T is for Tricky Treats

I posted one of these a couple of years ago, but didn't see any last year, however, B&M managed to get another five out this year, although I ate the pumpkin without photographing it in close-up, soz!

 

Not as colourful as last time, but, like last time, I'd describe the flavours as 'tutti-frutti', yet, I did notice that they varied between the lollipops, and it would seem they are all supposed to taste different, nevertheless, there's no hint as to what the flavours are, or which lolly is which? Still in B&M, and worth looking out for instead of photographing all the piles of polymer, land-fill, shite!

 

As I entered the store, the couple ahead of me said "Oh, there's a spider on the floor" and we had a laugh about it, and as they wandered-off to look for whatever they were after, I though, it might need a good home, so rescued it from the detritus under the shelves! I think it had fallen-off one of those big polymer, land-fill, shite piles! There's a trend for 'spider's web' netting, pre-stapled with hundreds of spiders?

P is for Plastic Glass!

Sort of a 'part three', but not really connected to the previous two, which dealt with the 1950/60's stuff, these are the more common stuff from the 1970/80's, and will be quite recognisable to most of you, and really no more than an overview of the other plastic 'vitrines' out there.

 

I sorted the Tags out last night, and 'Glassware' covers everything made of glass from marbles up, but not these, 'Vitrines' covers the real glass versions of these, and they will also have the Glassware tag, while 'Glass Animals' will cover both these plastic ones and the glass ones, so these will have the latter Tag only, marbles will get Glassware only, and real glass animals will have all three Tags, which will hopefully help someone in the future, get the right search-results up?

 

A nice set of six from Hans Postler over the Channel, they are better known, to us, from their many sets of rack-toy soldiers, more in keeping with the main thrust of the Blog, but that this is here, reminds us most of these guys were general 'Toy & Novelty' importers/wholesalers, and would turn their hands to anything they thought they could make a small profit on, and, these are probably 1980's, or later?

 

These have more the look of the '70's about them, and they have tree-hanger rings in them, so there you go, get a daft-looking mouse hung for the festive season! But, you know, if you can't afford the glass ones, because you have some shitty, underpaid job, and live on a trailer-park, and you see these going cheap in the local gas station, or drug store, why not, if only for the kids?

 

Kids aren't snobs, now, I am a bit of a snob, specifically on Christmas decorations, but I was raised to be so, by my late, and much missed mother, who had her own reasons for being like that; Nuns, an even stricter mother and an Edwardian upbringing!

 

'The sins of the Fathers . . .', 'The child is the father of the man'  and all that! There is always a truism in old sayings, wives tales and aphorisms. The tragedy is that somehow, 70-years of progressive democrats, totally failed to educate enough idiots, as to what they were trying to do, and we now have enough Morlocks and Yahoos, who don't get 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel', and they are giving justification to the Trumps, Farages and Le Penns of intolerance?

 

Just as we need the World to come together like never before, the warmongers, climate-deniers, the superstitious, and the anti-science brigades, rise, like muddy, Ork scum from Isengard, to wreak the planet with their ignorance, and singularly selfish stupidity.

 

A knock off Snoopy, an elephant who's also a key-ring, two more of the cocktail glass donkeys, we saw in brown, last time, and a variation on the Hans Postler elephant. The HP set is basically the six commonest types (from experience; that may not be strictly true!).

 

Another elephant, slightly better (slightly earlier?), another mouse, and the deer we saw in one of the comparison shots a few weeks ago. The elephant, if cleaned would have that faux uranium-glass look to him, but I don't know if it's a transparent marker (like most of them) or dyed plastic, and fear if I cleaned him, he might lose all his original colour!

 

A swan and yet another mouse!

 

Two of the mieces, back to back, but not yet in pieces!

 

Two of the elephants, with a small rhinoceros, he's probably from a Christmas cracker, but could equally be a gum-ball, capsule-machine prize, or something from a Lucky-bag, this stuff tended to get around!

 

The Rhino', it's missing one of those crappy plastic key-rings, you press both ends of, to hook onto the plastic oblong which he has retained. Is it meant to be a woolly-rhino'?

 

Only came in recently, and a charm-loop suggests gum-ball or Christmas crackers again?

 

These are interesting, Bam Bam and Pebbles, from the Flintstones, both larger sculpts to, they seem to have been taken from the sort of PVC stuff Bully and Comics Spain might have been issueing, he's holding a club behind his back!

 

While these are equally interesting for having been taken from a set of dogs, which we may have seen here in more realistic colours, as polyethylene toys, but here in the same clear 'canopy' 'styrene, enhanced with transparent coloured marker-pen! We'll look at proper glass ones next!

T is for That Tortle, No, Turtapin, no, Terratoise . . . Doh!

Speaking of Holly musicians (as somebody might have been?!), here's a small orchestra of them from my own collection! I've mentioned this tortoise several times over the years, and I think we've seen him in a mixed-lot post, and this picture has been sat in Picasa since 2016! And, actually, he's got cartoon hands (four digits), so he's neither a turtle nor a tortoise, and definitely not a terrapin! While, maybe only two of these are Holly!

 

The two probably Holly are to the right, neither associated with the Gygax stuff we looked at recently, and not seen together, in a set, I mean, yet, nor do they have the 900-codes of some of the Holly funnimals. But on the left, are cruder copies of both, in the style of stuff by Diener or Imperial, but not marked to either brand, however, manufactured in the same soft silicon-rubber which makes for shite erasers, but excellent pencil-smudgers!

 

The pig will be a lesser-make cake decoration, probably a set of musicians, but maybe just three (the 'Little pigs'), I don't know, while the Topo Gigio character (another left-hooker!) could also be the Portuguese Balin, but I don't think so.

C is for Chained Miniatures!

More glass animals, except these are all plastic, but I explained how and why that Tag is going to work, and glass animals they are, because glass animals they're pretending to be! Looking at Horses this time!

Chained! Make no doubts about it, these critters are going nowhere, until they're glue!

 

While the deer were 'Mum' and two kids, here we get small medium and large of basically the same pose, still connected with the little anodised aluminium chain, and in a rich orange transparency, with yellow-painted higlights and the same big doe-eyes!

 

A darker orange-brown has also come-in to the stash, here compared with the cocktail-glass ornamental donkey, manufactured in a similar colour, in all cases here, a hard, brittle polystyrene.

 

That donkey in full - that's it, more box-ticking! 

G is for Glass Animals - Oh Dear, More Deer!

I was toying, for several years (the folder these come from has been filling since 2020) with trying to establish 'Vitrines' as the collective noun for these, but the trouble is vitrines are already a thing, specifically small glass table-top/mantle-piece display cabinets, sometimes confused with the similar terrarium glass mini-greenhouses for houseplants, or even fancy lanterns for tea-lights!

 

So even if you were minded to go along with me, it wouldn't be ideal, and sometimes confusing, while if you were determined to not cooperate with the naming exercise, it would annoy the hell out of you every time I used it!

 

Equally, some people call them 'Murano', especially on eBay, where EVERYONE's an expert! And, while there are elements of Murano in their production, Murano is a particular form of Venetian Glass, specifically from the island of Murano, and pertains to larger pieces, using techniques not often found in these little novelty animals, which are more generic to glass foundries everywhere, and amateur glass-sculpting hobbyists.

 

AND, we're looking for a word or phrase which will also cover the plastic-tat versions, and 'coloured-transparent-animals-in-glass-or-plastic' is too much of a mouthful, so, they will be 'Glass Animals' in the Tags, even if they are plastic, and I hope that suits everyone!

 

In the order in which they were originally shot, we'll start with the plastic tat! These were a common prize at fairgrounds, where skill in hooping, hooking, magnet-fishing, shooting (air-guns or darts) or knocking a coconut off a pole, could win you your very-own, chained together set of coloured, transparent animals!

 

Chained together, coloured, transparent . . . yeah, well, boys would pick a pack of cap-bombs or something!  A loo-roll 'Furby' (called a Gonk, and predating Furbies by several decades!), or a bottle of bubble-liquid with wand, were other common choices, a Frisbee, or a balsa-wood fighter-plane! But, under multicoloured, flashing lighting, on their little gloss-painted wooden plinths, these boxes looked pretty attractive!

 

One the left, 1950/60's, on the right 1970's, even more-tattier, tat, in a reverse pose, but the charm's still there, and I bet you can still find these in some souks or markets about the planet! In the end, key-rings were added to some of the more substantial, or just 'less-frangible' mouldings.

 

But, in the 1940/50's, you got glass ones! And here, on the left is a box for a glass set, with a slight variation of the other set on the right - lightly oblong box against the first one's true-square, and a variation of code number, 33V as opposed to 33VA?

 

AG or GA does not spell Venice or Murano! German, Czech', American . . . Japanese?

"ArtNo" hints at Germany, does anyone know?

AG could be something-Glass.

 

The glass ones are much finer, and quite delicate, although some strength is imparted by dint of the stretching, and the annealing effects of continued heating and cooling, as the various steps of the manufacturing-process are gone through.

 

Glass got tissue-paper packing, while plastic gets plastic!

 

Comparison between the two, let's be fair to the toy-men of Hong Kong, it's not bad, and in a capitalist world, it's all about the money saved, at least they've tried to make the one resemble the other? No pink bows, or chains, on this (later?) set of plastics?

 

"Come out to play!"

 

Another boxing of the plastics, the little pink bows are illustrated, but the bondage chains are left off all artworks, here credited to an Illfelder Toy Co., of New York, but plainly the same Hong Kong product.

 

A lot I saw on eBay, with pink-glass horses (or donkeys?), the ceramic deer we saw, cropped-out in a previous post a day or two ago (I'm losing track at the moment!), and a chained set of the 'barley-sugar' deer, also in glass.

 

This one, who I picked-up the other day, in a charity shop next to the lucrative (for Rack Toy Month) Post Office in Cranleigh, is slightly more Murano in style with the orange glass-powder sprinkled, or, more commonly 'picked-up' by rolling the molten glass over the ground glass, on it's back, but is, otherwise, following the same pattern as the others, and it's one of the simpler techniques.

 

While these - above - are obviously all mass-produced sets of commercial production, the many glass animals you find, may also include both craft/hobbyist pieces, and end-of-term/end-of-year student test pieces - can you produce, using a set number of techniques, a number of similar sculpts, following a set of recently-taught rules?

P is for Puckator's Polymer Pencil Perchers!

Rather out of sequence, but the next couple of posts will reveal why, I picked these up at a garden centre over Wokingham way, somewhere near Arborfield. Those following the blog for the last few months, will have realised I've discovered garden centres to be a font of many things which have otherwise disappeared from the high-street, but then these huge 'mall' garden centres are why the 'High Street' is disappearing!

 

Pencil tops from Puckator, a name which has gone from near-generic to regular appearances here over the 18-odd years since I found the first dig-your-own-pirate crew! Two more Moomins, not long after the mini-torch, but the author's recently died, so now the money-men can really start making money for themselves rather than her, a phenomenon you often see after the death of a celebrity - capitalism stinks for the rotting carcass it's become. Note that one is an over-moulded semi-flat in relief.

 

And what is my third tree-climbing Panda, I think, and I know I've seen a couple of others? There's a single-issue collection idea there for someone with both limited space and a limited budget; you'd have to scour Alibaba and Amazon regularly!

 

Close-ups - Puckator!

 

Link - https://www.puckator.co.uk/

O is for Orange Tree

Shot these up at the Birmingham Gift Fair, the sort of thing which will turn-up in mixed-lots, years hence, and nice to see a bit of 'eco' wood, among the miles of poured resin and injected plastic!

 

That's it, a few figurals; thick, wooden flats, box ticked!

Website

https://www.orangetreetoys.com/

Q is for Question Time - Whimsical Lead

Again, not so much of a question, as I feel these are likely to prove to be Good Soldiers, but they came as a bulk lot of 'shop stock' with no packaging, which would be an uncommon escape from the garage concern that is Good Soldiers, I haven't seen them in Ron's immaculately-cut, foam-lined 'toy soldier' boxes, on his stall either, and they don't seem to be copies of other, older, plastic figures, as his more whimsical, or fairy-tale-TV-Disney stuff tends to be.

 

These are more 'Good Soldier' like, as the two larger bears seem to be taken from a commonish sculpt, both sides of the channel, and both sides of the pond, often found with backwoodsmen or other Wild West, not holding bowls or spoons, mind!

 

And the girl holding a straw boater behind her back also looks vaguely familiar, but as a group a rather nice Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I would add that Baby Bear is doing a pretty good impression of Mary Plain, while Daddy Bear seems to be a stretched Mummy Bear - owch!

Whereas these Rupert the Bear snowball fighters appear to be unique sculpts, in that they weren't cereal premiums or similar as far as I know, The Tournament Collection did a whitemetal set back in the 1980's, but theirs were smoother finished I feel, and all just standing. From the left Rupet, Podgy Pig and the mischief-makers, Freddy & Ferdie Fox, although how you tell them apart is a mystery to me!

 

So anyways, any ideas, on either set, gratefully received!

F is for Follow-up - Novelty Animals

I obviously lost this in the pile, or they would have been in Augusts post on the subject, and as most are duplicates, they are here now purely as a fillip to that post;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/08/n-is-for-novelty-animals.html

Some of these may even be in that post, but I don't think so? Points to note: 'tabby' version of the common cats, a tiger, new cow, pigs in two colours and a penguin! Also, a new chick with a beret, which makes him an anthropomorph! That's it!

N is for Novelty Animals

I can't remember if someone mentioned these in a comment on an 'H is for How They Come In' post, or if it was in an email, but a conversation was had, to the effect that I would blog them more fully another day, and it turns-out I have more here than I think I have in storage, so here they are!

These cats, are the ones my collection started with, not these specifically, who have only recently build-up here, and I do have a better sample in storage, they are also, along with the frogs, the commonest, or at least that's my experience, I'm sure different animals prove more or less popular in different countries/sales territories and would have been ordered-in accordingly.

I'm equally sure any similarity with the Marx Minikins 'Figaro' from Pinocchio, is purely coincidental, as there were - between 1900 and the 1970's several similar short, fat cats in popular fiction or the arts/entertainment, including two Felix's (I think), Penelope Pussycat, [Babbitt &] Catstello, Muff (from Tom & Jerry's Fluff, Muff & Puff kittens), Corky, Fritz, Lucifer, Pussyfoot and others, so these were aiming at a well-worn constituency!

 

I thought I had a card in the archive with them all on it, as a 'rack-toy', but I can't find it - although I found other things to enhance the post - so I can't tell you if it was an adult with six kittens, or all six as small or large mouldings. The smaller mouldings are commoner, as they were chosen for gum-ball machine capsule-prizes, among other things.

Pigs are also popular, and the Hippo's seem to turn-up with more regularity than some of the others in the range. I don't know, but suspect they may have got themselves into Christmas Crackers at some point, or maybe only the larger ones? They don't all seem to have larger versions, though.

 

The frogs, with a gum-ball machine's insert card below, I have seven poses here, maybe more in storage and there seems to be an eighth on the card, which also has a duplicate for a five count.

 

Other examples, again; there may be more in storage, but you can see it's all the things people tend to collect - puppies, owls, moo-cows, chicks etc. . . I think there were small elephants? The kitten doing a hand-stand (like one of the pigs), is from a later set, not connected with the (1960's?) black ones. While, I didn't realise I'd hidden the tortoise!

 

The tortoise and the rodent (far left) may be from a line of Netsuke look-alikes, their decoration is finer, and they are more realistic sculpts, indeed the rodent may be an Asian water-rat or vole of some kind?
 

The hole in the underside is the unifying factor with all these, although as you can see here, some don't have one! The smaller kitten has the standard hole, while the whole set of pigs (with the exception of 'hand-stand') have one which is large enough to make them pencil-tops?

 

The prone kitten has an oblong hole, and smaller base area figures tend to get smaller holes, and the frog to the far-right has a medium-small one. While typically the large-sized ones have a larger hole, the pair of frogs here have a small and medium-small hole, just to be different!

There is a tendency within the hobby to call all this type of feature mould-release pin-marks, but I suspect that's not the case here, and it's more about minimising material-used, and/or preventing heat-shrinkage on tools with a fast cycle-rate?

I think these have both been on the blog before, but they turned-up while I was looking for the other bits, so here they are again! These three cats are in storage, but probably not yet with the 'master' sample, so you can see there will be quite a few in total.  The bear is later, and probably from a different company, but more on that in a mo'.

 

Just a quick-one on all these, they are similar to Kinder's 'hard plastics' and Kinder followed the concept of cartoony 'styrene animals, but the Hong Kong ones mostly predate Kinder by a decade or more, and while some of the above were claimed in early Kinder collector manuals from Germany, I think they've mostly been excised from current edits as there just wasn't the empirical evidence.

A set of clowns are within the oeuvre, usually sold as cake decorations, as were these Santa Claus figures mucking about, again, slightly newer and contemporary with the bears, we saw them here, with a Model Power iteration and links to Tobar (Hawkin's Bazaar) in the comments! Note the Greensward Leprechaun!

 

I also noticed, while sorting this stuff the other night, that those garden gnomes (hollow plastic, wheel barrow and garden-tools lot, and musician lot), have a smaller, solid iteration, which may be part of this extended range? Six clowns are also sold as cake-decorations.

I've tried not to lecture or pontificate this Rack Toy Month, but I often come back to one message in RTM, with this cheapo', novelty type stuff, you can only pin them down to a brand if you have the packaging with them, otherwise they are any one of several brands AND several anonymous/generic issues, and I'm sure a quick search of evilBay will pull Unique, Carousel and/or Grandmother Stovers into the fold!

To which end Wilton carried families of larger animals, glossy airbrushed; pigs, lambs, squirrels, poodles, pandas, rabbits, chicks &ect. Typically, they were two or three babies and one adult, Culpitt had a set of chicks, but they are larger, and mostly in storage (if I have more than one or two?), so can wait for another day!