H is for Half Moon Bay

One of the trends I noticed at the Spring Gift Fair in Birmingham a fortnight ago, was the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, most of it way outside the scope of this blog, even allowing for the nostalgia element, but at least three stalls had related products on display, and this grouping of stuff from Half Moon Bay, did include a couple of pieces which might tempt some loyal readers into parting with their hard-earned!

 

Specifically the snow-shaker, but the pencil top is close to acceptable as a micro-flat and the ceramic 'thing' could qualify as a super-deform! You can also see the corner of a set of place-mats with all the characters, Blue Meanies, Apple Droppers etc.

 

Website - there's a shaped mug too!

https://www.halfmoonbayshop.co.uk/

H is for How They Come In - While in London!

I managed to get up to the party shop at Clapham Junction again this year, it's a routine now, I don't really look at my watch on the second troll round the show (after the pub!), but once it's obviously dark and heading for five' or six'ish, I get the over-ground back to Clapham and wander up to the party shop (which closes late).

I have a little mosey round, and head back to the Station, find an hour or more's the wait for a Fleet stopper, so get the next up-line to Waterloo, grab a burger and get the fast-to-Woking service out of there which slides through Clapham without stopping! It used to be every half-hour from both stations, but since privatisation it's got steadily harder to go anywhere conveniently - thanks Tories!

But before all that shenanigans, Mr. Evans handed me a pack from The Toy Project (one of several toy charities both sides of the pond) as soon as I arrived! They actually weren't at the show this year - having not been invited - but Peter had been up and picked me a handful of useful figures, among which were another Beatle (Macca-moneybags is the left-hooker isn't he?) cake decoration, some Lucky Toys (et al.) figures and a farmer from one of the sets Pagett/A-Z were carrying a couple of years ago.

The Piratical chap in yellow might be from a board-game, he seems to have a cocked or tricorne-hat designed to stack something (counters) on and a very board-gamey base? A Disney princess type and small PVC farmer (New Ray?) make up the lot - thanks Peter, and you can support The Toy Project here.

So to the party shop; they had moved everything around and while the novelty/party-favour section was larger, there was less there of interst to me/you, but I managed a set of Iwako knock-offs including a third iteration of the micro-tank, this time branded to Symex and the same guns we saw last time (The Works) as a single, but now three!

I also bought these as they were dirt cheap, and I think they are a re-shoot of an old 1970's tool; the 'rubber jiggler' / hollow finger-puppet dinos', here a bit stiffer, but still rubbery! Actually there's a fair bit of dinosaur stuff gathering in the queue so we will have a dino-fest soon! And note they have been bought-in as Asda clearance (I vaguely recall eschewing them in Asda as too expensive around the 4/5-quid mark a year or two ago?), so they may still be findable in Walmart 'over there'?

As it happens, the Iwako and 'Rock Star' boxes were both still here, they went to storage last week but I quickly shot these 'cumulative' shots before I shipped them out!

S is for Subbuteo's Snappy Songsters!

Although known to be by Subbuteo in the UK, it's likely these were bought-in, and probably from Hong Kong, for several reasons, not least that a falco subbuteo (European hobby), as a small raptor, probably eats beetles when it's had a poor day's hunting larger pray!

Two other [proper!] reasons for suspecting importation are that 1) they were also issued carded in the 'States with white rosette-backs as lapel badges, presumably to cash-in on a US Tour?

2) They are made of a softish plastic which could be either a polyethylene or a dense PVC, either way; it's a much better material for making footballers than the brittle styrene Subbuteo was using at the time.

Nevertheless, they are very well-done compared to all the other 'Beatles' cake-decorations we've looked at, although Subbuteo sold them as stand-alone (stand- together!) figures in a window-box set. All three guitars are different shapes, with well-registered stickers applied, and all are held in place with a small black rubber-band on the note-forming/fret-board wrist.

The drummers stool is glued on and the Drum-kit usually has more than just a bass-drum if I recall correctly (with a stand of some kind?), but a slip of the scissors (you had to cut the kit out) and you might easily end up with just the main drum! Indeed, the lack of a 'proper' drum-kit may point to the US badges coming first?

P is for Pop Music . . . ♩♬ m'Pop, m'Pop, m'Pop-Musik! Talk'a'bout doobie-doo Pop Musik! . . . ♩♫

Picked this quintet up the other day, for a song ('juke-box hero' . . . heh-heh!) I know I have a purple one in storage, but five was too good to pass-up, they're playing pieces from a board game the name of which escapes me but I haven't got time to look it up (timing's all shot to pieces this week!) and I think there may be a sixth (black?) piece missing, or was it a five-player game? I'll dig it out next week.

Pretty clean-cut for pop-stars; I tend to think of them as Cliff Richard'a'likes! Around 54mm and made in a standard model-kit type polystyrene you often find them at shows in the 50p rummage sections with broken or damaged guitar-necks.

Detail shots.

Thought for the day

There used to be a joke that when Elvis died there were x-dozen registered Elvis impersonators or tribute acts, ten years later there were x-hundred registered and ten years after that; x-thousands of the bespangled crooners, and that extrapolating those figures forward, the entire population of the planet would be Elvis impersonators by 2051!

Now - with news of a holographic Roy Orbison back on tour, and Elvis having already had similar treatment, will we one day fill the known universe with the sound of comfy-rock; with the entire population of the human race either impersonating a 50's pop-star, or paying to see a holographic one? Will planets of fake Elvis's launch vast armada's of killer death-ray armed starships against planets of Roy Orbison-a-likes.

Will the night-skies of a thousand star systems be lit-up with the supernova-flashes of intergalactic battle fleets deciding arguments between fans of Supertramp on one side and Supertrooper on the other! And will they all go into battle playing Wagner's Ride of The Valkyrie's? In space; no one can hear you croon!

Or should it be 'Sista', good name for a band; slimmer-sista! Comparison shot; all the others have been seen here at Small Scale World before, trouble-is they are hidden in the tag list under 'Band' I think, which is full of Guardsmen, one day I'll have to re-tag the relevant posts under 'pop music' or something, but we have a couple more HK sets to come and will revisit Gem at some point. Not to forget - rock star Smurfs!

Emirober on the left, two Hong Kong's and a resin 'unknown' (second from right) along with the game piece; centre.

♩♬ New York, London, Paris, Munich - Everybody talk about . . . m'Pop Musik! ♩♫ 

1st May 2020 - The upper five were joined a while later - Courtesy of Glenn Sibald in Australia) with a sixth, pink one, which revealed them instantly to be Tri-Ang as - together - they looked just like the Cops & Robbers figures seen here before!

 

2nd April 2024 - the resin figure is a Cakeboards chap.

C is for Crooning Liver'blokes

Or: M is for More Insects!

There was some anniversary the other day, a photograph book of some kind I believe, I wasn't following the minutiae of the business but I believe it involved that popular Merseyside beat-combo from the sixties - init'bluuurrd!

You see these (or - more usually - part sets of them) on evilBay from time to time and having covered most of the other examples of the plastic plectrum pluckers here at small scale musician's world; I leapt at the chance to shoot this set of bobble-headed, flat-fringed, suited & booted, boy-band'ers.

A tad fuzzy, I'm afraid; much as I remember their output! It's a bit like trying to photograph insects! "♫♪Whay-hey we're the . . .♪♫ ", oh-no - they were monkeys weren’t they!

You could almost use them as pencil tops, but they are quite heavy, so only advisable if you wanted your handwriting to read like one of Donald's tweets . . . WTF? The man's a loon, they elected a loon to the highest office in the land!

The only reason you can't hear the world laughing at the OOH-KAY is because they're laughing louder at the OOH-ess-AY!

Oi, Macca! There's a song in there somewhere?

Thanks to Adrian of Mercator Trading for allowing me to photograph these.

R is for ROCK & ROLL!

We've looked at most of the Hong Kong Beatles and a few other Rock Star types here in the past, here's one that escaped closer attention . . .

. . . The Swingers Music Set - Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!, boxed in all its slightly jazzy loveliness, it's not that rare, but like all the 'Beat Combo' sets does command a premium, especially when in this sort of condition, with the fine mouldings of the mic-stands, the cymbals &etc, all present.

Ladies and gentlemen; May I present for your pleasure, fresh from the top nightclubs of Tokyo, Kowloon Bay and 'Kay-Ell', the world famous, Sino-Japanese Beatles tribute act - The Beatelles!
Like most of these HK sets, they don't claim to be the fab four (the left-handed guitarist is the giveaway), and while none of them really resemble the boys; unlike the other sets these don't even look like Western musicians at all!

Seemingly based on 'The Swingers' we've already seen here (large blue ones) before I knew their title, they are poorer sculpts, but a fuller set, and about the same 66/70mm size, both sets would seem to be following the 'Go-Go Swingers' we have yet to see here, who are smaller and the best sculpts of these HK chaps.

With the three - above mentiond - and another 54mm HK set (in four colours), the named Spanish (Emirobar) and British (Subbuteo) Beatle sets, the board game guitarists (also four colours) and Gem for Culpitt's band (several colours), you can mount quite a festival on your display shelves, add the two types of Beatle 'Bobble-Head' (blow-moulded and styrene) I've tracked down over the years and all you need is love . . . and Nirvana's front man! Or is he from Guns and Roses?

Practicing air-guitar on a beach-inflatable; he's a resin cake decoration, in shops now, probably available from Wilton over the pond, or one of the bigger online cake-decoration suppliers, that only leaves me needing the Mattel Pop 'Cuties'!

Thanks to Adrian at Mercator for letting me shoot the photographs.

C is for Corgi Characters

This is the least complete of all these Corgi posts and yet it was the largest area covered by Corgi who really bought into the licensing 'thing', producing a lot of adult and children's TV, comic and movie characters, or vehicles based on them.

My problem being that while often know what's what, it can take years to correct the 'unknown' boxes, especially as in recent years my stuff has been in storage twice, in three venues with 6  moves! So...most of the Sci-fi,  Marvel and DC stuff is elsewhere and a lot of the anthropomorphic cartoon stuff likewise, while the Superheroes are deliberately in another box...but here are a few to give a flavour of the oeuvre...

The yellow submarine, who (of a certain age) didn't have one of these, not because we knew what it or they were/was, but because our still slightly uptight late-Edwardian parents could attach themselves to the younger 'Hippies' vicariously, by buying us a psychedelic cartoon submarine barley large-enough for the four-man popular beat-combo occupying it!

Hey maaaan...anybody got a carrot...I know I've done that one before...I'll do it again...he was a stoner! And that F***ing snail...I hated the bloody whining whingeing moaning mollusk!

Tom and Jerry - unbeatable, when Tom gets sliced into a dozen pieces by a toaster or something falls to the ground in a heap of pieces, shake himself together and continues the pursuit! Why didn't he go and live somewhere else, dumb-ass! There was a Tom, and this toy came out 30-odd years before Small Soldiers and their roller-skate.

Pink Panther...two cool for school - period. There was another PP vehicle (the pictured one is off some kind of motorbike thing), a car with a huge fly-wheel and with a pull-strip motor, not sure it was Corgi thought, or whether it had a separate figure?

All the above are favourites with a whole new generation of infants, though the Magic Roundabout has had scene and dialogue changes/makeovers.

Buck Rogers and dribble or whatever the pet-robot was called - Yes; I could look it up but then someone might think I give an ess-aich-one-tea!

The Hardy Boys, there are a couple of three figures missing from the bands line-up here, not a big seller so the figures aren't as numerous.

The figure with a cloth-cap is from Postman Pat or Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder or....it's from the Corgi flood years...

Wonder Woman (looking like a native-American dwarve), Spider-man and the Green Lantern? Hornet (thanks M7 - see comments) There are loads missing here, other Spidy's, three sculpts of seated Batman & Robin's in two sizes, a Hulk or two, a large Batman, Superman...

W is for Warblers-on-Wirrel

Wellll, overrated in my opinion and I was always a Stones fan, although they are all sell-out litigious capitalist swine now!

One of the first words I remember actually 'learning' was Synergy (the first ever - in my memory - was People, taught to me by Mr Barker, headmaster of the village school in Heckfield, long-ago turned into yuppie-flats...pea ee oh pee el ee, it sort of rhymed!), and the reason I looked it up (other than someone had used it in a context I half-understood) was because like 'Egypt' it had too many of the odd letters in it to make sense! Suffice to say that the dreaded Wikipedia defines it thus; Synergy is two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable.

Well, if I hadn't posted the Spanish-made mop-tops the other night, and if the seller hadn't taken these to Sandown Park on Saturday, they wouldn't be here now...is that synergy or coincidence? It's synergy in my book, as I've seen them before and not bought them, but had half a mind to find some more Beatles at the show!

When I mentioned the other sets, the other day, I was thinking of a set of 70mm Hong Kong figures and the Subbuteo set, so when I saw these in a little bag, I was surprised by the size (54mm) and the level of painting which was much better than the larger ones (or at least - I think it is, I'm not sure as they are in storage so I can't check!). Not having any funds I hid them, rushed away to borrow some dosh off a mate and went back to see if they were still there, they were...and I paid too much for them! Moral...never rush away from a stall-holder and then come back panting with a large denomination note!


Then once I had them in my grubby mitts and showed them to the other guys - we were hanging around the 'car-boot sale' some dealers have on the terraces of the main stand while we wait to get in - they all said something to the effect '...they're not the big Hong Kong ones...' so it was agreed they were worth the effort, and means I can bring them to the blog while they are still half topical, I can still bring you the other two sets another day, and compare these with the larger red ones (I'm pretty sure they are the same poses pantographed up, or down?).

M is for Mop-topped

A quick box-ticking exercise this one; That too-famous (in my opinion) bunch of mop-topped beat musicians John, George, Ringo and the money-grabbing one were immortalised in plastic several times, both in Hong Kong and the UK, but also in Spain.

Whence this set issued-forth, it was apparently a mail away premium offered by a Spanish Comic which I'm assuming was called Emirober? But it may have been several comics and such-like in different European countries? The figures were probably made by someone else...Jecsan maybe? The comic obviously thought they would sell like hot cakes as they ordered what seems to have been hundreds of thousands of sets, with the result that a quick Google will reveal them to be as common as anything, with whole stock boxes regularly going through auction houses, while FeeBay and it's contemporaries always have a few sets kicking around.

The trouble being that despite it's availability, dealers seem to think that all things 'Beatle' must carry a premium, and tend to price it to reflect that. Fortunately there was an ethical dealer at the recent Birmingham Toy Soldier Show, who had a bunch at a couple of quid each ($3/4 or Euros), so I picked one up to 'tick the box' here.

Each card is different, having identical sides, which differ from the other three to be sought if you are that level of completest, The cards each having a different Liverpudlian balladeer as the central theme. I went with the one I think is meant to be John Lennon. Figures also come in orange, sky-blue and dark green plastic, giving the same completest 28 figures to find!

M is for Mop-Tops - Culpitt 'Battle of the Bands'!

More Culpitt's - These are 45mm 'Beatles' era musicians, if you want a collection they turn up all the time on eBay, however, don't pay silly Buy-it-now prices, you can pick them up for pennies if you're patient!

The pale blue variant I mentioned in 'lazy post' last night, this is a 'full band' there was no left-handed guitarist, so they never tried to be the Beatles, although there are at least three lots of figures in 54/60 & 70mm that do represent that very band.

The various parts of the drum-kit with the brown boys, note; there is a slight colour variation with some a pinkish-brown, this doesn't show well in the photo, but there is a clear difference. The skins on the drums are paper stickers and were applied to one side only.

Two of the three green band with Culpitt's footballers, the footballers were never made in the brown, but there may well be yellow band around somewhere, but I've yet to come across any, nor indeed red ones? Yet the drum-kit only seems to come in red!

The figures are unmarked, and late production would have come from Hong Kong, however early production will be UK-sourced. The lack of a mark makes it hard to say for certain weather they were by Gemodels or Festival. Most think Gem, however the base designs, size/scales and sculpting are so similar between the two companies, I'm beginning to suspect that Festival was a trade-mark of Gem, but they may just have been sharing sculptor!