C is for Catalogue Cluster

Variously taken from the 1972, 3 and '75-79 catalogue scans the other day, they are sort of eye-candy, but mostly low-res, or not that clear, so to draw the curtain on the recent miniseries, and to get them off Picasa, here they are with a few notes, and in no particular order!

 

Larger playsets.

 

1st version Americans, with 2nd version in the boat, but they seem to have been given 1st version German helmets! I refer you to my previous comments on art-departments m'lud - muppets!

 

Ist version in the box, 2nd version outside the box! Americans again. It's not clear what the Bren-carrier crew have on their heads, but I think it is British helmets.

 

This shot was reversed in the 1976 catalogue, obvious from the red beret!

 

Window boxes.

 

Big beast, post-war British Chieftain Tank it was also issued in German grey, along with this one in a big-box play set, it's expensive when you find it, and rarely complete!

 

More art-department shenanigans here, some of the bases are wrong!

 

A bit silly, the Centurion turret is underscale and won't go through tunnels!

 

More art-department shenanigans here, some of the bases are wrong!

Have I already said that?

 

I think this is a mock-up too, the kneeling guy doesn't look right in the card-art, or in the blister?

 

That's it, I could have done a few more, but the effort of cropping them all was a faff!

 

 =============================================

 

Later the same day - 

 

I've added the Timpo paratroopers to the Parachute toy page, which you can find here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_14.html

M is for Medieval Plunder

Back last May, I shot back over to Basingstoke House to shoot a few things I didn't shoot when I was there previously (2014, published here 2017 - ACW Tag), and I thought I'd check out the gift shop at the same time - here's m'plunder!

 

Poured resin suit-of-armour pen/biro, he'll get the same treatment as that regency lady a few years ago, and be cut flat and based, one day! While the medieval princess is from Papo, and actually a Queen!

 

Modern Westair, they've pretty-much phased-out the old Peltro sculpts now, and issue their own figures in a softer whitemetal, I grabbed Willy Wavelance and Queen Bess, and what I thought was one of the others, in poor light, only to find it was a duplicate playwright! But from the card we can see I'm looking for a Damien Lewis and Sir Francis of the Duck Pond!

 

A fun little activity sheet for the kids gives me two card flats, for that side-bar. You obviously bend the lances after cutting and glueing, and charge them at each other, down the tilts!

F is for Follow-up . . . and Update, and Image Dump, and A-Z Page Update and Contribution and Apology! Highlander Miniatures!

Jason, who I think might be Jason Pontiac (?), sent the Blog a shed-load of Highlander Miniatures stuff, which has been languishing in Picasa since 2020. Now, with Covid-19 that year, then a Mother, Friends and two beloved Cat's, dying about the place, over the next three years, while I fought HMRC, HMCTS, local authorities here and in the Channel Islands, a lazy, belligerent Brother and an . . . uncommunicative Step Mother, not to mention venal auctioneers, grasping antiques dealers, and dishonourable Estate Agents, I hope Jason will forgive me for taking so long to sort this out, especially given that I have churned out some 2000+ posts in that time, but it needed time, it needed a clear head . . . and there's more!

Armour

M60 A1's, A2 'Starship's, M107 and M110 SPG's

 

All the work on this ephemeral firm has been done here at Small Scale World over the last 11-years, with help from several people. And as part of my own research, back at the start (2014) I found, when Google was still useful, a catalogue, listed in a University's research and reference library, back in the US.

I wrote to them asking if it would be possible to have a copy, for wider dissemination (on the Blog), expecting a small fee for a couple of stock images, only to be told it would be in excess of $25 dollars, which makes one wonder how people can afford serious research, the answer is increasingly, they go to European or other countries' places of learning!

Anyway, I didn't proceed at that time, knowing that if it existed it would turn-up, and in 2023, with the images from Jason still sitting here, I found one on eBay, which with postage was less than the American Uni' wanted, so now I have the whole thing, to share with everyone, for free, and which is on the A-Z entry, or it will be in the next few hours (by the time I publish this), covers, below;

Front

 

Back

 

It came with a 1977 dated price list, but there's an extra set, listed in the catalogue, and descriptions differ between the two, and with the cards we've already seen, so it's a hard one to annotate, and I've been re-writing the listing for an hour or two already, and thought I'd get this started to help sort out my thoughts, and the images, some of which will go over there!

Jason's main aim was showing us the longer-barrelled SPG, and the standard M60 A1, but he also has a lot of infantry , guns and other stuff, which he remembers going to a ". . . toy store 'warehouse' in Brooklyn in the mid 80's" with his father, and purchasing them, presumably as clearance?

Image dump - finally!

 

Another small development, was the purchase a couple of years ago of an A3 scanner, allowing for the scanning of larger documents, and so I scanned the old broadsheet-cutting as one piece, and because the catalogue is split here, and whole on the A-Z entry, while the split cutting has been on the A-Z page for a number of years, I thought it could go here, whole, for balance!

So, many apologies to Jason for the time it's taken to get his images up here, and many thanks for his sharing them with the rest of us. His subsequent purchases of carded sets, and some AFV close-up's, have gone on the A-Z entry, along with full-scans of the gate-fold catalogue, the price-list, a fully updated product listing and some card scans.

And to anyone else who's sent stuff, I haven't got round to yet, it will all get put-up here eventually!

 

It needed a quiet Christmas morning . . . and half the afternoon!

 

https://smallscaleworld-g-h-i.blogspot.com/2016/02/highlander-toy-and-miniature-military.html 

 

The full entry is still not 100% complete, and certainly not definitive, but it's the best info' on the Web, and seems to sum up the company's history and product list, to a satisfactory level.

A is for Another 'Lucky Bag', and Some Seasonal Stuff!

A few other purchases in the last few weeks, and after the blind surprise 'Lucky bags' we saw from The Works earlier in the year (October), I noticed similar bags in Poundland the other day, and again got the Dinosaur themed one as the best chance of a figural, and as a comparison with the disappointing inflatable of the last example.

 

A task made slightly easier by the fact that the contents are illustrated on the outside of the bag! Stickers, puzzle, skeleton, collector cards and a 'bonus' key-ring . . . if it's listed, pictured and included in every bag, it's not a bonus, it's a priced element of the contents!

 

A few minutes later I popped into the aforementioned The Works, and bought these, as apart from the fact I thought they would make nice additions to the wooden-trees subsection, they might also prove useful as photo-shoot accessories in the future?

 

To that end, here they are, both artfully arranged (!) in the fashion of an interiors' magazine shoot! You have to imagine they are on an immaculately-polished, white piano, with a recognisable supermodel, just out of focus and staring intently at a Hockney, on the wall!

 

Mostly duplications of one sort, or another, I also picked these up on my day's shopping in Farnham a few weeks ago, they sort of complete what Opie calls a cameo, in that we have previously seen the Santa's in individual bags the same as those the snowmen are in, here.

 

We have also seen the snowmen in the red and green scarves, along with a mauve version, so this blue one is new. And we saw a copy set of the Deer, red-Santa sleigh, snowman (red scarf) and tree, also from The Works, so that's pretty much all known versions of originals and copies, now, in several variations of packaging!

R is for Rack-Toy Round-up - New York

Brian B has sent us a sample of what's hanging on the hooks in New York's Bodegas and Trading Posts this festive season, and there are some past names to check again, with soldiers, frogs and, err, well, we'll get on to Brain Rot in a minute!

 

A nice set of tropical frogs from JPW International, probably seen before in different packaging, possibly available elsewhere for more 'geld' under a bigger name (K&M, CollectA or one of the Japanese moulders?), but with 8-10 in the bag, around the 30-cents mark, per frog!

 

Hunson's current 'Army Men' offering is a mix of two armies of figures, being later sub-piracies of Matchbox and other figures, it's better than nothing in a landscape which has so few army toys beyond the big-box, generic, action figure stuff.

 

Speaking of Action Figures - this unbranded set has an interesting action-figure scaled swamp-bike at the top! I can't really make out the figures, but I think they are the little ones we've seen many times now from Poundland and the long-gone 99p Stores?

 

While Brain Rot is . . . err . . . a knock-off? Continuation? Extension . . . take? I think we'll call it a 'take', a cleaner take on the Skibidi Toilet meme-stuff, which we also saw here, also courtesy of Brain a while back, apparently not coming out of Italy, I shall defer to Jan, who covered them on his Site of Curiosities a few weeks ago, and found a link which goes some way to explaining!

T is for Two - Christmas Plastics

A couple of plastic sets turned-up in The Works back at the start of September, which was a bit too early for crimbo' posts, but it's not often you see new, plastic cake decorations these days, so here they are now!

 

Two different sets, each providing for a typical vignette for the cake, only a vignette from a 1970's cake! I don't think people do cakes like that any more, or if they do, they use the 'family' decorations, to do the same traditional cake each year?

 

Looks to be a mix of polystyrene mouldings (the two figures), poured resin (tree) and air-dried-clay - the candy-cane, so ancient and modern in the one teeny bag!

 

Penguin delivering Christmas prezzies!

N is for November's Sandown Park - Wild West, Animals and Odds

Winding-up the Sandown purchases from a month ago now, and it's mostly animals, and the Wild West, with a few odds & sods, cartoon, TV-Movie stuff and the like, to look at this time.

 

I have two beliefs about this set (which was a gift from John Begg, I think), one is that it's from the same series as the #445 Mobile Task Force, and Space Explorer sets issued by Gordy, Woolbro and others, this being one 'sock' instead of two, and a generic issue with no branding-overprint. The other is that we were bought a set each from Webb's the Newsagent, in Hartley Wintney, by Mum, one wet weekend, in the holidays!

 

There was a two-sock Fort Cheyenne under the 445-code, but that had a version of the fort, and different figures/horses, so this may be a lookie-likey , and leaves the first belief questionable for now, the second belief is 100%, I well-remember the colour samples, and trying to wiggle the horses hooves into the carpet fibres to keep them standing up!

 

I bought a second pirate set from the same chap as last time, and it's already been opened and shot for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so a couple of months after the last one, and there are already two folders ready for next year!

 

A  mix of HK smallies, including several sub-piracies of the 2nd version knights, in red, I'd had a few yellow ones but I think these are new, usually you find both the Giant originals and the copies in silver or black. They probably belong on the horses to the right, but this is how they came!

 

Someone tried to 'mend' a broken tail, by rolling a scrap of faux-suede up, very tight, setting it alight, and stuffing it up the horse's jacksie! Given how common these are, and how many would come in even a small 6d set, that was a hell of an effort! Probably a 'favourite' horse? Kids are a bit like that, you can have fifteen white horses in the bag, but if one's slightly grey and becomes your favourite, you'll move Heaven & Earth to keep in going!

A rather tatty 2nd generation copy of one of the Hong Kong dogs we looked at in a couple of round-up posts a year or two ago, and the smallest King Kong in the world! Certainly the smallest I've seen, who wasn't moulded into a resin Empire State Building keepsake!

 

Probably a 1d-1¢, gum-ball capsule prize or Christmas cracker novelty, it really is tiny, less than 20mm! In all other respects it's the same as all other HK gorillas; soft polyethylene, with a basic MADE IN HONG KONG mark.

 

A sample of broken Cherilea dinosaurs, which Adrian gave me from his bits box. Useful nevertheless, against colour variations, or even to combine with others into dodgy Dr. Moreau subjects at a later date? I mean they are so rare these days, due entirely to their brittleness, that some are better than none, and they will be added to a bigger sample with some better ones we have seen here, previously, at Small Scale World.

 

Two Britains copies, a rather nice Hong Kong Herakd clone, from Hong Kong! And a damaged sub-scale rendition of the war-dancing Swoppet, also from the colony of intellectual property crime!

 

Kinder, all 1980's, I think. If you were to 'age' Kinder like comic-fans age their stuff, these would be 'silver age'! The head and hat, is from a slightly different set to the complete figure, I think, while the fire-appliance with two mini plug-in firefighters was late 80's, and I actually kept a few of the tractors at the time, so there's a tub of these to add-to, or cannibalise from, to make whole examples.

 

Damaged guard from Cherilea's executioner set, another Invicta dinosaur, a couple of Esci Americans and a partial pig, in the style of the Xandria key-rings, but all 'ethylene, and probably from another source?

 

Four 'funnimals', and all probbaly Holly rather than Lik Be, certainly the llama-like and squirel-thing come in a set with the known Holly guitar-turtle, while the cow was issued by Mail-Order outfit Colonial Studios, with a set of otherwise realistic (Briatins copies) farm animals.

 

This is just marked Hong Kong, but is not a bad rendition of Disney's Pluto, and holds-up against the Marx, Heimo, and early-Schleich stuff of the 1970's, a lump of stable-PVC, I guess the ring is the remnants of a key-chain?

 

More of the cartoon mini-animals often credited to Kinder, but which predate Kinder by a decade or two, and were issued as carded 'families', as gum-ball machine prizes and through other such novelty avenues. Kinder would issue similar 'hard plastics' in the 1980's, but usually larger models.

 

UK Cereal premiums, haveing other outlets elsewhere, here they were all cereal, with two jig-toys, three of the Aristocat figures and a Brian the Snail from the Magic Roundabout, and while we now know Brian could have been a Wavyline promotional, I think in this shade of blue, he might be a European ice-cream premium.

 

I think we might have the Little Baby Jesus (or Moses?) in red here, a rather tatty Marx Snow White (from Swansea?) and a lovely survivor of Japanese blow-moulded lightness, in the probable 'styrene copy of an earlier celluloid Santa Claus.