B is for Bag o'Bugs!

Apart from the bag of 80 rings, which we saw in the 'round-up' post in the early hours, the only other 'rack toy' I found this year was a large bag of mixed bugs, critters and skeletons, from Amscan in Tesco, so lets look at it!

 

You get a lot for your £2.50, sixty items, which have clearly been bought-in from more than one source, as they are different plastics and there are alturnate designs of bat, spider and skeleton, but it'll be fun for those who get one.

 

One of each above and the piles of polyethylene to the lower left and PVC-substitute to the lower right. Black predominates (easier to lose?), but there's a good smattering of 'seasonal' coloures - I get the orange (pumpkins), but the green and purple are more arbitary, yet very traditional?

 

In addition, you get some white skeletons and a sextuplet of glow-in-the-dark bats!

The fly design is another variation of the 'new design' simplified ones we looked at a few years ago (no seperate clear wings), when for one or two years only nearly everyone had a go at this kind of set! Likewise, the centipede, while the rat and bat are pretty generic types, both based on their predecessors, if not actually from older tools? I forgot to do a close-up of the black bat, he's a semi flat and a bit naff!

 

While of course - those of you who have followed the blog for a while will know - I'm calling the bottom left image three girls have a picnic! The smaller black spider seems to be the design, or one of the designs you find sewn into Halloween costumes, or attached to hanging sheets of cobweb or micro fairy-lights.

The skeletons, from at least two sources I suspect, if not three, but all equipped with hanger holes, for hanging them around the house or patio/garden, so they can hang-about, hung!

 

While the rat and the glow-bat both have small holes which are too narrow to be for pencil-topping, yet too wide to be mould-release pin-marks, and as I'm not happy about the speed with which some in the hobby excuse/assume all holes in bases/undersides are for release-pins, the explanation here, is to be found on the blog, where we saw a green bat, attached to the very sucker types I used to hang the skeletons in the previous shot.

 

So these two are sucker novelties being repurposed as party 'scatter' or playthings, and it's probably the reason for a lot of these 'half-sized' pencil-top holes, which have featured before. I kept a few, one or two of each, and the rest went to the Blue Cross shop to help fund pet help.

 

That link also contains my example of the finger-puppet monster (I'd forgotten it got blogged!) , and it is different to the pair Chris Smith sent to the blog (I thought it was) but is the same colour, so that's three now, the next quest is how many were there altogether?

 

A few minutes later . . . that cowman/bull thing, also in that post, is the same as the Devil-Santa Theo sent to the blog, the Frankenstein's Monster and skeleton Chris sent on seperate occasions and the skeleton I already had, and which I had posed in a coffin one Halloween, so there are five of them about the place now, sans a couple of legs and an arm I think! All waiting to be reunited into one horror-tub! If you scroll the Halloween tag in a spare moment, you will find them all. Or wait a year or two, and I'll blog them all together, with any others that come in!

W is for Whacky Walkers

No wall required, but Winter's coming and no mistake! These, like the jumpers, are a growing collection, or sub-collection I wouldn't have given houseroom to, in my small-scale only days, and couldn't have imagined a few years ago, but after robots and ceremonials, it was only a matter of time before Halloween (or Christmas) entered the ledger!

 

Welp, they were like 79p ladies and gentlemen, so under the 'we buy this shit, so you don't have to' rule, I managed to find the shekels for the eyeball as I knew we had another in the pile, and then went back for the pumpkin!

 

They both came from Home Bargains and I think there may have been a different eye, or a purple pumpkin (which seemed daft?), I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I left one on the rack? Green eye maybe?

 

The other eyeball was in one of Jon Attwood's boxes (and I have a feeling another one came in a few years ago, possibly from Chris?), and we looked at a set of them from Amscan, here, many full-moons ago, via New York!

Then, the other day, I found two end-of-line walkers in the local garden centre while looking for Christmas Decorations! Now these two ARE walkers in the common sense of others we've seen here, the pumpkin and eyeball are actually hoppers, like the original 'ACME' cartoon (and real) teeth, often used to chew-up Tom the cat's tail, or similar!

F is for Follow-up - Glow in the Dark Bug-eyed Aliens

Very much a follow-up to this post, which does itself link to the previous sighting here, so a third outing tonight! And far from just ID'ing them, I've managed to find and ID three lots under four monikers which is a pretty satisfying state of affairs, I can tell you!

They weren't capsule toys (I'm sure I've seen something similar on gum-ball machine insert-cards, so I'll keep an eye out for more on these!), they were Cosmo Explorer Glow in Dark Alien aliens, and imported or 'jobbed' into the 'States by Way Out Toys Inc., of New York (left hand card), however, under the Way Out sticker is the unmistakable Soma logo printed on the backing card!

So the ones we looked at last time were Soma, and in this pack we have a new three-finger pose (pink, right) and a new four-finger pose (greenish, left), and a colour variant - in the middle - of the pair I already had, with plastic-colour, pose and paint variations; who knows how many you can find? Soma pose-counts are often in sixes or twelve's, so it should be dozens, as a minimum . . .  oh goodie!

Meanwhile the card on the right shows what seems to be all four poses (some sources state six poses, but the blister say four - two pairs, two singles) of the Imperial Toys (another importer/jobber, but also a contracting one) Glow in the Dark Alien Invaders, in what seems to be all three colours.

Well, once you know what you're looking for, finding them (and inaccurate information about them! I'm talkin' to yooh - Pinterest and Wortpoint!) becomes easy, so I bought some . . . so you don't have to! But why wouldn't you want a glowing army of human-knapping cattle-botherers!

The Imperial ones are slightly less sophisticated in that they all [and only] have black eyes, with no other decoration and a lower pose-frequency count on the two with weapons, but then the Soma planet sends it's emissaries out with no weapons at all, so on that score these guys are better-off!

Close-ups; because I can, and because the Soma ones are good-enough in the link and now in storage, so I couldn't shoot them for this post and I didn't want to de-card the three newies. I would imagine Imperial commissioned theirs after they'd seen Soma's, but the factories in China may have spied on each other; bringing them out at roughly the same time - around 1992-94'ish, I believe?

But I got a half-decent image through the blister and shone a torch on them for the de rigueur glowing in the dark shot! On the eight I have now we can see gold, blue, green and orange paint with a distinct four polymer colours. And while Imperial have gone with one 'species', Soma's are - so far - all different.

They are all a nice 54/60mm with the Imperial Toys set having a constant, slightly cone-headed physiology (for people who follow all that 'greys', 'nordics', 'talls' and 'midgets' LGM stuff), with the cone/bulge at the rear. They are also all marked 'Imperial-[over]-CHINA' faintly, across their shoulders.

All the searching which resulted from knowing what they all were actually threw-up a third lot, another novelty importer; Amscan, their's sold as an eight in North America and a twelve here (but the spelling suggests they were both available for order in all sales-territories?), but only one pose/colour-way, with orange eyes. I haven't got any yet (they are findable), but in those multiples, too-many, so I'll wait until I see one or two in a loose/mixed lot.

I can't work out if the picture bottom-right is a mock-up or an artist-enhanced photograph, nor is it clear whether they have been and gone or are yet to arrive, but the image comes up when Googling them, so it (the picture) has been released somewhere (might have been the Amscan website), for some reason . . . something to look for!

I kept forgetting to turn the light off and/or turn-off the flash (the cat thought I was mad!), and so several similar shots resulted in an obvious .gif presenting itself!

It's like a 1970's disco' floor . . . "OOOOoooooo'Ifeellove-Ifeellove-Ifeellove-Ifeellove . . . Iyyyyy Feeel Luuuurve . . . I FEEL Luuurve, Luuurve, Luuurve Luuurve . . . I feel luuurve . . . piew-piew-dugaduga-whang-whang piew-piew-dugaduga-whang-whang Phessheewwww! Cheers Donna; the ultimate bangin' choon - and a nice spacey soundtrack for little rubber aliens!

And many thanks to 'Patti' in the US-of-A who sent me extra figures!

R is for Rubber Round-up

I don't know when 'eraser' replaced 'rubber' or why, I vaguely remember the new wave of European rubbers from Pelican, Staedtlar Norica, Rötring and co., coming to the UK at some point in my childhood with 'eraser' on their little card wraps, and while much better that the old India-rubber ones which seemed to be made of either wood-pulp (the pink 'pencil' rubbers) or recycled sandpaper (the 'ink' rubbers)* I wondered at the need to change the name, after all they rubbed stuff out didn't they?

I ask because for a while they were interchangeable words or terms, but these days rubber is rarely used, and when listing on auction sites, or tagging on Blogs 'Eraser' is supreme and 'Rubber' carries the slightly giggly baggage of French Letters and English Overcoats!

* While ink rubbers had a tendency to drill holes in your exercise book, they weren't as vicious as 'typewriter rubbers' which seemed to be made from recycled concrete!

Anyway - as the trope of 'A is for . . . ' I stuck-with years ago continues ad nauseum (it was going to be a quick single run through the alphabet and then more normal post titles) it gets harder to find title-words which haven't been used for those things which keep coming-up.

All of which is a overly long-winded intro for bugger-all's worth but it's also sometimes hard to find an intro paragraph in a fuzzy brain . . . and it gets us to picture one!

As a follow-up to January's football mini-season, Terranova sent me this image of another Amscan rack-toy which - if nothing else - is fun! But it's also useful! I suspect the bar-hole that appears to run through the shoulders is designed with the placing of a pencil in mind, for the playing of school-desk-table-bar-football!

Brian also sent this which is similar to a set of four we looked at a couple of Christmases ago as a shelfie from Basingrad, but I think this chap is larger and more angular? Obviously one of four, he is distributed also by yesterday's new tag; MZB, as Imaginations this time, not Inc. He may be the same in individual packaging though, I can't find the images now, but will check when I upload the post!

Really meant for TLAP Day, but we can return to look more closely at the figures then; I picked this up in Woking on Tuesday in an end of January Sales clearance sale in Paperchase, in April??!! There's no way I'd give you four-fifty for a half a palm-full of erasers, but one-fifty? . . . Bargain!

Brian also found these . . . how f*****g cool are these? These are too cool for the International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol School, that how cool! Imported into North America by the regulars here; Greenbrier (USA) and DTSC (Canada) I've got my eyes peeled until they hurt so's not to miss them if they turn-up this side of the pond!

Soldiers and erasers, erasers that are soldiers; "Rub him out Private!", I'd like to think my work here is done, but this is the Internet and you're only as good as your last post, so - more to come! And thanks to Brian for most of these.

N is also for Nippon and Nunchuck!

So to a few other Ninja types; most sent to the blog by Mr Burke, many thanks to him and the first lot are the interesting set vis-à-vis this morning's post . . .

. . . as they are 'not quite' copies of the small gum-ball capsule ninjas we saw earlier, only in a larger scale and with adjusted or new poses and as they're being imported by Amscan - a similar company to A&A Global - might possibly be from the same source as the diminutive ones.

It's not terribly clear but they are definitely larger and not quite the same, although colours are similar, material looks to be the same (PVC or its modern equivalent) and the childlike, slightly 'deform' sculpting is in the same style as the small ones in the preceding post.

'Terranova' also sent these shots back in February, of resin Kung Fu practitioners, for sale in a gift shop and clearly based on the inimitable Brice Lee and in three sizes - the larger as 'paint-your owns' (like Bendy Toys; another new but recurring trope here on Small Scale World!); the smaller two sizes seeming to be 54- and around 60mm's?

The smallest - titled 'Kung Fu Man' - also appearing to have a wider range of poses and to be the better painted, although the painted version of the large figures (hiding behind the two unpainted ones) is a second pose in that scale, so there should be more?

Mr B also took a couple of close-ups of the nicer figures and you can't complain at three-dollars-fifty can you? These resin figures need to be purchased (or shelfied!) as soon as you see them as they are nearly always limited quantity production runs, due to the rapid degradation of the air-setting rubber, silicon or latex moulds, and with no obvious maker (WCP?) on the price label; they're off for a - probably - long stay on the 'Unknown' dongle!

Brian also sent these - carried by the 'usual suspects'; Greenbrier/DTSC - they would appear to be a continuation of the large Firefighters and GI's I bought a couple of years ago from - the now defunct - 99p Stores under - I think - PMS International's label? Brian's sent shelfies of those giant soldiers too - in new packaging - but they're for another day. These will be 4-inch, polyethylene figures, and one expects all four to turn-up in both colours.

We've seen firefighters, GI's and superhero types of these before too; mostly also from the Blog's New York agent and like those, these are that odd thing; Action Figure types which aren't really action figures due to the limited number of points of articulation, more like the old knock-off Action Men/GI Joes'.

These are also from Terranova, but have been sat in the older folder for a while now (over a year!) waiting for a suitable post; such as this one! But they ARE Ninjas! They will be in a dense polystyrene or polypropylene and come with rather over-decorated Ninja-type weapons/accessories.

Rounding-off the day with a dice-rattling lump of styrene; I've had two more lots of those Gogo Crazy Bones come in recently and so two posts are in the pipeline, but one of them is Ninja-like enough to close today's look at Ninjas! He may be more 'Kamikaze' than true 'Ninja' though?

And that's covered most of the main scales, several figure-types and all the major polymers in one post - Thanks Brain/Terra!

L is for Looking Spooky, but not in Boots!

More Spooky Spectres' of Undead Ancients, these coming from a Chinese outfit called Ningbo, via Walgreen's in the 'States and to us here at Small Scale World via New York and Brian Berke.

He only sent them the other day and the first thing I did was troll-off to Boots (a subsidiary of Walgreen) to see it they had them this side of the pond, they didn't, I asked the girl of they might have a Halloween section in the bigger stores and she ummed-and-erred, so I tried the website and for the 'Skeleton' search-term found a stick of nail polish, and a Minecraft horse in the Christmas gifts department . . .i.e.; no dice, no banana, no skeleton army!

Walgreen's promise 100% satisfaction; well - I'm 100% satisfied by what I can see (4x4 poses for a total of 16 figures), but I'm 0% satisfied by their subsidiary's stocking-of-skeleton-army's policy! I'll try the bigger stores next year, sometimes these things seem to be tested on the US market and then come over here a season later!

Close-ups of the figures; Shaun covered these about a week ago and everything said by him and the commenter's seems to stick, they are definitely derivative of the Amscan figures which we have yet to look at here.

Which reminds me, the PMS ones (earlier today) were issued here at Christmas, not Halloween? I'll have a bit of a shooftie round the discount store in December, they may yet turn-up sooner rather than later!

I love the chap with a meat-cleaver, I'm guessing a French chef who ate the wrong snail, stuck in limbo until he's paid the Ferrymen in souls! Again - as said on Shauns Fantasy Figure Blog - painted-up they'll make excellent additions to the other sets.

 

Pretty prefect for 54mm gaming or role-play, and with the Crescent 'Khaki Berserker' having Halloween off, we have a painted legionnaire (AIP) as a scaler - looks good with the sand-base as well; you have to get close to kill the undead! Don't worry; I've since taken delivery of more images from Brian and the British Berserker is already back on-station for the winter!

S is for Skeleton Sky-divers!

They're skeletons and paratroopers, on Halloween, what's not to love about these, they parachute, and they're skeletons! I thing we had a shelfie of this set last year, courtesy of Brian Berke, he then donated a pack to the Blog, so this year we have them 'in the flesh . . . less'.

One of the reasons we've had so much rack-toy crap in the 'countdown' is because I've been looking out for these; even after receiving this set from Brian in order to confirm the Amscan UK were carrying them here, but no dice. They have a full multi-lingual packaging for the US, Canada and Mexico and I particularly like the French word for Skeleton which is Squelettes!

Parachuting skeletons - brilliant!

F is for Follow-up - V is for Value Pack

A couple of days after I'd scheduled last weekend's posts, Brian Berke sent me his findings for this season too late to add to the relevant posts. One or two of the bits he sent have already been slotted neatly (or jemmied) into posts, but as the Amscan post was on the 1st of the month, it's easier to present these as a follow-up.

Unlike the sea-life the other day, these are definitely knock-offs of Iwako designs; the donkey we saw a while ago ('Erasers' in the Tag List) and at 12 for just-short of five dollars it's pennies per unit isn't it? Cheap as chips!

I'm loving these! I mean I am ab-sur-lute-ley f****g lovin'em! Brilliant! They are like the old rubber jigglers and I'll be looking-out for them in UK shops - quality . . . real quality tat! And the colours, you've got to love the colours - that orange is gorgeous! But they're not as cheap as the donkey-rubbers.

From the top you've got a six-armed cyclopean with Piglett's ears, an even more piglike cyclops, a wacky vampire batterfrog (indeed, is one of these a realistic likeness of a Basingrad hippa'crocka'frog?) and my favourite the triclopean who is borrowing heavily from Toy Story.

Note also that the way they're packed each one comes in three of four colours - so you have to buy a second set to get the lot? Thanks Brian!

O is for Ooooh, fishy, fishy, fishy-fish!

A-fish, a-fish, a-fish, a-fishy, Oh! . . . Ooooh, fishy, fishy, fishy-fish! . . . That went wherever I . . . did gooooohw.

I don't suppose we'll visit fish here again at Small Scale World for the longest time, so this is a round-up of all the fishy stuff that's hanging around, most having come-in in the last 18-months, so there's a synergy to the thing and the post is clearly meant by the gods (unless you believe in one of them, then you'll be spitting nails at my casual atheism and refusal to take your pan-dimensional mega-being any more seriously than the next guys, anyway - his is the one true-one, not yours!).

It's also all rack-toy type stuff, if not actually from a rack toy, or seen on a rack! Although; if they were on a rack, they'd be smoked and we don't do smoking here anymore - vaped mackerel anyone?

These are currently available for next to nothing from The Swagman's Daughter and when I first found them I thought they may be the old Prior moulds, but actually they're rather more 'based on' than actual and are - in any case - marked Hong Kong rather than Macau.

They are also in hard to shoot psychedelic primary-colours, but I had a go! In fact a mishap meant two sets were forthcoming and between photo sessions I took enough to give you an idea; but to be honest I think the shots on the originating site are better!

I wasn't the only person looking for fish online, the owner of the old photography/camera shop in town, recently rebranded for the digital era was also looking for fish to decorate the shop's float in this year's carnival, he found some, but they were . . . err . . . weren’t what he was expecting - always read the description!

They were in fact 30-40mm or so; not including flappy-bits! Anyway they went in the window for the same carnival's window-dressing competition, where I spotted them, took these shots and got the sorry story of how they couldn't be seen on the float!

I then tracked-down the catalogue images on-line and as you can see there are only six poses, but they come in assortments of twelve, six in a basic-paint finish and six patterned. I couldn't tell you if they are made-up markings or representative, but with the same sculpt used for two different schemes I'm guessing (like assumption - but wilder!) they're made-up's. Available here.

These were from Peter Evans buried in the big-bag of Army Men, the one with obvious markings (angel fish?) seems to be a direct copy of a Prior sculpt (with reverse stripe markings), but again they are all marked Hong Kong, not Macau and the others aren't so obviously Prior, although with different sources crediting two different crabs to Prior (one of which looks like this sculpt) and me not having any Priors here to compare-with; I'm sticking with 'after Prior'!

They are also all laced with a piece of fine thread, so may have been part of a hanging mobile, all very 'Seventies! Whether they were sold as a mobile or bought as toys and 'crafted' at home is anyone's guess. Actually (after checking); two - the crab and the fish with a stand weren't hung, so maybe a low-maintenance faux-fish tank? And why is the one so much better painted than the others, it's painted to match the Prior as well?

The rest of the local piscine shoal, a varied bunch with - from the left: an eraser-type rubber blow-fish (Schleich 'mini'?), an ethylene pipe-fish (US?), a modern, PVC electric eel from China, a small PVC goldfish similar to but smaller than the first set above, a two-part styrene goldfish (possibly of Japanese manufacture) and a leaping, factory-painted dolphin, probably copied from one of the US premium sets?

To which are addended two crustaceans, the left hand in polyethylene with traces of past having had gold paint round the eyes and the right-hand in PVC.

This chap (from Beverly Hills Teddy Bear - best toy company name ever!) was going to finish the post, he was sent by Brian Berke over a year ago, and was waiting for this exact post . . . to finish! However, no one ever said life was fair, or if they did (say it) they were lying, or unbearably, sickeningly lucky . . .

. . . so Brian sent this the other day to trump the Nemo-shark at the finishing post! Literally - because the post was in edit and nearly got published the other day.

I thought these to be bootleg Iwako erasers but I think they're the same ones we had in Poundland-Plus here, however it had already struck me it's clear that about 30% of all 'Iwako' erasers out there are bootlegs.

Given the history of relations between Japan and China over the last few hundred years, there probably isn't any licensing involved from the Nippon-end, or much policing from the Beijing-end! What's less understandable is that high-street names like Wilkinnson's-Wilko and WHSmith are happy to carry the bootlegs, heaps of them!

That's yer'fish, you'll have to find you own chips, and we'll probably not return to these 'till I get the similar sample of mixed odds-and-sods out of storage.

A is for Amscan

I promised we'd start Rack Toy Month with an image-heavy, blurb-light look at Amscan, and this is that post, all sent to the Blog by Brian Burke - so many thanks to him - and all current or recent (last year's-) Amscan production/US issues which should still be track-down-able.

Pencil rubbers/erasers, some of which appear to have had a pncil-sharpener stuffed in their open mouths, or somewhere even more uncomfortable!

Stretchy-aliens (and catapult'able!) and dinosaur skeletons; Dinosaur skeletons have been a common trope for a while now, and there's probably enough out there for a small sub-collection should anyone feel so inclined!

Small vehicles with enough plastic to earn their right to feature here! Three pick-up trucks, three dog-catcher vans and two puddle-jumpers, it's a cheap way of providing transport for war-games armies?

And a bulk set of animals, there seem to be 3x12, and while they are not in-scale with each-other, they are a bargain if you've got kids and a party happening at the same time, compared to some of the 'party favours' you see over here, these are good!

'Cheepie' die-cast sports cars, and all-plastic F1 types, I love the latter, it's a pity there are six identical cars though, if they were all different colours they'd be more use, but anything with an HO figure in the cockpit scores brownie-points with me!

Whistles, qualifying for the Blog under the novelty banner, you can see from the backgrounds that there are bags of one type in older packaging and mixed bags in last-years graphics and it seems State News is the place to look for all these - if you're over the pond - as I know Brian shot them together in a session.

Both sides of some wacky, googlie-eyed, alien-head, key-rings - what else can one say about them, that's all the bases covered!

Shifting table-tennis/ping-pong balls out of season! Or should that be wiff-waff now?