H is for Hairy Horrors!

When I was a kid, Trolls were a simple thing to get your head round, they were slightly larger, toad-skinned goblins who lived under bridges and ate slow, or dim witted goats.

 

Then Tolkien arrived in teenage'hood, with trolls the size of land-tanks who breathed fire, while the Nottingham Mafia and Garry Gygax's D&D monster handbooks, along with dozens of whitemetal manufacturers split Trolls twenty ways, and suddenly they could be large, small, relatively harmless, existentially dangerous to the planet, green, brown, orange or yellow, or anything between!

 

These trolls, the 'Scandi trolls', fill the slightly larger, relatively harmless, goblin niche, I think, but clearly this lot are strangers to the barber's chair!

 

The final tranche of Brian Berke's Icelandic shelfies and he thought the chap with the shield reminded him of Eccles from The Telegoons, while I thought those (red background) reminded me of Michel Bentine's Potty Time, characters which was a sort of second spin-off from The Goons!

 

Many thanks to Brian for all these, they've been a lot of fun!

T is for Tröll sem eru í Treyjasum!

Apologies to any Icelandic Loyal Readers who may have just chocked on their elevenses, for my miserable attempt at a line of Icelandic grammar, and even I know (now) Treyja are really cardigans not jumpers, but sometimes my desire to be a clever-dick outweighs any need to be more sensible!

 

More Trolls from Brian's visit to Iceland, and these are your every-day, regular tröll, not seasonal guys, and it seems even the locals need jumpers to meet the weather in those northern climes! The jumpers themselves are part of the resin moulding, but I think the little woolly hats are actually real, knitted apparel, while, obviously, hatless tröll have too much hair for hats! More on the hair in the final part of Islensku tröll.

Y is for Yule Lads!

It's always fun finding out how other people do Christmas, because it's not all the modern iconography of Albert, Prince-consort, The Saxe-Coburg-Windsors or Coke Cola, endured by the English-speaking world, with or without crackers! And I well remember nearly having a fight with Krampus and his 'pals' in an Austrian pension one cold night in December!

 

In Iceland, they have the Yule Lads, a bunch of Icelandic Troll types (more to come on them), who fool about at this time of year, each having a day between the 12th and the 24th, in the lead-up to the big day, almost an half-advent of annoyance! Brian Berke, roving reporter, sent some shots he took in Iceland, and off down the rabbit-hole I went!

 

They actually leave little gifts in children's shoes, the equivalent of our stockings, but lesser, yet daily! However, if you've been bad, you might get a rotten potato, or a sour-onion!

 

This is Pottaskefill (Pot-Scraper, December 16th), he scrapes the food remains from the pots and pans!

 

While Skyrgámur (Skyr-Gobbler, December 19th) loves skyr (Icelandic traditional yogurt-type dairy-produce), and if you don't leave some out for him, he'll just steal it!

 

Ketkrókur (Meat-Hook, December 23th), he steals meat, gripping it with a hook! Another steals sausages!

 

Þvörusleikir (Spoon-Licker, December 15th), he steals spoons to lick them clean, but there isn’t much food left on spoons, so he is supposed to be scrawny, this one looks well-accommodated with bounteous spoons! Presumably, the spoons quietly reappear in the drawers when little people have forgotten them?

 

You'll have to Google the rest yourselves! And there are a couple of equally (supposedly) execrable parents and a dodgy cat! Many thanks to Brian for the introduction, to something completely different!

P is for Plastic Power . . . ♪♫ I Gotta' I Gotta' I Gotta' Jigga' Jig-Jig . . . Yeah! ♪♪

There are moments when you struggle to believe you've done something, and at Sandown Park the other day week month one of those moments overtook my ability to escape them and I bought a twelve-inch doll in order to add a one-inch doll to the collection!

A crime; a sin; a monumental act of stupidity I have still to fall-for a possible four-more times! Still, it's a while since we added a Galoob to the tag list, and getting the Spice Girls into the metadata won't hurt traffic!

Probably my favourite spice-girl (if I have one?), Posh was a haughty, humorless, thin-lipped tart, Baby was . . . well; a baby! Scary wasn't and Ginger was a bit OTT, but little Mel C was just a spunky Liverpudlian with a bit of attitude and 'up fer'it, jahnowhatahmeeen yer scally!'

Years ago, we had half a pallet of these to shift at the on-line auction house I worked for and they were bloody hard work, with a 99p start-price 'business-model' at the firm, we let a lot go for 99p, even whole sets of five, some people got mega-bargains!

I nearly got my mate JB to bid on a lot for me at the time, but I couldn't bring myself to subject him to the ignominy of taking delivery of-, or providing house-room for- five Spice Girl dolls! I did get him to bid successfully on the Star Wars stuff we were selling at the same time!

I daren't check what they go for now, but suffice to say I paid too much for it, I won't be telling you what that was, and you can be assured that everything bar the little figure was dropped into the Blue Cross animal-charity shop last Monday [last, last, last, last, last, last, last Monday now]! Sometimes you have to cut your losses and run, to save face; not with your mates, but with the chap in the mirror!

The little figure, however, is in the collection for keeps, I've been waiting for them to turn-up in mixed lots since I first became aware of them, and that was so long ago I gave up waiting and bought a whole caboodle a fortnight ago, just to get one!

Marked with a number and based to match the later combat infantry and Star Wars Micro Machines, the Galoob DNA is clear and as a standalone figure, just a young civilian woman; suitable for O-gauge railways! I wonder if that's where they all are; waiting for trains!

By now you've worked-out that each of the Spice Girl dolls comes with its own doll, the packing of which mirrors the packing of the larger dolls box, I still have four to locate and that's it . . . a bit horrid, but it had to happen - Toys is toys . . . all of them!

H is for Horde of Homies

Not really a 'horde' but quite a few and the A-Z trope has been hacked to death now . . . although I'm not sure what a 'horde' consists of; a horde of guns might be less than a dozen, but a horde of enemy warriors tends toward thousands as a minimum!

Mr Berke sent us these just as we all went into lockdown . . .

All new poses with seven homie's and three babe's hanging around the 'hood and three more 'doing something'! I like the Ice Cream trolley and the guy in his bathers seems to be accidentally advertising Macky-D's while the chap in blue reminded me of a figure already in the collection, so before I'd looked to check, I eMailed Brian to say I thought I might have some really early Homies in the storage-section of the stash . . .

. . . but it's not a Homie (bottom middle, blue jacket with the red stripe), he's marked Hasbro or Mattel (I can't remember and I've put him away now! and dated 2002 I think?) on his back but he fits in beautifully and looks like a teenage BA Baracus - Wha'da'yer mean FOOL; I aint gow'in no 'plane! He's been posed with all the front-branded Homies-shirt wearers, from both the donation samples.

While top left we have "But officer; all me'Homies have a pet lizard?" and top right is "OK, so it's Ma' Buggin's Doughnut's on the corner of 7th and 33rd and I tell 'em you sent me, cheers pal; I owe yah one!"

There's a good potted history of the line here, and there's a useful checklist here, they now do Homies big-head deforms and bobble-heads, but I prefer the original gum-ball machine toys!

And many thanks, again, to Brian for another bunch of these charming figures.

E is for Eggtastic!

Kicking-off a small Easter season, or small season of Easter posts? Anyway, these are old Hungarian egg-painting designs, recorded in the main cultural museum in Hungary which I did name in the past but can't find the notes for! It'll be their equivalent of the V&A or 'British' in London or New York's Metropolitan.

Strange how reminiscent of some other tribal art - from all over the world - some of these designs are, while the pointillist or stippled hatching is very like some Australian native work. I think I like the oak-leaf design (dead centre) most.

Slightly more geometric and/or repeat or mirror designs in red and white, whether they painted the eggs red or white before putting the other colour on, or if they are single colour designs for white or brown eggs is not so clear, but I suspect they are meant to be two colours, as the little kids/infants could block-in and feel they'd helped, while older kids or adults could do the intricate work in a second colour?

My favourite is probably the top-left one, which is another very Aboriginal-looking design.

Have an Eggtastic Easter loyal readers!

Y is for " ♫ ♪ You Gotta' Right t'Not-Fight, But Par-ar-ar-ar-taaayyh! ♪ ♬ " ! *

So this is the stuff I live to collect for - forget yer' Airfix, yer' Jean, Elastolin or Starlux, all mass-produced, common-as-muck stuff, and how many colour variations of Marx cavalry? Who cares, they were packed in quantity in huge play-sets and piled high in ten-thousand stores, every Christmas for a decade! Britains farm and zoo? There are over a 2000 lots on evilBay - today (Farm - 1,897 lots, Zoo - 780), there will be in ten days time, there were ten day ago!

But these . . .

 . . . never seen them before, may never see them again! Best thing from Sandown, best thing this year - so far, two cool for dance school! **

What'der-yer recon? Balkans? Removed from some larger piece of tourist tat like a cuckoo clock? Cake decorations? Presumably, back in the days before globalisation, there were things like 'local' cake decorations? Wedding-cake? They could be a wedding party?

They are free-standing, but with a tendency to fall backwards and note that there is damage to a foot at either end, so they may have been removed from something which might have been a simple base, a complicated plinth or some household object? They could be the handle of the lid of a cheap butter-dish, with the other figures from a matching cruet set or sugar bowl or something!

We know a lot about UK, US and Euro toys, have learnt a lot about Aussie and NZ makers form the ACOTS guys and are now getting quite a bit on the Soviet bloc's commoner stuff, but there's a whole world out there and we know little about most of it, we don't even know what happened to Tatra's moulds after they went to Africa, probably in the 21st century!

These could be from the 'Stans, from the Balkans proper, South to one of the former Yugoslav republics, North to Bulgaria, West to Greece, are they Maltese or Cypriot (which half?!), the hats are quite Cossack-looking, black rather than red and softer outlines than true fez's (so I've ruled out Turkey arbitrarily!) which could take us up to the steppes of the Urals?

Bagpipes! Now we're in Syria or the Levant! Yeh - Scotii, you got them from the Picts who got them from the Legions, the little baby Jesus [probably] invented them two-hundred years before the Picts stopped painting each other blue like monkey's arses for long-enough to kill some Romans and take their wheezing-cat bags, you just added some notes and a fancy tartan cover!

Joking apart, they have a lot in common with the Female Italian from Codec / Commonwealth / Sanitarium and the male Turk from Sanitarium in the various World Doll/World Dancer ranges, so maybe Turkey after all! The apron and simplified skirt-stripes could place the women nicely in Skutari, Albania?

Researching this costume stuff - as I've discovered before - is not made easier by the fact that fifteen or twenty of the modern states/countries the figures may be from were in three empires in 1900; Ottoman 'European Turkey', Austro-Hungary and Imperial Russia.

The bag-piper has a wire-nail trumpet, but a plastic finger-whistle-mouthpiece-thing and is a single moulding with the nail presumably set into a jig in the tool before each shot. The brown 'worms' on him and the figure below were perished rubber-bands, used to hold them all together at some point in the past - let's hear it for click-shut bags.

All the figures are a creamy-white or neutral plastic, definitely polystyrene (as I mended some damage to the line-up) and are all-over painted in at least 12 colours - all of which are on the seven-figure line-up; flesh, pink, red, blue, pea-green, dark-green, yellow, tan, brown, black, white and gold.

These two however only add to the mystery, they initially looked as if their arms had been broken off, but close-ups show that they are just formed flatter (and possibly - further glue-melted) and with the deliberate hollow formed in the centre of their chest they seem to have been removed from something large; a base-drum, a May-pole, a dancing partner, a circus act . . . who knows?

Someone does - somewhere! They had to be informally discussed, formally planned, designed, funded, ordered, master-sculptured, pantographed, cleaned-up, test-shot, manufactured, packed, wholesale-marketed, shipped, retail-advertised, sold, used, discarded, found, sold-again and moved to Surrey, over maybe a 30/50 year period? Somewhere; someone knows all about them!

You want to know more about Cherilea Wild West? Google them!

You want to know more about these? Tough!

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* With apologies to the Beastie Boys!

** Actually it's a toss-up between these and the whale, as Balkan dancers can't have a fair fight with a whale, it'll have to be a draw for now! Look out for best ever non-board game game . . . with pigs . . . ever; coming soon!

And many thanks to Adrian Little who as good as gave me the bag of bits which contained both these figures and the whale!

S is for Stop the Press! B is for Bugger!

I mean...if I'd known? I would have been there . . . with a butterfly net!

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/music/plan-b-review-back-right-where-he-belongs-a3596001.html

Fussa-russa - fussa-russa . . . heeh-heeh-heeh!

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Also - in my mail-box today, Barney's got a sale on!

http://www.heraldtoysandmodels.co.uk/catalog/landing_page

Dear Collector, today sees the start of our Big Summer Sale with many items reduced by up to 25% off - click on our 'Specials' tab to the right of our 'Items for Sale' page and see a staggering 290 specials on offer - Get Them While They're Hot! We also have a good selection of Hilco and Taylor & Barrett plastic Farmyard models just arrived, including some harder to find animals. Happy collecting! Barney

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Ah Yes - people who read don't need the advice, the people who need the advice don't read - some "politic constant attack" for you!

H is for Homies

I'm loving these, I'm not sure if they pass muster as Rack-Toys, more of a blind-bag or carded 'collectable' thing, but my blog-my rules and all rules are made to be broken, even "Rack Toy Month means Rack Toy Month" and I'm loving them anyway.

I don't know anything about them, there's a link here to the website where there's loads of stuff if you want more. Also because they are popular/originate over the pond, I wouldn't try to explain in depth something a chunk of the readership probably know more than me about.

From the author/artist:

"The Homies are a group of tightly knit Chicano buddies who have grown up in the Mexican American barrio (neighborhood) of "Quien Sabe", ('who knows') located in East Los Angeles"

- Dave Gonzales.

They were a gift from Brian Berke, and while they may have been available over here, I suspect it would have been in small quantities, somewhere like Forbidden Planet, where they wouldn't have been cheap! Let's look at them . . .

There are various sub-stories/genres within the line, some of which involve clowns!

I love the guy with the 'Stars & Stripes! Is he a vet, or is he a wannabe? Either way he's proud . . . "Don't tread on the flag dude!". When I get my stuff out of storage and set up my desk he's going to squat on the disc/dongle tub; guarding the archive!

They all have so much character, they are quite cinematic really, but I believe they are now a cartoon as well. However as figures they vary between quite cartoonish, flat caricatures and almost realistic sculpts, yet they fit together wonderfully, each is 'right' for his or her part.

Left - "I ain't seen nut'un. Straight-up!"

Middle - "Guys! Look up! I'm trying to take a snap here!" although after I took the shot I realised whatever he's holding has a power lead, so I think he's actually a barber!

Right - Priceless . . . if there's one thing about American culture that the whole world knows, one trope, one stereotype which has travelled via Hollywood round the world it's the whole fat-cops and doughnuts thing! And the Pigeons on the bin! Thinks "Any minute now the guy in blue is gonna' run to his cruiser's voice and that third doughnut is mine!" he's just willing the cop to drop one!

Close-ups. I didn't think to do a photo but I think they go well with the boarders/surfers and probably the Kid Robot street performers, but I don't know for sure?

Product-placement is got around by using the Homie meme for everything logo'ed, which is a really nice touch in a world where everything is covered in brand logos or product-placed. Scale varies as much as humans do, and they are all made of a stable, soft but firm vinyl, like old school Bully, Heimo or Comic Spain stuff

I love the look on the face of the older guy, talking to the graduate . . . "You got a degree? Little Louie got a degree? I don't think I can spell degree, you gonna' make loads of money and move away huh? Buy a big house up the hills? Sheeesh, whoda'thought it; from this neibourhood?"

Brain - Thank you so much for these, I love them!

Could someone over the pond do an article on them for Plastic Warrior magazine, I don't think they've been in yet (maybe in 'new product news'?) and they need to be, I'm sure Paul M would appreciate it? With a little more knowledge/background than I've managed!

C is for Culcha' In'it, Ja'nowhat'a'meen Guyie!

Some more of the cultural referances to toy soldiers and model kits I've collected over the years...

Spin Collective Wall Stickers

Home Made I love these!

Melting Plastic Stefan Gross, and a Flikr album Here

He's Moved......from his bench!

More Wall Art Margaret Roleke's Barbie in a War Zone

Another Little Boat Some people do it so much better than James May!

There are still more to come...

C is for Cultural Combatants

Sometimes the heading is the hard part!...More Toy Soldiers seeping into the veins of wider society!

Skater Boys, Radical Man!

Hornets Nest...Don't poke it! They've got Armalites!

10,000 - But how many can you get in a 'Phone-box...and Here (with 'pop-up' you CAN kill!)

Nesting - Spring is sprung!

Toy Soldier, Vik Muniz...stunning, no?

Barricades...the best ideas are the simplest!

More soon...