports from Deluxebase, Funrise, HGL, House of Marbles, HTI, Huggables, Kandytoys, Keycraft, Kidzone, Playwrite, PMS, Tobar and similar, and if we haven't, it's because they are still in the queue!

 

Ooshies, cushies, squishies, squeezies, executive stress-relief balls, the solid inclusion balls we've been looking at here, recently, funny face balls, odd-bouncing egg-balls, liquid-filled (the eyes are particularly disturbing!) and 'tactile' balls are all out there, I don't collect them, it's the inclusion-balls which brought the subject of novelty balls to the blog!

 

Which brings us to the end of this box-ticking exercise, but I think it's going to lead into another mini-season of Capsule Toys, as it's a few years since we did an overview of the non-Kinder stuff, with help from Brian B, and there's a load more in the queue now, including more images from New York.

 

And, yes, I know, I should be finishing the HO railway figure overview, from two years (three Christmases) ago, and which also has stuff from Brian, Jon Attwood and Chris in it, about ten folders, sat there waiting, and which should make about 12-posts, and an intro-page, and I know I should be doing, getting, finishing, finding . . . the reason you don't get endless eBay scrapings here, like you do at Bushy's, is because when I say there's a thousand posts in the queue, there's a thousand posts in the queue, or, at least, a thousand folders!

 

Take that image above, for instance, downloaded in 2005? I didn't have a computer in 2005! But I did have a dongle (524MB's!), I downloaded stuff to, on/from other peoples computers, so I may have found that image, browsing the coin-operated Internet terminals at Heathrow or Gatwick (one pound for five-minutes if I recall correctly?), while waiting for a client's delayed flight, or someone like John Begg or Paul Morehead might have found it, and emailed it to me, because I was known for the small-scale stuff?

 

We'll get there in the end! Afterbirth eggs next! No, seriously! But, machine-gun follow-up, first!

M is for More Balls - Bouncy Balls!

A bit of an image dump today, as we roll-up, on the balls! The first tranche are quite low-res, but illustrate a few points about how this stuff reaches the stores, while the others just show what's out there, often in the few remaining, smaller, independent Toy Shops, often in smarter towns (Farnham!) or the up-market or 'nice'  areas of larger conurbations. These are also exactly the kind of novelty you'll find in Gift Shops and Garden Centres.

 

I can't remember the company's name, but this was an online, trade catalogue for one of the Chinese factories, I think they might have been called Superball, rather unimaginatively, but here we have Wild Animals on the left, Farm/Domestic on the right.

 

Guinea Pigs & Otters!

 

Panda's and Dinosaurs, and, not those carried by Keycraft Global.

 

On the left Fishes, with a few cetaceans and penguins mixed in, on the right the set which Henbrandt obviously carried all those years ago, with plain, 'slush' and iceberg balls, and a crab?

 

While these last two are larger mixes, with fish predominating in the first set, and turtles/crabs (bottom feaders, shore/beach dwellers?) the second, but with cetaceans, sharks, fish and the odd polar animal mixed in. The point being that you (Henbrandt, Keycraft, Playwrite, Ravensden . . . whoever) go to the Chinese manufacture, and get a tailored selection, which suits the needs of your perceived customer base, budget or forecast trends.

 

The Playwrite (WH Corneilius - WHC/Success) catalogue from a similar time (2006), showing that they were carrying animal faces and insects, in addition to the more obvious stuff, as seen above. This, and the next two images, should enlarge properly.

 

Ravensden catalogue from the same era (2010's/20-teens), also has a full range of subjects, including some familiar looking ones, either from the recent, previous posts, or from the trade images above. And between them all, there must be a couple-of-hundred of these incredibly small sculpts, most of which are quite well done, and nicely decorated, down to species/subspecies identification, in some cases.

It's worth noting most of the above are either clear/tinted-transparent balls, or the bi-coloured, half-opaque ones, there are few of the background discs which were a feature of most of the Henbrandt imports. There are a few more in the last post of this series.

L is for Last Ball

There are some follow-up or related posts, but this is the last of the samples of my figural inclusion-balls, with a summing up shot, comparing those we've seen over the last few days, and a non-figural 'also-ran'.

 

There were soldier balls!, At about 15/16mm, they were a tad small for compatibility with other popular scales (except 15mm war games stuff), but, being baseless would be really useful for filling open-topped vehicles, which are always short on space, due to overscale slab-sides reducing scale 'space'.

 

I don't know how many poses there were, as I found the last few, but I would imagine with three here, at least four would be a starter, probably eight or ten! And they are late-1980's US/NATO type,s in the then still newish, kevlar 'Fritz' helmets.

 

Using the left-hand of the 'mirror' as a key - on the left we have, at the top, the Keycraft Global dinosaur egg, with a plain red opaque background half, and the same issuers semi-transparent green ball. In the middle, a pack-ice/slush inclusion scenic Polar Animal ball, the footballer ball, with a half football as the other half of the ball and a full iceberg Polar ball on the right. While the lower pair are a skydiver ball with multicoloured chunks, and the soldier ball with camouflaged chunks. All branded to Hembrandt.

 

The FA ball (link in earlier post) was larger, and included a larger figure, a previously seen snowman Santa (with icing pick), had a clear ball with glitter included, while Keycraft were offering butterflies last year at the Spring Fair (I didn't attend this year, but may try the Autumn show), and wild animal balls, alongside the dinosaur eggs back in 2020.

 

While this non-figural, franchise-licensed, movie tie-in, came in with a job-lot from a charity shop (I think? Or one of Chris's parcels?), and you can see it's beginning to delaminate along the plain of the card disc, which would have caused it to fall in two if the previous owner continued to use it as a bouncy-ball! 

 

It looks to be a two-phase pour, like the dinosaurs, or FA ball, while most of the others would have required three phases to suspend the figures above the other inclusions/scenic discs.

A is for Animal Balls!

No, not a study of gynaecological gonads, so you can fuck-off, you weirdo! But rather, a continuation of the overview of inclusion toy bouncy-balls, through the imports of Henbrandt and their Harlequin lines. The guys who started it, as I found them first, and actually two lots, the Polar Animals, whose tub I kept, to keep them all in, and a set of cetaceans, which, with other issuers/carriers can be intermixed, either with each other, or with other sea-life, sharks or more conventional fishes.

 

There are three types of these, and, after the card disc type and PVC landscape type, represent three other types, of four really, being plain, large iceberg (upper-left), pack-ice-slush (lower-right), iceberg with snow (below) and half-and-half clear and opaque, with the opaque half providing the backdrop, which we have seen already, with dinosaurs.

 

Airfix Zoo size! But only if they are all juveniles! So small, so easily lost, and with probably 90% of them either incinerated or in landfill already, it's lucky I've got some to show, although they are still available, from Chinese wholesalers and importers like Ravensden.

 

Snow over iceberg, two seals, and unfortunately, the method of construction, or properties of the materials means that while I could extract the tiny animals, or figures, the other inclusions were fully melded with the clear ball material, and broke-up with it, instead of coming out whole.

 

Although described as PVC in the Tags (the animals and figures are) the balls are made of something else, like polybutadiene, or polyvinyl acetate (PVA (like white glue/woodworkers glue)) adulterated with borax, (sodium borate), or a silicon/cornstarch mix, and even when formed in separate layers, they become one entity, which I had to scalpel to pieces, to extract the inclusions of more interest!

 

Underside of one of the icebergs.

 

My full sample, less the cetaceans, a range of sea lions, seals and a walrus, with penguins and a polar bear, most of them not longer than the width of a thumbnail, yet really quite well-decorated. They would have been an absolute in our Christmas stockings as kids, but seem to be a late-1980's-onwards thing, unknown to the parents or kids of the 1960/70's?

 

Another sizer, 'ball scale', the penguin's maybe 10mm?

 

Tub sticker!

P is for Pint-sized Players

The more interesting of the inclusion-ball figures, being near HO-gauge compatible, and I managed to find quite a few, liberating most of them, keeping a sample in his ball, and not the first time we've seen them, the British Football Association (FA) having commissioned a larger one, which we looked at years ago!

 

I found nine, each in the same strip, but it was one tub, and I would guess that over time the factory may have produced other batches in other colours? Nine is an odd number for a set of anything, so the suspicion is I may have missed one, or even three? Check-out the teeny balls!

 

Obviously with the sizer being one of Airfix's smaller figures, at around 18mm, these footballers are a bit small, but as a background on a model railway layout, a bunch of them playing a game behind the marshalling yards would still look grand! Although Preiser do full teams!

 

Backgrounds have little relationship to the individual figure in the ball, and are cut-card discs with library photos of actual teams/players, among which, the Dutch national team (I think?) seems to dominate!

 

Variation of the first shot, no balls!

 

Here you can see how the magnifying effect of the ball makes the figure appear larger than he actually is, by some degree. Note also how the still-included 15-shirt has a red numeral, rather than the black numbers on the two I've removed from their balls . . . Ouch!

S is for Smallest of the Small!

Well, you may have thought we'd got as small as it comes when Brian B sent us that mixed lot of space/sci-fi kit figures', from New York, a few of years ago, but I think we're going an increment smaller now, with the smallest of the small, here branded to Henbrandt's Harlequin Brand, although these are available elsewhere, and in other branding, we saw the more recent Keycraft Global iteration of these inclusion balls, a while back too.

 

The first few posts of this new series will be looking at Henbrandt, simply because I bought an initial sample, over a few years (1997/8-2005/6'ish) from the same party shop in North Camp, long gone now, called The Balloon Shop, if memory serves (I think it's a Kebab place now), they also carried the last version, smooth-based iteration of the Lik Be (always, and still LB!) 54/60mm spacemen.

 

They let me have the tub, when I bought all the remaining arctic animals, so I keep all the 'inclusion balls' in it! As well as the Arctic animals, there were soldiers, footballers, and the smallest of the small, hobby skydivers, practising formations over micro-scenes!

 

As you can see, from the Airfix ceremonial sizer, they are about 3.5 or 4mm, no more! With the magnifying effect of the clear PVC ball, enlarging them to 5 or 6mm to the eye! The scenery, looking more like a 3D map, is made from PVC, as are the diminutive little figures, and I only found them in red and blue jump-suits.

 

Where/when I accidentally, or deliberately bought duplicates, I would dig them out with some scalpel-surgery, and apart from this set, most just have a card disc, or an opaque/solid-coloured 'other half' of the ball, as a curtain-backdrop, while a few have further 'scenic' inclusions. The parachutists are set a couple of millimetres above the disc, to further enhance the 3D impression.

 

I produced this little 'heads and tails' sketch (R = red, B = blue) of the four arrangements I found, at the time (2000's), for the archive, while the shots above were taken in 2021, when they turned-up during all the moving/sorting, which means the Keycraft Dinosaurs jumped the queue, but then, there's always order in chaos, if you follow quantum science!

M is for Musings on Mini Mecha's

One of the problems with researching or collecting 'Kinder' (inverted commas used for a reason), is that, firstly they have been mythologised, especially by the more fastidious German collectors, to the point it's not even clear if they were the first company to the genre?

 

William Salice, who along with Michele Ferrero has been credited with 'inventing' the eggs, stated before his death that he was merely the "material executor" - 'exploitation' being an acceptable way for companies to find a way around intellectual property rights, on existing designs, but more especially, on existing ideas.

 

Secondly, they carried a lot of stuff which was either pre-existing as mini-novelties (like the Mattel 'Zowees', from Hot Wheels, which had been issued in 1972 (the first Kinder Surprise eggs were '74), and already carried as a Shell Petroleum premium/giveaway), or which was, on the little accompanying paper sheets, branded to someone else, often someone (like Marajà) who had their own capsule-eggs at some point.

 

The subject of today's post is a perfect case in point, as they are considered Kinder by those overly-intense collectors, yet are usually accompanied by Menotti Giocatolli papers, and still seem to be out there somewhere. So I'm going to try and put them in a sort of order-of-evolution, without the narrative having much weight!

 

Possibly the first iteration, maker/issuer unknown, but many of these humanoid figurals were issued back in the 1970's and early-mid 1980's, these were probably branded to Menotti Giocatolli, at the time of issue, if only because of what follows.

 

First they were robotised!

 

Then Centaur'ed

 

Definitely Menotti Giocatolli, someone has given them robotic torsos, a robot horse body, and angelic, mechanical wings, which one suspects are death dealing, they would have been in my toy universe, the alternative would have been too 'girly'!

 

Still with Menotti Giocatolli, and someone has said "Lets give the robot horses, robot horse-heads with a saddle for a full robot, who can dismount and act independently of the horse" . . . "Make it so", said the design department!

 

And it is in that iteration that they seem most numerous (these may not be Menotti Giocatolli, nor, necessarily, Kinder?), with at least four sculpts of horse-body, horse-head, mini-robot and robot weapon, which, while usually issued in an 'egg specific' configuration, can get mixed up, in a sample of the size seen here.

 

A couple which have (who have?) come-in over the last couple of years, both 'believed to be' Kinder, by me, but with no empirical evidence, they are another of the many Kinder (or similar) which have been rather distributed to the four corners of the stash, by dint of their bittiness, and the lack of serious sorting over the last few years.

 

But it'll give me an excuse to return to them, when they are all in one place, for a box-ticker on poses/colours, and hopefully, I have a blue robot to replace the incorrect red one, in the spares/bits bags?

 

Where Kinder are definitely involved in the evolution, is in these cartoony Wild West, who follow the same basic format (cartoon horse, element of 'swoppet' or plug-in, mini-rider) who are getting very brittle now, which suggest further, that Res Plastic (RP, not 'LP', nor LB!) were involved in the production, as a lot of their stuff suffers from the same brittleness now.

 

Note the 'Pharaoh-head' from the previous collage is on a green-bot's horse, with another horse waiting a rider, it'll be fun getting all the bits bags together and sorting out a better sample!

 

Two other Menotti Giocatolli designs, which have been credited to - and may well have been carried by - Kinder, the upper following the designs of the fantasy muscle-men and monsters we saw here, and the lower R2-DBot looking like the Bluebird Toys Manta'bots!

 

Another Internet image here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-is-for-audit-of-alien-astrofarers.html

G is for Gashapon - Kaiyodo / Capsule Q - Shogun Palaces

So . . . to the first of the sets, and we're looking at one of the Kaiyodo sets, further brand-marked to a Capsule Q, who I suspect (from their ubiquity with the Kaiyodo gashapon - same word singular and plural, it's not an exact translation, but neither is it a true transliteration of what in spoken Japanese is more of an onomatopoeia, sounding like the handle being pulled and the pod dropping), are a facilitator of the gashapon lines or range/department, specifically, just as Kinder use other operators/subsidiaries.

 

The machine they came from!

 

'Blind bag' capsules, all the same green 'propylene or dense 'ethylene polymer.

 

Opening to reveal three parts, beautifully finished and fettled, in small sealed bags, some gashapon have bags within bags, and one might complain that a lot of 'single-use' plastic is involved with these, but firstly, none of them come with runners or partial connectors as Kinder's often used to, and some of the Turkish budget rivals still do, so we might assume that such material's being recycled in the factories, and recycling, generally, in Japan, is ten times more efficient than in the leafy environs of Hart District Council, or the teeming metropolis of Rushmore!

 

Each of five designs come in either a realistic, weathered effect, or gold, something we saw with the Fujimi and Imai kits from the 1960/70's, so I'm guessing there may be gold, or gold-plated models in one of the Japanese museums? Models are PVC, base and sign are probably polystyrene.

 

Paperwork! You can see that without the wherewithal to name them, mine are the middle one from the upper row, and fourth from the left in the lower row.