N is for Northfield Products

Do you remember this image, from one of the earlier donations from Chris Smith;

 

A resinated slate (or coal?) lady on the left, what turned out to be Tringa Toys, via Toyway in the middle, and a Britains Highland Piper, trapped in a bottle. At the time I said of the right-hand item: "The final piece is very interesting, clearly a Scott's tourist thing, he is a HK-production Britains Herald piper, held on a cork plinth with a piece of textured green Plasticine . . . and a blob of glue? The tartan band, other than hammering-home the Scottish nature of the item, is probably hiding a clever join at the base of the bottle, or a not-so-clever join bodged with glue?"
 

And, a few months later, I found marked items on feebleBay, of a similar nature, employing the same tartan ribbon, which have been in Picasa for a few years, waiting for the right moment to show, which following a purchase at Sandown four weeks ago, is now!

 

Revealing themselves to have been entrapped by a Northfield Products of Edinburg, I fear they are a little disingenuous as to their London design or Hong Kong manufacture! The contents have actually broken loose, and slide up and down, but you can see how the figures are landscaped onto a piece of hardboard, with green Plasticine, and shunted in from the wide end, before the join is hidden with the tartan tape!

 

My hand looks strangely stunted in that third shot, I can assure you, I currently have perfectly normal hands, and will blame foreshortening, or AI? . . . buzzztt . . . pling! "Northfield Products refers to several different businesses, most prominently Northfield Farm, known for high-welfare free-range pork, beef, and lamb sold online and at markets like Borough Market; Northfield Furniture, offering handcrafted wooden items like toilet seats and trays; and Northfield Freezing Systems, an industrial brand by JBT Corporation for large-scale food processing. Other mentions include school uniforms and even a shoe model." 

 

This is a wind-up music box, with the mechanism hidden in a tartan gift-box, and the same bottle as the loose one, Chris sent to the Blog. It also has the Frea Scotland (from Scotland) sticker, which is missing on the new, larger band-bottle from Sandown's show.

 

And the shipping box the larger bottle came in, this also has the sticker. Now the next question, because there's always a next question, is: were there earlier ones which used the better quality, UK-made, Herald figures? Anyway, for now, that's another one put to bed - Northfield Products, purveyors of quality tat, to the passing tourist trade!

 

And I bet there are other Northfield items, you could probably build a nice little niche display or cameo collection of them?

 

As we're doing an 'Answer Time', here's confirmation, via a couple of dodgy colour scans of B&W copies, of the earlier (pre-RHA figure) Tringa line-up of 90mm figures, sold through Toyway, and also aimed squarely at the tourist trade.
 

A is for Answered - Box Ticking Toy Major!

The pre-Christmas question time was answered, they're Toy Major, I should have worked it out from some of the pirates, but they don't have the more comprehensive (or complicated!) marking of 'modern' or current Toy Major, so, anyway, that's what they are, and to be fair, I did suggest they looked like Toy Major 'stuff'!

Yes, the fourth from the left/third from the right Alien, is 'Mirrorman'!

And, no, they haven't really improved since we last looked at them here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/10/q-is-for-question-time-u-is-for.html

It occurred to me there was a bit of the Party Pig set of Star Wars knock-off's about them, but I think it was fanciful thinking based on the over-use of Wellington-boots in both sets! It's actually more a case of four 'Hoth' snow-troopers and two AT-AT crew!

Comparison shot with a few other puke-green figures!

Yeah, it's not very 'spacy' writting, but I haven't

imported all the stuff from the old laptop yet!

Q is for Question Time - U is for Uglynauts

These were flagged-up by Fred Barratt in an old Plastic Warrior magazine . . . Around the 150's I think, he'd found them on holiday in Australia, I seem to recall, but didn't have a brand name/mark for them.

 

I have a horrible feeling I've even lined them up the same as the PW article, which, if I have, is pure coincidence, but it's how they lend themselves, with the firers to the right and wavey-hands-man over the lowered arm of the next guy!

They are not very good and look like a group of over-acting firefighters! About 50mm and fun, they are - at least - more spacemen! But hard to place in the oeuvre, they're more 'pulp' than anything else? Cardboard helmets, mechanics overalls and wellington boots!

 

Looking at them enlarged, you could claim they are Star Wars knock-offs, one of those dodgy Italian ones with original space-battle clips over pop-numbers and ninjas! There are two 'AT-AT' pilots and four 'stormtroopers'!

Being spacemen, they do have an enemy! Or, the denizens of several planets to conquer/destroy! These are not much better, but marginally more believable, and I have a red example of the chap holding the cattle-prod (2nd from the left) somewhere in storage, so they must have been issued in other colours?

 

Base mark is like some Toy Major stuff, and some of the similar pirates we've seen from Redbox, or even the buff/tan Halloween sets we've featured in the last few years, can anyone add anything other than "They were in Australia around 2010"?

 

Now known to be [earlyish] Toy Major.

F is for Follow-up - M is for Monkey Business

Many thanks to Chris Smith for this particular follow-up, he quite quickly solved the question of the unknown helmeted 'cool runnings' character in a Wookie-suit, it was actually a board game, the original seeming to be from Spear's and my examples probably budget Hong Kong clones.

The item in question; Spear's Monkey Race, a game for younger players, the dice only have 1's, 2's and 3's to drag the race out a little longer! Les Singes Grimpants, sounds painful, but is - I suspect - 'the griping monkeys'?

Chris has one in a purple'ish plastic, who is clearly the same beast (in both senses of the word) unlike my deformed, helmeted Ewoks! You can see how the bar is used to lock them in at each stop-point on the climb, it still leaves my chrome-plated chap as a question mark I think, he's the wrong shape for this type of game?

Chris also has this Monkey novelty, looking like similar all-plastic 'dimestore' toys from Thomas, Banner or Pyro or such-like but with more substantial steel cross-bars, as you turn the fancy handle-wheels (in both directions) the monkey jerks about and does cartwheels and stuff, I vaguely remember a similar toy from childhood, possible with a clown figure? Cheers Chris!

S is for Silly-Season Search for Sci-fi Solids

So, while the Tories spent the summer eating each other alive over Brweakshit, Donald Small-hands loaded so many tariffs on China's (sorry; Chai-Nah!)'s components their trade-surplus with the 'States actually went up (because the US buyers had to pay the extra for the bits they needed!) and the BBC stooped ever lower in its desire to lick the arses of Fox and Sky, but not as low as the daily Wail (get your feed from TJF!), we here at Small Scale World had much better ways of seeing the silly season slide by with its record temperatures;

I got my collection out of storage, Brian B sent me lots of pictures and Gisby searched frantically for an ID on some figures, this post is the result!

Ages ago, like two years ago or more, Brian sent me an image of one of his displays which had this trio in the corner, and I asked him if he had a better shot or knew anything about them. He then sent the image I posted back at the beginning of July and I (being a lazy git) sat back and waited for Gisby to reveal all! Gisby, however; missed the hint and did a fantastic job of finding the Buck Rogers figures instead (for which link I've just looked and failed to find the follow-up! Then I remembered Gisby put the links in the comments)! I emailed him with the cry for help, and he was off!

'Racun' - Critter Commandos

He sort of drew a blank, but had checked Team Frog's 'Critter Commandos' (his first thought), as he suspected it might be the work of sculptor Steve Lortz, before he "checked Castle Creations and Lance & Laser, because he [Lortz] sculpted for them, but nope. I tried Archive and Stan Johannsen, because they make 'that type' of figure, even if a different style, but nope".

He then left a message on a vintage forum and got in touch with Paul Lidberg at Team Frog, who correctly ID'd them as being pretty poor sculpts! We all got a bit excited for a moment, thinking they might be quite uncommon, or a bit 'old school' and better images were called-for; which Mr. Berke duly provided . . .

. . . and I sent some on to Gisby, while planning this post around the rest of them, but RTM was bearing-down on me and I had a four-van logistics exercise to arrange! At this point however the story failed to develop into a full, epic quest as someone on the forum had ID'd them and that was - rather . . . that!

It turns out they are by Dark Horse Miniatures who produced these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sets based on their (Dark Horse's) own comics, the sculptor being Ian Lungold, and the foursome who'd caused all the excitement are titled set 178 - After The Bomb Mutants. But they are still nice 'old school' figures so let's have a closer look . . .

The thing is - while a modern maker rightly feels they are a bit poor, when I was a kid this was par for the course and there were dozens and dozens of these things in Military Modelling around '78-'80, and the pre-GW editions of White Dwarf. I used to buy things very much like this from Tangley Model Workshop in Guildford and if you put them lose in your pocket half the detail seemed to have rubbed-off by the time you got them home!

I'm guessing these were mid/late-1980's (at the time of writing I haven't followed the links myself yet!), but in the '80's lot of guys were sculpting this kind of thing in their bedrooms from Plasticine or candle-wax, casting them in Lego-dams or cuttlefish moulds, which is why I have the occasional unknown posts, I keep coming-across unknown metal!

My favourite, 'she' looks like she may be a she, which if they are dogs (mutant dogs) would make her a bitch, and if you encounter a mutant dog with an eye-patch and a big gun; 'Bitch' is the least of it, but the one word you wouldn't use! I think she's probably the leader of the gang as well?

I don't know what to make of this chap, there's some dog around the jowls, but the rest of him is more turtle-meets-mantis! What looked like an unreadable marking on the base equates to neither the maker or the sculptor, nor even the franchise; so just some fettling-marks or something?

Thanks to Brian for indulging me, thanks to Gisby for all his searching and thanks to Paul Lidberg and whoever put the name to the figures; I think they're great!