T is for Toys in the Media, Part the . . . God Knows!

A trio of Hestair Kiddybrick related adverts from the archive tonight, call it a Lazy Post with a bit of a tangential rant, and realise things will get better here again, shortly!

Advert for Intel, now rapidly being eclipsed by nvidia, they were the market leader for a couple of decades! And an actual Lego tie-in, so presumably the Evil Empire paid some of the marketing campaign fees?

 

One of the few Building Societies to survive the Capitalists' demutualisation frenzy which ruined not just British, but global banking back in the 1990's (made a small number, of mostly white men, very rich!), the YBS are still going, their blocks are artistic renders, I think?

 

A&L demutualised in '97 and finally packed their bags in 2011 (about the same time mine, Halifax, began is slow decline to now, a mere brand of Lloyds!), this might be a GCI image, the bloke and ball probably are artworks, of some kind, but while the blocks are based on Duplo, or Megabloks 'biggies', if it is a photograph (this trio is from the 2000's), they are probably cheap own-brand generics from Toy R Us or Mothercare? Both of whom have also disappeared!

 

It's funny, since around 1979/80, it's been one, long, fire-sale, an absolute bonanza for a few public-school educated money-men and asset strippers, which has left a Chinese car dealership on the old A30 into Hook, which I noticed tonight, a couple of miles from the huge billboard for Ranil Jayawardena (local Tory candidate, who has decided the corporate colours for the Tories round here will be green and purple!), why do we even let this state-subsidised shit into the country?

 

I mean, I like to think I'm a liberal, but I also have a sense of justice and fair play, which some might claim is overdeveloped, I blame the Asperger's, but it leaves me quite intolerant of our Government's tolerance, which boarders on incompetent complacency. And how can fair play or justice be 'overdeveloped', it either is, or it isn't?

Yet these despots; China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, &etc; they just don't play fair, even when they can't stand each-other, they will side together, get a few African kleptocrats and a couple of Central American nutters on-board and cause no end of trouble for the whole world, with a power-bloc that blocks any attempt to make the world a better place.

But the cars will be perfectly reliable, reasonably outfitted, with all the mod-cons and gizmos, and cheap, why would you pay three-times as much for a Volvo in a 'cost-of-living' crisis, created by those same landlord/landowning/speculative hedge-fund bwankers, who will now be importing these cars, using the money they don't seem to pay much tax on!

H is for a Handful More!

Back with key-rings, keychains, key fobs, they are different things to different people! I think this lot was a charity shop lot a year or two ago, I can't honestly remember, and I made the mistake - a mistake I regularly make - of trying to shoot them on a red background!

 

Several catering firms had similar dough-men mascots, this one - Turkstra - is Dutch, and appears to have awarded itself 1st and 2nd place in something, at the same time, their biscuits must be bloody good!

And I thought this was fun, as you could remove the chain-ring and have a perfect egg-box for a dolls house! I'm guessing, from the lack of a mark, that it's missing a sticker, and if it had a sticker, may have been offered to several egg-producers, so could be missing any one of a number of stickers?

Common 'Jig Toy' design of the family saloon, made key-ring, my experiance of this kind of key ring is that if you actually wore in on your trouser loop, you quickly found pieces missing, so it's nice to find it in one piece!

 

Not really my thing, but it will join the other novelty key-rings, alongside the other novelties and next to the figural key-rings, paperwork-wise! Quite a survivor too, as it's quite delicate, especially the visor, which has two little ethylene pins, and there is plenty of opportunity for loss, breakage or cracking, not to mention the sticker going missing, so a bit of a find I guess!

 

Relief-flat - a cockerel and grapes, is it a French regional mascot/logo thing? A winery? Or just a generic? Again, outside the main collection, but early plastic ephemeral, novelty/plaything, it has its place.

 

Another automotive subject here, with a small base-metal old-fashioned racing-car, might be based on an Edwardian board-game moulding? Not Monopoly, a lesser thing? But fun anyway!

 

Looking at the pre-'publish' close-ups, I think it's actually plastic, not base metal, and while possibly still from a board-game piece, is more likely to be taken from a charm-bracelet thing? Could even be homemade from a Christmas Cracker prize!

 

Another relief-flat of a cat and kitten, a bit bitter-sweet right now, I still miss Boysey-Boy every day, but these are black, and it's many years since we've had black cats, although once Dad brought six home in the staff-car, in a catering-sized cornflakes box, after rescuing them from the bin-stores at Browning Barracks!

 

Little Topo-Gigio, the Italian kids TV puppet, I wonder if some of the several similar small versions I have may also be ex-key-rings? I'll have to investigate them for loop-removal. This one was so hard to shoot on the red I gave-up and pulled up the winter cover, complete with cat hairs, only to find one of the red shots was actually useable!

C is for Clipper and Cable Car!

A couple more novelty, card-packaging vehicles, and first we'll have another bus, but it's not flogging chocolate bars this time, rather tea leaves! Although, why do they call them tea leaves when they are little crumbs of tea-leaves? Leaf-tea I get, tea-leaves I don't!

 

You can make a decent collection of this stuff, and that's how I've ended up with a dozen or more (no, I only scanned these four, so the rest can wait for another day!), I'd bid on a junk lot of railway accessories, and when it can time to pay for and collect them, it turned out there were two boxes under the table, with the same lot-number, full of miscellaneous bus-stuff!

 

Our scalers are a little younger now, school-kid sized, next to the conductor, who's around the 40mm mark, and again we have a product-related number-plate. The '49' still runs from Clapham Junction up to Shepherd's Bush and back, I have myself ridden it once or twice, but not for over a decade. Clipper - who still seem to be going - aren't actually on the route, being from the West Country!

While the Cable Car contained four Wispa bars. I think these might have been a present from someone who didn't know me too well, as I hate Wispa bars, a cheap, claggy rip-off of Aero, and with hardly any bubbles, quite disgusting, and I thought they'd ceased to exist (Caramac just died, so it's Gold Bars or nothing kids!), but was disappointed to see a heap of them in Sainsbury's this afternoon!

D is for Double Deckers and Double Decker's

Which is important because one of them is a single decker! B is also for a Blast from Christmases Past!

 

Christmas (and Easter) is a time when all the chocolate manufacturers, some of the biscuit makers and a few other snack-food guys like to play with the packaging (and pricing) as part of the consumer-fest which is the Western holiday season, and Cadbury's iconic Double Decker bars used to pull all the stops out, I haven't seen anything like this for years though, now it's all more blatant 'multi-packs' . . . sniff!

 

The actual, big red double decker 'London' bus, even though it's actually in the distinctive orange of the Double Decker bars, and it contained four bars so it's a bit broader that UK roads would allow-for, especially with all the cycle lanes we have now!

 

Posed with two of the 30mm copies of Commonwealth national costume ladies/dolls of the world, and calling for a bus to stop with an Alpine Horn wouldn't endear you to a British bus crew, no matter how multicultural the area!

 

Please note: the mug says 'I think, therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader'!

The weird thing about this is that it came out long before the UK had 'bendy-busses', yet was almost certainly a UK specific issue? It's also presaging the corporate colours of Stagecoach, many years before the chaos of privatisation! And I hope you've noticed the number-plates, on both models!

This too, was four bars, but two in-line stacked pairs (double-decked Double Deckers!) so is better proportioned. The Esquimau is slightly overdressed for our climate, and waving a raw, unwrapped fish is not going to go down well with the other passengers, these girls aren't really helping themselves fit-in with the locals, are they?!

H is for Haha-Haha-Haha-HA!

Or; follow-up to Smash mashed powdered potato Martian Alien Robots!

I have an annoying habit of shooting a post (probably leaving it Picasa for an average of six months!), editing the images, maybe taking  a few more, doing the text/blurb, and then chucking it up on the Blog, trying to check for typo's and finally publishing it, then, and only then, I think "Ooh I wonder what's on eBay related to these?"!

And - imagining all the Loyal Readers have had the same thought, I then rush off to eBay and grab something I probably didn't really need, before any other bright-spark does . . . the other day, after publishing the Smash Martian pencil-tops, was one of those occasions!

And this is what I found! Aren't they lovely, I found some Marx stuff and a chunky bendy-toy too, but these were affordable! Small polystyrene badges of the robots as 'flats', with chrome-effect plating blue-on-white and silver-on-red and green, with a standard safety-pin heat-welded into the rear for attaching to clothing. No obvious maker - for Cadbury's Smash.

TITM is for Toys in the Media - The Rest . . . For Now!

These are all the other things in a folder it'll be nice to see the back off for a bit, as they've been sitting around in Picasa for about three years now! Vaguely in order of their being deposited in the folder, with something a little different at the end!

Full page spread in The Metro or 'i', probably CGI'd Russian nesting dolls advertising a give-back to the LGBTQI+ community by Paddy Power . . . every time Russia scoured a goal, money went to Putin's hated gays! The funny thing is, I susspect Putin's an every-way predatory deviant . . . but the witnesses are probably all in the ground, except his poor ex-wife who's in internal exile in Kaliningrad!

And it's nice to see that while I was earning my own opprobrium from 'over there' for questioning some of the 'eastern' production, its promotion, price and where - exactly - the money was going, other - more mainstream - sources were also realising Russia was not a friend - of anybody.

Oh, I'll have plenty more to say on the subject, don't you worry . . . unless you're in the Penn-State Toy Soldier mafia, in which case you may well worry? I'll name you because you put your names to your insensitive comments, lacking all self-awareness, or awareness of the greater world picture, you nasty little, right-wing, selfish, brain-dead shitheads.

Taken before I'd got my new scanner, and sadly out of focus, but you can see it's Kenco using some cheapo, substitute vinyl-rubber, rack-toy Chinnamals to advertise their excellent granulated goodness! Yeah-nah-yeah, I used to take Kenco, before I realised Douwe Egbert's gave me an unending supply of self-seal storage jars!

I like this one, on one level it's a pretty non-descript advert for something your subconscious will ignore the instant you realise it's not for you, but on another level it's using a toy frog to trigger the large-print tagline, while the toy bus reinforces both the toy/key-ring motive, and that it's about two drivers, one having more useful insurance coverage than the other - get on the back of your better insured friend, or get the bus!

I think this and the previous were taken from copies of The Economist?

This is more of a joke-ad', I can't remember where from, but something like The New Yorker, circa 1960's, maybe something more mainstream like Mad Magazine? It is however; still 'toys in the media' and came via Brain Heiler's Facebook group I think?

Two from my Facebook feed, following the same trope of using a model house to sell on-line Estate Agency (Real Estate) services. The two buildings are quite different so may have separate origins, and I wonder if they might be houses for gerbils or other small pets, or maybe money-banks strategically posed to hide the coin slots?

Touristy/novelty pound/dollar-store stuff, though, I think? However - from the size of the hands - very useful for war-gaming in 54/60mm scales. Both could pass for Western Europe or New England and both are pretty simple, timeless designs.

Back to an old trope here, previously seen on a couple of book covers and a health thing; the model-kit runner. Here employed as street-furniture outside the Japanese HQ of Shizuoka Models, incorporating a post box, there are similar constructions around the plant's wider site, some in blue.

Real-steam steam-rollers (probably Mamod - the current Model 1312 [short version] looks almost the same) being used to sell the luxurious smoothness of Cormar carpets! Bry-Nylon was that terrible stuff which snagged you fingernails, skinned your knees and gave you shocks if you had the wrong footwear . . . and the shit which gathered in the little ravines between the fluffy-islands!! Published circa-1970; a magazine advert for awfully-awful, bloody-awful carpets.

Not a movie still, not a fan's CGI, not a 'toy in the media', and while Paddington has been seen here before now; not actually Paddington, not even a bear . . . this is a dog! A toy-dog if you like, a Pomeranian to be precise (no piccolo :-( ), who gets dressed-up as Paddington by his owner! You can't make this shit up, but he (she?) makes a very good Paddington!

TITM is for Toys in the Media - Soldiers

Being a round-up of toy soldiers in advertising and the wider world which I've been stuffing in the Toys in the Media folder for a while now, both modern stuff and some vintage bits.

This is a book I found on Amazon looking for something else, I rarely read novels (other than sci-fi) so it didn't interest me particularly, not that that doesn't . . . what I mean is; it's here for the cover not the contents which may be very good, but I don't care/didn't bother to find out! Modern 'army-man' pose, sinisterly blured, off-centre and allowing the shadow to do all the talking - good stuff!

Someone in Eastern Europe (?) is commando-bombing street signs with army-men, purpose unknown (road-sign sentries?), but it must be fun looking for them if you know it's going-on in your locale!

Another book cover, this one seems to show old Stadden designs for . . . Tradition? Old Guard? Probably from the 85mm or 120mm ranges? These have been painted, but silver, chromium-plated or polished pewter versions of many pieces exist. Again; the book and its contents are of no consequence to me.

This lady has a credit attached to 'Indigo' which means little, I think she was found on Twisted Sifter or Dangerous Minds, or off the back of a link from one of them? Modern Airfix copy (Afrika Korps officer/Rommel figure) parachute-toy converted to an earring! Although "converted" is a bit highfalutin' for cutting the strings and adding a wire-loop!

A well known (in its day) advertising campaign for White Horse Whiskey included this image, in various crops, which ran in the early 1970's in the Sunday newspaper colour-supplement magazines and on street hoardings I think.

I assume the figures will be something common (and relatively cheap) such as Minifigs (Miniature Figurines) but could be home-cast or something earlier like Alberken, while the farmhouse looks like, but isn't the Airfix 'Waterloo Farmhouse', I thought it was, but close-ups reveal enough differences to rule out the plastic kit. The descriptions and sketches of the time are many and enough to build similar farmhouses!

This is an icing plaque from crafter Yvette Mayorga and is all icing, but in a frame, not on a cake! Not sure if it's an army-man or a cowboy, but again a modern Hong Kong/China figure has been skillfully modelled.

The first series of Blackadder (The Black Adder) was the least celebrated, yet set-up all the tropes for the future works and is probably my favourite after the trenches of the last full-run. In one episode Richard IV (Brian Blessed) is war gaming 'diplomacy' with one of his lieutenants, using large (Papier-mâché, plaster?) figures on the floor, I took a few stills last time I watched it.

Then I thought where are The Avengers stills I took, only to remember I posted them ages ago!

TITM is for Toys in the Media - Preiserlike Persons

I've been saving these up for a while now, and had so many they'll need breaking down into separate posts, and this one deals with the popular trope of using model railway figures to help sell us stuff. We've seen plenty of artists using these figures to great effect, but here it's all about promoting other things, although some are simply illustrating articles with a view to gabbing our attention with an eye-catching image.

IFLScience (formerly 'I fucking Love Science' . . . the conformist cowards!) start us with their group of people hanging around illustrating the header for a hot-linked article on Faceplant about a psychological disorder involving seeing little people who aren't there.

Me? I see idiots, everywhere, selfish, stupid, climate-change denying, nationalistic idiots but I don't believe I'm imagining them as part of a delusional condition, I just see selfish, stupid, climate-change denying, nationalistic idiots everywhere!

IFLScience is behind the upper image here too, while The Conversation also carried it, so not only is it clearly a stock image, it's one of the ones which comes-up first in search results for such things! Neither credits the agency/library, so I don't know who's behind it.

Both stories deal with ageing AND the negative benefits of doing so, one more generally, the other specific to those who have had a severe dose of Covid-18 (SARS-Cov2), or who are suffering from Long-Covid.

A British policeman surveys a keyboard, I imagine a story about computer crime or on-line fraud? I didn't take a note on this one and there not much of a clue in the title, also; the figure seems to have a squared-off base, so not sure of the origin of this one, but about 1:72nd scale?

The uniform is somewhat archaic now, officers on the beat haven't dressed like this since the 1980's, but I believe it remains their academy/parade/disciplinary appointment uniform, and is the one still popularised in tourist trinkets and post-cards, while some strategically placed officers in tourist hot-spots may dress like this to feed the need of the tourists to see a 'British Bobby' on the beat!

Very skinny looking, I think the image has been pulled on the North/South axis? The note with this one (which we may have seen before in a past 'News, Views Etc'?) says "Organisational Structures and Resourcing Hero Image" which I'm sure has you riveted to the point of searching for what must be a world-changing article! I'll move swiftly on . . . (whispers . . . I must have read it to have found it!)

Another common trope with these (we have seen several here in the past) is money and/or financial articles, some have the figures, some have small change, the ones we're most interested in have both!

Upper shot seems to be showing Euros and Euro-cents and was from an article entitled "As part of the Unequal Democracies project", the lower image has pounds and pence Stirling, and is an Ian Johnston shot for Shutterstock, used here for research purposes

This was an article on weight-loss drugs, I don't tend to read such money-grubbing/emotional garbage, so it must have been an add' in my feed? The purple ones might be the Wonka Works Blueberry Pie meal-in-a-pill-deal!

This one's a bit sad! I think he may be Merit, although Preiser did do some chunky sculpts in the 1970's, all those track-gang and construction worker sets were heavier sculpting? Anyway, I suspect one of the artists who set these out in the environment (we've seen a few here already and there's more to come) didn't look after his and it got painted over. Indeed the paint may be partly the cause of the heaviness?

Because a freshly painted wall is to graffiti artists what a fresh dog-shit is to flies, it's since attracted a half-dozen or so re-paintings (original caption says seven layers), in a  rather bland pink (inner-city pub?) and will soon be no more than a blob or pimple on the wall!

R is for Recruiting Rodneys!

A couple of scans from the Sunday Times supplementary magazine, dated 1960 and 1966 receptively. I don't know what it was like where you are (foreign readers), but from the 1960's and into the 1980's our 'Sunday supplements' were really very good magazines, with minimal advertising (against the glossies), interesting articles and usually very good imagery, and where there were adverts, they could be quite good to!

A pose which could have influenced both messrs Ron Cameron and Bill Farmer? Airfix British Commandos (SLR replaced with a Thomson SMG), Britains Super Deetail (tree-branch replaced with grenade!), couple of Matchbox figures . . . both sculptors would have seen this image many times, as these ad's would run, regularly, or for a year or two on-and-off, in several publications.

 

Also of note is the pre-DPM olive-greens ('OG's'), which replaced the WWII/National Service Battle Dress for a while, having first been used in the jungles of Malaya and Borneo I think? DPM was fully introduced around 1966. This may be the Canadian pattern jacket, but the uniform changes of the 1980's are a murky business with no real timeline . . . the Gloster's wore Battle Dress in Northern Ireland in 1970!

 

Yeah! You got that, Johnny Foreigner? The best in the world 'init! Heay, I can be as jingoistic as an arse-kissing lover of Farage (rhymes with c**t) if I want to! Just a bit of fun!

But joking apart; it was - I think it's fair to say - one of the best for some time, regularly winning inter-nation tank performance and gunnery competitions in Europe and Canada, giving the Israelis the ballistic turret outline of their Merkava and producing a barrel and fire-control system any-other nation who could, immediately tried to squeeze into their existing turrets, and while it was getting a bit long in the tooth against later marks of Leopard (and Iraqi T-72's made a mess of Iranian ones in the original 'Gulf War'), it was really only Challenger I and M1 Abrams which chased it into the history books?

WH is for Art Craft Products

This is one of those posts which by hook or by crook pretty-much write themselves.

I don't know much about flats, a rudimentary history and the technical stuff about pouring lead into slate moulds, or that sculptors and publishers (or 'Editors') are not necessarily the same people, is about the limit of my knowledge. I know I like them and I have a few, they come-in in mixed lots, or if I see some going cheap I grab them, while for everything else Garratt usually proves more reliable on flats than he does on plastics, if one wants to know more!

I also have a couple of the older German books along with the beautiful all-colour one which came out in the 1990's/early 2000's (glossy, dark green cover?), but they are all in a rather appalling stack in the corner of the garage and I haven't started sorting 'the library' out yet!

I have however - as you will have noticed - started scanning the cuttings from the box- and lever-arch files and trying to get the more interesting bits up here, to which end I scanned this in, meaning to simply post it 'as is', to wit; a curiosity, in the hope someone may have been able to help with the ID'ing of the figures.

Art Craft Products - a jobber in the early 1950's; working out of a warehouse (mail order) or a speciality-store advertising seasonal novelties in the press, something like that and the pictures look like you'd want a set - on the mantle for Christmas, arranged under the crimbo-tree or set-out on a wide window sill, or even on the cake?

Although it's not clear they aren't solids of some kind! And younger readers should be aware that the mid-eighties and gay-nineties to which the ad' refers are the 1880's and 1890's, closer (or 'as close') to the 1950's as/than we are!

I then realised a picture I'd only recently hoovered-off evilBay matched the sets, with a typical flat, block-in, factory-paint of the era, but still no ID as they were being sold unknown.

Then about two weeks ago another picture appeared on the same site, describing a Hafer as the name, I downloaded the image thinking it might be a typo for Hafner or a similar, more familiar name, but checked Garratt and the dongles to find two of them, both connected to the same German or 'Nuremberg Flats' outfit!

I intended to crop the image and do the same thing as with the previous, but it was a nicer, high-res image, so thought to ask the seller if I could use it as a stand-alone image - I went back to see if it was still for sale, only to find he had several useful things in his shop, so I ended-up buying three of them!

Like the old painted ones (which will probably be from Art Craft or a similar seller and contemporary or near-contemporary with the advert) this sculpting is clearly visible in both sets, but is - here - a modern or recent casting for someone with greater painting skills than me to work their magic on.

Lots more shots as we may never visit it again! Going on Garratt, but from his Model Soldier Collecting, not the Encyclopaedia, we can see that the WH is for Wolfgang Hafer the editor. LM  and HL are probably for the engravers Madlener and Lecke - maybe one specialised in horses, the other the sleigh/people, or one blocked-in the other, the finer work?

While the RH may have been added in the last few decades (1979 by the looks of it?), being Ruediger Hafer; Wolfgang's son, they both operating near Kassel, a place I have often cruised-past on the way to somewhere else - a beautiful part of the world though! The Wv, is for Winter Scenes (item 19) . . . in German . . . Winterver-something!

How they come in! I also added to the library (greatly increasing the flats section) with the Berlinner Zinnfiguren catalogue and all but completed the SEGOM archive with their flats catalogue, having already got the solids/plastic catalogue and the small scale plastic catalogue to which the late page (with the additional British poses) was added by a contributor back at the beginning of the Blog; ten-odd years ago!

See, by happenstance; the post as good as wrote itself, and I get to add Art Craft and Hafer to the tag list . . . bargain! And . . . from the base shape/markings, I think I'll be able to ID some of my unknown flats, so we may well return to Hafer (or SEGOM) next year.