A is for Ancient, African & Agricultural Animals

I know, but I started with the alliterative titles, and I'm determined to get to the end of the plunder-posts with the same trope, so some are going to be a bit weak! Also, I've been a bit blearh, for the fortnight since the show, the heat, work, and a persistent cold, have left me a bit deflated, but I've sort of kept posting . . . if not regularly, becasue I'm rather just going through the motions! Anyway, I've shot the animals, the bits & bobs, and the civilian stuff, so they will be next, with ancient, medieval and 'combat' (the 'proper' toy soldiers!) still to face the camera!

 

Because I included several things from the Friday or Sunday afternoon in the total plunder-pile of 'PW Weekend', the fact that I managed to get to the Car Boot Sale at Bordon, on the Sunday morning, seemed to be a good reason to include my only purchase - I rejected some Corgi military on one stall, and similar Dinky's on another.

 

Somewhere in storage is the old childhood family set, also Merit, but in an older, litho or screen-printed box, and I bought this intending to replace a few missing and broken pieces, in that much-loved and over-played set, only to find it's got an orange beetle, instead of a red one, so I may still need a third, but could end up with enough good parts for five players!

 

Not that you have to build them all one colour, half the fun was making a multicoloured one! Called Scarabee in France, Escarabajo (scarabs!) in Spain, and Cootie in the US (WWI troops slang for body-lice! And which were love-bites over here, when I was a kid?), I'd be quite surprised if a UK collector didn't know they were called Beetle Game, indeed, one might think he was just a dealer all along, not really paying attention!

 

I got this from MM-Smith, who didn't have any new figures in his own range this year, due to the kind of personal shit, we're all suffering, however he did stall-out, and had these, they're quite modern, but he said he remembered having the exact same animals as a kid, which is both believable and likely.

 

Sometimes a maker can be left with a ton of stuff from a cancelled contract, or just a stack of stillages in a warehouse somewhere, filled with over-production, and where it can hang around for years, before another buyer, or selling/marketing opportunity arises, or someone remembers it's ". . . at the back there somewhere", and digs them out, so it's entirely possible, this is old stock in a new CE-rated card.

 

And I've had both the uncommon Hippo sculpt, and the turned-head 'Black Panther' for years, they're having come in with vintage lots, so it's nice to find they go together, and what goes with them!

 

Similar, but much older fayre from Jecsan, as their unpainted/pocket-money JC line, a mix of caveman-like native warriors, and wild animals, a bit of a packaging box-ticker, but equally I don't have any of them in the stash, or I didn't, before the show! Both bags contain two animals, three figures and a cactus!

 

This is the CollectA Quetzalcoatlus, a huge flying dinosaur, which was the idea behind the movie Q: The Winged Serpent, albeit, an inaccurate representation of an Aztec mythological creature! I'm not a great fan of horror movies, but a giant pterosaur picking bikini-babes of the roofs of New York was quite amusing!

 

Beautifully made and decorated, matching the best Schleich or Papo can offer, they tend to be a lot cheaper, but you have to find them online as brick & mortar retail stockists seem thin on the ground. The baby-sauropod snack, in scale, is slightly larger than a human! While the beak is slightly more curved than some reconstructions?

 

Mixed, mostly smaller ones, including a vinyl turkey, Matchbox horse and pearlescent cracker elephant, but that semi-flat red plastic moulding, back left . . . 

 

. . . defies description! It appears to be a lion, eating either a monkey or a human? It's quite damaged, with the legs/lower torso of the 'meal' missing, along with the Lion's other leg, and the tip of its tail, with the result that we don't even know if it had a base, or was a baseless 'charm' of some kind.

 

Does it get any more esoteric? What else was in the set? How bloodthirsty was the rest of the set? Cracker or gumball? Literally, the most interesting thing to come out of the show this year!

 

A couple of funnies, on the right, an Airfix ancient horse bing made to look like an unpainted whitemetal casting, for WTF? reasons! On the left a Merit dog, Hong Kong copy of Merit pony and a piece of Timpo hedge are brought together to make a rustic vignette.

 

In the past I would have stripped these down, but now, I'll probably hang on to them for a while, indecised (is that a word? Undecided-) as to what to do with them, then pass them on to the next generation of collectors in a mixed lot, similar to those they came in!

 

Sold to me as Starlux (!), the Corgi circus elephant, from the Jean Richard 'Pinder' playset (Gift Set No. 48). I think it's been repainted by someone, and is a hollow polystyrene moulding, glued together from about four or five parts.

 

A couple of Erzgebirge, the cow being pretty bog-standard, but the horse slightly above average, with the extra shaping of the legs. Along with a full-on piece of ivory, a tusk, probably from bookends, or similar decorative pieces. Also, two legs; one plastic, one metal; which don't appear to belong to any of the other animals in the plunder pile, so will be heading to a spares tub!

 

Three metal figures, even a plastics show will turn-up the odd piece of metal!, the goat might be a game piece? The mini-dino' is interesting, and a thing a weird shop in Wantage, where I got a wizard years ago, might have had too (in which case I may have one already?), but the Irish Wolfhound may be a jackpot find?

 

It's die-cast aluminium, as a flat. And we've seen such things before here at Small Scale World, but before I place the link, this casting (metal IS cast) has Wolfshond (with an 'o') on the base, now, it's not clear, but I think the Germans would say Wolfshund (with a 'u'). So, if this producer of aluminium flats is actually Dutch, that would help make perfect sense of this outstanding question mark;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2019/09/r-is-for-return-to-nazi-flats.html

 

The Dutch got a bloody hard time from the Nazi's, and it would make perfect sense for them to produce a satirical, caricature set, soon after the end of the war, and with sources of aluminium like crashed allied and destroyed German aircraft, pontoons, landing craft and similar, all over the place, aluminium might have been a good choice to try starting up a novelty/toy company?

 

And while the base on the dog, is slightly different, and has the title mark missing from the smaller farm and wild animals sets, and the figures, the parallels outnumber the differences? Does any Dutch collector/historian know anything about a flat/semi-flat manufacturer in aluminium? It could equally be Luxembourgish, and they got a hard-time too?

 

And, in fact, all three pieces are die-cast, with the T-Rex and goat both being in some Mazak/Zamac alloy, which is why I suspect a board-game playing piece for the goat?

 

Domestics, the interesting ones here being the unmarked, non-spiggoted version of the Blue Box Japanese officer's horse, here possibly from one of the Red Box factories, or one of the Singapore factories, but could be a knock-off by a rival.

 

The other interesting item is the semi-flat horse, in the style of those Mokarex/Figurines Hostoriques we saw again the other day, marked "CAROLINGIEN" on the facing side above, and "760" on the other side, I'm guessing a French premium, possibly missing a rider in the style of the Kilty/Bonnie Built (et al) US officer, but an ancient Carolingian?

 

Modern vinyls! Schleich Baby Girrafe.

 

Britains polar bear in need of a clean, and a crocodile Adrian gave me, as the show was packing up, looks Hong Kong, but is unmarked and could be an Argentine copy of something Spanish, they had some lovely animated wildlife!?

 

Another Airfix beagle/foxhound, and a rat from one of the Games Workshop/MB Games crossover board games of the 1980's? Probably Hero Quest?

 

Finishing with a Kinder dragon or dragon baby, and four dinosaurs without marks or with generic marks which will need to be sorted into the vast pile of such stuff, against more definitive posts another day, the carnivore is reasonably realistic, and the rather pale sauropod might get matched to his set, by those distinctive eyes!
 

So, that was the animals, thanks to Adrian Little, Brian Carrick, Colin Penn, Isaac, Matt Murphy, Martin Fahie, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin again.

M is for Mixed Magnanimity Mound

I know! But after nearly 20-years, even the thesaurus starts to fail you! It's a charity lot; soon after the last posting in this vein, I popped into a couple of the charity shops in Fleet and managed to come away with five things of vague interest, and these are they!

 

Another duck! It wasn't until a guest post back in 2012, that I had fully appreciated the whole sub-branch of ducks, since when I've probably added as many ducks to my own stash as were in that post, with a similar range of sizes and materials, they are - in the most part - real tourist kiosk/gift-shop/overpriced 'boutique' type stock, but they are fun, and one day we'll look at them all together!

 

A teeny-tiny hedgehog, which is so small it can keep the [believed to be] Playmobil one company! And a gape-mouthed, Chinasaur, rubber-jiggler, who may well be from the same set as the one Chris sent, which we saw here a few days ago? There were several sets of these sculpts, back in the day, and they occasionally still turn-up, so, hard to age.

 

A slipware porcelain cat, probably a fairing, or cheap, corner-shop/local hardware store ornamental, I thought the colouring of the glaze was quite good, even if it has a rather daft face with anthropomorphised eyes!

 

I think these would have been called Empathy Counters, and while you don't seem to be able to get this exact set any more, there are several other similar sets, and these five mouldings are still found in a larger early learning/maths/coordination set, in a yellower yellow!

 

From Edx Education, they fill the same role as that old set I was pleased to track-down a few years ago, or the Houghton Mifflin stuff in the 'States, and gets five more animals in six colours into the stash! Made of 'eraser' rubber, they would be mistaken for such, if not known.

M is for Micro Fidgetz

I can't believe he managed to squeeze Ossuary into something so quickly, manner from Heaven, that must have been! And so soon after name checking Gygax monsters, after a fashion! So fragile, yet so pleased with his own idea of himself, but seeming to know so little?

 

Continuing the intermittent clearing of blind-bag and novelty capsule stuff from the folders, and these are in the shops now, from HGL, an old pocket-money importer, whose corporate structure and business model has suffered, endured, maybe enjoyed (?) several changes, in the few years this Blog has been going.

 

Very much a knock-off of the Toy Box miniature versions of other toys from Hasbro, Mattel and co., which we saw, just over a year ago, but here with the hook that they are all fidget toys, or cheapo-novelties, rather than the licensed properties and TV advertised stuff of our childhood memories, in that earlier set.

 

There's the one you can see in the mirror-backed clear dome, sealed against filching, by a shrink-wrapped film, like a soft-drink! Inside are four foil packets with the other toys [of toys] inside. Other items include a fidget-spinner, Jacob's ladders, a squish-ball, slinky and the like.

 

Series one missed me completely, and series two claims to have 25 to collect, but lists various colour variations within that count, which is further complicated by some pairs, counting as one, like the dinosaurs here, giving more than 31 items to find if you are minded to? But with two dinosaurs and a balloon-animal, I'll stick at five . . . it’s a full house! No, I don't know the significance of the switch, but guess it's a fidget 'thing'!

D is for Donations - Peter & Chris - Dinosaurs

As with the military and Sci-Fi, there was a fair amount of carded and bagged in the folders, particularly in the stuff from Peter, which has been sent down to 1971 in Picasa, where lay the RTM folders!

 

Consequently, I've combined what's left into one folder, and we'll have two blind-bag/capsule toy posts before the final pair of donation posts - Odds and Sods. Then we've got the recent BMSS and Sandown show stuff in the queue!

 

These should have been kept for Rack Toy Month too, but I happened to find them myself elsewhere, just before Christmas, so the whole set, and various sister sets are already in that queue! But these are currently to be found in more independent corner shops/hardware stores, and they are quite well executed sculpts, each identified as a specific species with a potted 'thumbnail' history on the back of a collector card.

 

Apparently generics, they carry product/re-order codes very similar to those of both Henbrandt's catalogues, or -  more closely - D&D Distribution? 

 

Interesting mix of car-booty or charity shop stuff here, I'd like to know the origin of the bright orange and blue Kerthunkersaur! And the Triceratops . . . 

 

. . . glows in the dark!

(and needs a clean!) 

 

These look to be from one or two sets, and are similar to the carded ones above, well executed, realistic sculpting and paint-jobs, it's only when you get all the odds together and sort by size, marks, plastic and even paint-colours, or, if you're lucky, against sets, or set images, that it all starts to make sense!

 

White button! I had no white button toys (excepts, unknown, the old childhood Christmas stocking yellow robot in Mum's attic), when this blog started, there's very little in the HO/OO oeuvre which calls for or necessitates white button toys, but since the expansion in scale, and extension into various realms of 'novelty', there's quite a sub-genre of them in the stash now!

 

Chris doesn't send so many Dino's, as he's not buying in that area, but nevertheless, the odd one gets through in a mixed lot, and he always saves the more interesting ones for the donation parcel, here we have the Holly 'Gygax' in red, which we previously saw, in the recent mini-season, as catalogue scans, and a nice very 'Chinasaur' [1] or gape-mouthed [2], rubber jiggler [3] - how does a crude rubber lump end up with three recognised, hobby-wide, terms of endearment? Childhood nostalgia is a powerful force!

L is for Loose Lots - Sandown - Everything Else

Last of the purchase posts from Sandown Park, it's funny I've mentioned the stash/pile and Battle of the Planets in the last 24/48 hours, and Bushy managed to name-check them both in the last few hours (the irony being, he doesn't have a pile), almost like he can't bare me to post original stuff, but that's all I do; original images, original copy and original opinions - isn't that right readers? While someone else has commented, forgetting what he said about me a few years ago, but stupid people have the brains of goldfish!

 

A nice bunch of Charbens circus. Circus, like Pirates, have become a bit of a side interest for me, but then so have dime-store vehicles, parachute toys, LB, stationary novelties, Cracker & capsule toys, and, and, and! I think the Tiger is quite unusual here, and the different colours of the dogs costumes, and horses furniture, make the sample more interesting.

 

Speaking of dime-store vehicles, here's a couple more of the small, US pattern, row-crop wheeled tractors, Western plastic crap, predating the Hong Kong plastic crap by a decade or two! As you can see, these are basically the same model, but different sizes, and I have near-on a dozen now, nearly all different, so when they're all together, we'll have a proper look/comparison.

 

The blue one is marked Banner, and is the same as one of my military ones, the yellow, is not the smallest, so may be the same as the Merit/Bell ones, but marked Tudor Rose?and possibly the same as the unmarked pair we saw last September? That's a check I can make one evening this summer, when sorting over at the storage unit, where I think there's four or five of these?

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2025/09/l-is-for-last-mays-lots-of-lovely-loot.html 

 

Action Man command post field telephone set, which was in the biscuit tin from Isaac. This would be connected to landlines (the origin of the phrase, predating the mobile telephone!) connecting the forward trenches/positions, with a platoon net, company net and 'chat net', set at the evening O-group (Orders). Sometimes, on Salisbury Plain, in the middle of the night, you'd pick up Russian spy trawlers in the Channel, due to the power of their sending sets, and the aerial properties of all the D10 landline network!

 

Tomte Laerdal Renault Floride Cabrio sports car, note how much better the wheels are moulded on these than on the Galanite ones we saw the other day;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2026/04/l-is-for-local-loot-2-of-2.html

 

A couple of interesting Animals, Adrian found the horse, I think, which is similar to, but not the same as the Britains Shetlands, longer, thinner legs for a start! The composition squirrel is damaged, but was always a small delicate moulding, and squirrels are another thing I have a soft spot for, along with elephants, and hedgehogs!

 

Better Hong Kong copy of Lone Star, than some (but may be Spanish, South American or even an actual Lone Star, hard to tell, until I compare), and a kit accessory, possibly from a Jacques Cousteau ship model of Calypso?

 

Upper lot are Holly or Holly-like, we saw some of them in the recent Gary Gygax posts;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/search/label/Gary%20Gygax

 

While the lower shot shows their 'rubber jiggler' clones, as part of my favourite childhood set, indeed, the Dimetrodon to the right, is pretty-much how I remember mine to be, prior to my tearing all the spines free of each other, and ruining it!

 

Random, newish Dino', which turned-up during the course of the day!

Thanks to Adrain, Gareth, Isaac and Steve for bits at the show.

L is for Local Loot - 2 of 2

It looks like I might be picking-up two lots of donated loot at the BMSS show this Saturday, if I can swing my carcass out of bed, early enough, something I have been struggling with recently! So at some point I'll have to get back to a more regular posting, but with over a million hits since Christmas, the Blog seems to have reached a self-supporting momentum, based around it's existing content, which is nice, but may be one of the [subconscious] factors contributing to my lack of motivation? Never thought I'd accuse myself of sitting on my laurels! Anyway, in continuing the plan of some weeks ago - there was a second successful trip to charity shops at the start of the year . . .

 

A bag of bits, a bag of animals and a couple of Stegosaurii . . . Stegosauruses?

Before and after cleaning - three Galanite infant-toy vinyls from Sweden, the poorer brother of Tomte, Both in accuracy (although the BMC 1100/Mini is quite good), and the wheels, which are no way as nice as Tomte's, or even the cheap 'W.Germany' (Stelco, Vinylline) and Hong Kong (Miniflex?) clones which were around at the same time. But collectable nevertheless, and there's a tub of them all somewhere!

 

There was also these . . . they went to 'Recyche'!

 

I'm pretty sure these are from the Corgi Chipperfield's Circus sets, and will need to be compared to the others, there's a bigfull somewhere, to get the best samples in the 'master collection', then the others can be disposed off, probably to charity! They all suffer from paint loss due to play-handling.

 

I suspect these are Corgi too, I don't remember a Zebra, but the same Hong Kong identifiers, and lack of marking, suggest they go with the giraffes? Close to the Britains sculpt, they are also very close to the various Blue Box, Redbox, Holly and New Maries zebras, which I'm one day going to have to try and sort out!

Likewise, note-wise, these two yellow tigers, the white one being marked and probably Holly? Again, someone, someday is going to have to sit down with all the boxed, carded and bagged sets, any catalogue images and all the loose examples, and try and sort them all out and get them annotated correctly by plastic colour, paint, markings etc . . .

 

Britains Llama, Corgi Rhino; a later vinyl moulding, and the bear, which again, may be Corgi, it's quite common in mixed lots, and has a lot in common with both the Rhino and the Corgi Bull from the Lamborghini, so it may be another Corgi, but I'm not sure I have it listed?

 

Modern, Chinasaurs, two makes, both unknown, but we may have seen them in show-reports, or carded acquisitions/donations, all to be sorted another day!

 

 

 

I also picked up this for next-to-nothing, a couple of the figures are damaged, but they just join a growing sub-branch of the collection . . . Box in the recycling bin, and I kept a couple of the accessories, as a sample!

 

Popular movies or other licensed productions, TV, Comics &etc, produce a plethora of crap over a shortish period (unless they really take off like Star Wars or TMNT), and while there's a lot of Minions stuff around at the moment, in 30-years, they'll be more like Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite or Richard Scarry animals are now - half-forgotten, and "What was all the hype about?"!

A is for Animated Animals in Amniotic Afterbirth!

I may be over-egging it slightly, but it's still a rather odd thing for anyone to think might make a toy, even a toy for older kids, as one presumes these were aimed at? They literally come in a rubber amniotic sack!

 

Made of stretchy-rubber, probably a silicon, and various colours, designed to produce a sort of limited-colour rainbow effect, with the 'smoked' bicolour eggs, which are a hard propylene, or flexible hybrid-styrene, the amniotic sack IS what constitutes the afterbirth, isn't it, I'm not making this shit up?

 

These were a charity-shop purchase back in 2018, who have been sitting in Picasa while I tried to find an angle on them, but I'm not sure if I have, really? Anyway, we're going to run through them quickly as a box-ticker!

 

There are two parallel lines, one more Dinosaur recognisable, the other more Monster'ish, and both had five models in the first tranche, although I don't know if there was a second wave, and they were issued by Canadian Mega Brands (of Mega Bloks), and may have been designed to enhance that companies little Lego-like 'minis', which at the time (2006) included fantasy stuff, and - if memory serves - rather overblown Vikings.

 

Plasma Dinosaurs

 

The two Dino'types, a steggi' and a tricerah', they are well-made and decorated for what they are - pocket-money'ish, plug-together fantasy toys. Made of a dense but softish PVC substitute, and dry-brush weathered over a two-colour, basic scheme.

 

They plug together from seven parts, remarkably like the Blue Box Gormiti we saw here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2014/03/n-is-for-new-finds-pt4-sci-fi-and.html

 

And may well be manufactured in one of the Tai Sang plants, for Mega, who knows, they are certainly the same material, as well as having the same plug-in construction?

 

An eighth part takes the two dinosaurs off to the realms of pure fantasy, being sets of wings which plug-onto the back, at the shoulder joint area. But to get the wings you have to have the full-on dragon-monsters too!

 

Plasma Dragons

 

Construction of the two monsters is similar, and if you studied the scanned ephemera on the way down the post, you'll see the idea is to collect all ten, and then twin them; one each, dino'monster, with it's dedicated full-fantasy monster, to create even larger monsters, through mix-and-match of the various parts!

They all came with a collecting card too, and I'm sure if I dug deeper, I'd find there's more to them, I have a tin of Orks (Tolkien not Kremlin) somewhere (their own tin, illustrated like the paperwork here), from Mega Bloks, which are far more adult-oriented toy figures, than even the current Lego stuff, yet they are similar age (20-odd years old, or thereabouts), and there may have been gaming elements or rules, to, or between the two lines, in an attempt to muscle-in on the Nottingham Mafia's action, but I don't know?