L is for Lots of London Loot - Sandown February - Space & Pop Culture

So, I would seem to be catching up with the stuff that's come in over the last ten months or so, and the Sandown Park show, just gone, produced quite a collection of bits and bobs across scales, types and genres for the stash, this post is what I'd normally call the Space and TV, but they weren't TV first, being corporate mascot and comic characters!

 

I have quite a few Bibendums, and we have seen him here before, but this is far more animated than the usual standing types. Quite large and a modern PVC-substitute, I'm sure it's a pretty contemporary promotional piece?

 

Slightly futuristic lines to these dime-store pieces, the car and caravan being more conventional, and marked ACME, one of the trading names of Thomas Toys in the US, I think the truck is unmarked, but I'm sure it'll be in Bill Hanlon's book? Looks like a simplified copy of Archer's 'Future Cars' sculpt?

 

Adrian had saved these two Cherilea / Hilco's for me, the standing guy has a damaged weapon, but they both have their correct helmets and put my squad, much enhanced with superglue up to about ten, with most complete, but all short on helmets!

 

Bully Lucky Luke figures, the eponymous hero, his horse Jolly Jumper and his dog, Ratanplan, these are soft PVC and scale well with the Comansi/bubble-gum premium ones seen here before.

 

The Dalton Brothers, from the left; Averell, Jack, William and Joe, also Lucky Luke characters, these are in a hard, possibly phenolic plastic, or early 'styrene, from JIM in France, and are in a larger scale.

 

Brabo bendy toy! Larger again, and manufactured in that slightly sweaty PVC, some Hong Kong makers used/favoured at times, but only to a slight shininess, not the full-on weeping stickiness of some old toys from the colony!

 

Mixed, larger-scale space figures with two of the Marx metallic blue ones, a Tudor Rose (marked) licensed copy/mould swap of Premier's pulp spaceman waving pistol and a - probably - 1970's PVC gum-ball, capsule-machine robot.

 

Three of the LB (for Lik Be) copies, I couldn't remember which ones I already had, so just grabbed all three against the possibility I might still need some poses, which may be among this trio, and because paint was quite good, except the bases!

 

We've seen them before, and now attributed them to two names, Toyway and the original GLJ, with packaging, so I thought we should see them from the back! I got excited as I thought I'd 'found' a fourth pose, but we've actually seen them all before!

 

These have been a steady stream-in, over the last few years, Italy's sub-scale copies, titled Space Legion (Legione Epaziale), from little pocket-money cards, again copied, but from Archer as well as the Premier biggies. I like the marbling, it gives each figure a certain character or uniqueness!

 

These are the Giant sub-copies I called 'Copy 2' here, and while the most common of the four types so far found, this particular batch is a late-production run, with a lot of heat-shrinkage dwarfism! They are also, mostly, in a darker gunmetal than the usual samples? You can spot the three more common silvery ones among them, and they are guarding two valuable dome-helmets (Archer / Glenco and Britains?) for the spares box!

L is for Lots of London Loot - Sandown Park, November 2024

Not much in this one, but I think we've seen some on combined posts over Christmas and the new year, some has gone in the long queue, as it was manufactured in the country of Trump's puppet-master, and we don't Blog them at the moment . . .

 

. . . and some more of the items in this folder were 'shot at' the show, rather than purchases, so I'll do them as separate posts, but there are a few bits of interest, so let's see some of what we got back in November;

A lovely Codeg (Cownan-de Groot) earth-mover, or wheeled shovel, it's marked-up to them, but would have been bought in from someone like Tudor Rose, Kleeware, Rafael Lipkin or another of the early users of polystyrene. The design is similar to one I have by 'believed to be' Manurba, and I've just picked-up a military one from Noreda, so a future comparison of plastic heavy-plant beckons from the archives! It's quite small, a nice OO-gauge railway-compatible piece

Seen before, and mentioned twice, I said last time we looked at these (https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/12/very-much-follow-up-to-this-old-post.html) I thought it had joined the stash, but obviously that was the Cheerio one! This has now joined the stash, so it is - following the language in the previous post - the six-and-a-half'th, with the KUM being the half!

 

A lovely flocked Timpo bison, given the passage of time, and the lack of packaging, we won't know if it was flocked for Timpo or by Wend-Al or someone for zoo gift-shops, and we probably never will!

 

These were fun, and odd, they would seem to be knock-off's of Tom & Jerry, the 'Tom' being a pink blow-mould, the 'Jerry's being solids, one with a bum-spike, one without (there's a clearly undamaged join-line), all three polyethylene, and my guess is they came, out of Hong Kong (or Japan?), with some larger novelty, possibly a tinplate or 'styrene vehicle, where they had different positions, or functions/jobs?

 

A vintage die-cast Midgetoy half-track, it makes the same mistake of one or two toy half-tracks, in depicting the M16 GMC Quad .50-cal, with the drop-down sides and cut-outs for the gun traverse, but without the gun. It does - as a/the toy - tow a small semi-fictional gun, which I think I have somewhere, but in the darker green!

 

I will thank Adrian again, as I suspect some of the above came from him, and if it didn't, other stuff at the show did. In fact, the helicopter and shovel both came from him!

KUM is for Rotor Ship!

Very much a follow-up to this old post;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2013/11/this-article-has-been-long-time-in.html

. . . and it's been ready to go for a while, but I hadn't got round to it, until I mentioned it in the previous post and thought, "Yep, nice bit of Dime Store tat for Christmas!".

So first-up are the two from storage, which I managed to dig out of the Garage and shoot in the autumn before all the heartache with Katie-cat and Mum, after which I sort of lost interest for a bit, the military one has lost two blades, but still looks the part and has the RAF roundel/National marking missing from my other khaki example. While the blue/white combo' is the one in Fairylite marked packaging.

 

All four 'on the tarmac', except it's now-five-and-a-half, as we shall see in a minute, no, it might be six-and-a-half, because I think I ended-up with the ACME one, but it went straight to storage.

 

I re-shot the Injection Moulders' (IM) Rota Ship's box again, it had a good outing last time, but what the hell! I love how the end folds down into a launching garage, which has all the graphics of a 1950's amusement at Coney Island!

 

And this is the rather tatty Fairylite box

 

But this is new, joining the fleet in February '21, according to the photo's! This is the Cheerio (UK) packaging of the same machine (all marked - REGD DES Nº  844987) from Thomas/ACME, and it goes one better than Injection Moulder's box-end, the whole box (less the bottom panel!) is an aircraft hangar!

 

It's more simply marked ACME HELICOPTER, suggesting it came via the Canadian parent of Cheerio, via Thomas/ACME themselves. The other two shots are from the Intermaweb-thingy, and show a really nice colour combination in grey/red and a lovely marbled-heliotrope one, rather ruined by the extremities, in a red which is from a different part of the colour-wheel and clashes!

 

Quick one, it can't have escaped your notice that after 15-years of rubbing along happily, someone has decided to competitive-blog against me? I haven't the faintest idea why, but he's been doing it for over a year, and he did stop responding to eMails a few years ago, his mucker didn't, but he did, and now his mucker seems to have joined-in anyway?

 

Anyway, I like to Blog my collection, and increasingly I have the archive to hand, or, at least about 14 meters of it (A4), there's a similar amount in the storage unit, and if I wholesale scanned that, the tag-list would take half-an-hour to scroll at full speed!

Now, in blogging, my collection or archive, along with submissions, I will use the occasional eBay or other image, to enhance a post, like this one, 90+% mine, but if I started using the stuff I've kept off the Internet, wholesale, as they do, we'd be here 'till 2525! And, apart from submissions, that's all they've got? eBay, Worthpoint, Scalemates and Google?

 

If they really think that it's a good idea, to start a war, now? I'm up for it, I'll start digging out all the stuff I tend to leave to them, or in the past have sent to them? Think about it. What is it about Christmas that brings out the worst in some people?

While this, this is the KUM! And it's the dog's bollocks! It's a W. Germany knock-off, of the Thomas/ACME gear-ratcheted helicopter with a truncated tail, and enlarged crew-compartment for the fitting of a pencil-sharpener! How cool is that? Too cool for cyclical flight-training school, that's how!

 

They might be planeings, but they're not helicopterings, are they! The shaving-compartment, which was missing off the one we saw earlier today, although that had the pencil-feed from the back. KUM have produced a wide range of novelty pencil-sharpeners, and could be worth a side-collection on their own. And this collage was made in April 2022, coincidence happens!

 

I loved it so much I shot it thrice! This is the 'half' referred-to above! Here posed with a combination of Atlantic Italian Air Force and Preiser Luftwaffe accessories! So there you go, yet more on the Thomas-ACME-IM-Fairylite-Cheerio-KUM et al (don't forget the French and Scandinavian versions!) helicopter!

T is for Two - Scarlet Space Fleet!

These two came flying-in from the US-of-A a week or so ago. I think I did add an X-100 about a year and a half ago, possibly a blue or silver (more likely) one, which I vaguely remember putting with the others and sending-off to storage, but I think if you're going to have a Pyro one, it needs to be red!

 

It has suffered a dink to the rear fin, which has been smoothed-off by a previous owner, but is otherwise a clean one with all wheels and a clear Pyro mark under the left wing, which is in exactly the same place as the Kleeware/Tudor Rose 'Made In England' one we looked at the other day, confirming (to me, as I've not compared these before now) that it was a removable drum in the tool, which I have suggested in the past.

This is a Thomas Toy 'ACME' futuristic Airport Limousine, which has most of the future bits firmly anchored in the 1950's, as each decade's sci-fi tends to sit within the meilleur of its own time, Star Wars managing to be an exception, keeping a similar look throughout, which Star Trek didn't quite manage, think of the 1980's uniforms of the early movies!
 

Duty pilots switch at launch-bay Red 1, while service droids get busy with maintenance and pre-flight checks!

T is for ACME, IM, PP et al...

This article has been a long time in the making, and wouldn't be as full as it is without the help of two other collectors, both of whom I bow to as possessing superior knowledge to me in these matters. This is in every sense of a word off-abused; Iconic, both as an example of early plastic and as an instantly recognisable toy. The real purpose of this article is to cover the various makes, as while it may be instantly recognisable, if it's loose you may not know who made it - and that won't be much easier at the end of the post!

The reason I consider it to be such an iconic early plastic toy is that it was produced, licensed and copied by so many companies or as 'brands' and it showed how a simple mechanism in a plastic toy, if robust enough, could produce the same level of 'playability' as a much more complicated (and expensive to produce) metal clockwork or friction-motors in the previous staple - tin-plate toys.

The thanks go to Bill Hanlon and Adrian Little, who have both helped with images and information.

Bill's Website is here;        American Dimestore

Adrian's is here;                       Mercator Trading

So the first incarnation seems to be the last photographs to join this article - taken the other week. Designed by Islyn Thomas, originally for The Acme Plastics Manufacturing Company of New York in 1945, it looks very modern, lacking a rear rotor would cramp it's style in the air somewhat, but 'junior' wouldn't have known that!

It is so modern in fact, it seems to represent a shape that wouldn't be built for some years, being given a 'nose' that was lacking in the Sikorsky R4 Hoverfly, the only volume production airframe at the time, but then it was sold as a Bell Helicopter - none of the early models from that company looking anything like the toy, however, there would have been some drawing-board designs that could have led to this shape being adopted, and - due to the war - there were some close connections between toy makers and defence companies.

The box is square using the longest dimension, and the simple mechanism meant you could pull it along by its little string and the rotors would revolve. Faster you pulled - the more action you generated...bargain!

The fogging on the wheels would suggest a material other that styrene, possibly a cellulose-based polymer. Although Cellulose-acetate was used on early ACME and Thomas toys, I've never seen one of these helicopters in that material, they all being in polystyrene.

By 1947, it would seem that the ACME contract with Thomas Manufacturing Corp. was coming to an end (or at least the order for helicopters had been filled?) and on Bill's website we see a generic letter offering the helicopter to all-comers. Above - courtesy of Bill; is a collage of various boxes, by various manufacturers including a French company who obviously took Islyn up on his offer. The box is now based on the maximum breadth dimension.

Because Thomas had a UK arm near Swansea in Wales, the UK versions were probably sourced from there rather than the 'States, however the mould-sharing regimen of the time, US import/export [protectionism] tax implications and order-filling may have led to all sorts of relationships between companies, boxes and contents!

However as this letter (also supplied by Bill) shows, Injection Moulders (IM) were talking to the US parent. In 1953 there is another letter from IM (on Bill's site) talking about a new Sikorsky helicopter, and that they have "...re-hashed it again...", this may well be the following one....

...and this is where my own efforts toward this article finally kick-in, as about 18 months ago I had the luck to secure the following by IM at the bun-fest on the steps of the stand at Sandown Park before the doors open;

The box and contents are given a space-age feel but very much in the style of Buck Rogers, Dan Dare or Flash Gordon, what they thought in the 1950's the world would look like in the 2000's!

The Inter Cities 'Rota Ship' in a fetching gold with a folding flap that turns its box into a garage. Unlike the Acme model, this (and most others) carries the Thomas patent number.

Although I had started to collate this article when I did the text-less space-ship articles some time ago, as soon as I got this I lent it out for a book project, so everything was put on hold for a while longer.

 

We've seen the green one before, with a question mark over it's being Tudor*Rose or Kleeware, I now suspect it is another IM version/issue but could equally be either Thomas or Poplar Plastics, and - again on Bill's site - there is a nice shot of several of these with the generic box . The broken rotor'ed one we looked at last time has the original RAF roundel, while the complete one I got about a year ago has lost it.

Fairylite, who we looked at the other day were an importer/re-packager of other peoples product and their model could have come from anywhere, even Hong Kong where this helicopter was copied, but I feel it will be one of the UK factories (Thomas, Poplar or IM) who supplied it, as the HK ones tend to be glossier and of less quality.

While most of the models in this article are mono-coloured (ignoring the rotor/wheel mechanism). bi-coloured ones are common and came in a verity of combinations.

This is the original set of two drawing that accompanied the patent application for the rotor/wheel mechanism, it's freely available from the Google patents site. All the assemblies were firmly glued in the factory which has probably helped so many to survive, although rotor-blade do go missing!

The model is quite adequate for 20/25mm war-games and I have tagged it as HO - OO, which in the best traditions of Airfix covers a multitude of sins.

Thanks again to Adrian and Bill for their input, images and samples to photograph.