B is for Benevolent Buys - 3 of 3

Along with the cats and turtle/tortoise (you'll agree it wasn't clear, but flatter = turtle?), came this bag of shrapnel at the start of October, nothing special, but all fun!

 

A Fiver's the top-end for this kind of thing, but it'd been a few days since anything joined the stash, and withdrawal was starting to itch, so what choice did I have?!!

 

A near-complete set of the 'Nabisco' Magic Roundabout, and in a follow-up I'll explain way I haven't italicised the Nabisco, and have placed it in single-quotes, but for now, strange that it's all in red, with no sign of the other colours normally associated with the 'cereal premium'?

 

Standard Erzgebirge houses and church, but larger than previous ones we've seen here, with an extra window each, The Church/Public building with Zwiebelturm (onion tower, one of the first German words I learnt, the dreaded Umleitung came second, Bummelzug third!) is one from our childhood, I've been after for years, so really pleased to add this to the pile!

 

 

Other wooden stuff of the Erzgebirge type, with the train possibly a later Kinder one, and the car probably from a board game. Some of it may go with the cottages in the previous shot, but it's not obvious, while styling, paint, varnish &etc. . . suggests several sources, and many years between oldest and youngest samples.

 

Mostly 1970/80's rack-toy scenic stuff, but the greenhouse is from the New Ray HO civil/model railway accessory range, and the two Poplar trees are new to the collection, and - with those huge bases - probably from something more infant-oriented, and also, probably more modern.

 

Odds & sods; the barrow looks like it should have a pencil-sharpener attached, but there's no sign of such an accoutrement having ever been attached, and I don't know what the blue-cap is from, or if it's even anything to do with toys whatsoever? 

F is for Follow-up, as Mentioned Earlier!

So, my thoughts, not canon, not necessarily true, but just my thoughts on, specifically, the origins of the Vitacup premium dear/fawn, and more on its ubiquity, which has appeared here before, in various forms, painted and unpainted.

 

Vitacup deer? The one in the middle, is the most likely, if Vitacup only had one (and they had no multiples of their other animals, except the 'Three Wise Monkeys' who were a single moulding), as it's the one most often found with the other Vitacup animals. But the male with small antlers has also come in with them.

 

Then this one came-in a while ago, a larger scale, and painted like others we have seen, a vague attempt at fallow deer spots, and will look at below, slightly more baby-fawn like with big ears and shorter proportioned body.

 

It's marked as a raised relief DEP, which can be short for Depose, a French term meaning 'Registered Design', but equally, can be short for Deponiert,  German, and also 'Registered Design', I suspect the latter, but the former can't ruled-out.

 

Shown next to a tourist figure of a miner (?) I remember a gift-kiosk full of this stuff back in 1969, somewhere on the Rhine, possibly the Niederwald Monument, but it could have been somewhere near Koblenz, or one of several castles in the ENESCO world heritage Middle Rhine section, I was six, and it was very foggy, I can only remember a large car-park/viewing area, and a long stone balustrade. We ended up with two gold-chrome plated plastic dwarf miners, with deer which were - possibly - even smaller versions of some of the deer seen here?

 

We saw a paler one, in a previous post, with similar but unrelated sculpts.

 

While this broken one also came in and was seen previously.

Note the Indigo-inked, rubber stamp 'Foreign', on the tail.

Here we have much larger ones, but with what appear to be painted versions of the Vitacup ones being used as actual babies, to the two juvenile-looking 'adults' who are about half-a magnitude larger, the slight absurdity being they are plastic figures pretending to be wood, on a pretend wood base, on an actual wooden plinth!

 

And I think Chris Smith took this image in a Charity Shop for the Blog, some time ago, knowing these were being collected in one place! So thanks to him for taking the opportunity presented, to add to the subject.

 

Here's another, from the scale of the figures, the same larger size, but now suggesting the 'babies' in the previous image, may themselves be larger than the Vitacup 'Ivorene' models.

 

Of interest here, is than despite now having over a dozen of the barometer figurines, loose, I don't have either of the two in the background here, so I need to look out for them both, and there must have been dozens over the years coming from the workshops of Switzerland, Austria and Germany, since plastic came into use, with many more wooden ones before them!

 

Here’s what looks like the painted version of the Vitacup, from the previous post, with the stamp again, but here on the belly. The Foreign mark was more common on German (and Japanese) stuff between the wars, and Japanese stuff after WWII, but that's a whole 'nother post, in porcelain it applies to a period between 1893 and 1923, while it is found on US workman's tools for the period 1890-93, and that's the tip of an iceberg connected to . . . Tariffs, taxes, recent enemies, new friends, and the hiding of origin, while flagging origin!

 

A painted version of the feeding pose, and a fourth pose/fifth variant, laying on the ground, these also look to be a larger size, and have a surface texture which suggests they may be a different maker, to most of the others, either as copies, or a renovated tooling?

 

While this is just a homage, in glazed china!

Much smoother lines. 

It seems, someone, probably German, who may or may not have been Siku, had a catalogue of these, sculpted as if made of carved wood, in the Erzgebirge style, in two or three sizes, at least four poses, with a head variant on the commonest pose, of which Vitacup took between one or three, in the plain Ivorene, while anyone else who needed them could arrange a supply to suit their tourist trinket, or, kitch tchotchke, in a variety of paint styles (they may have added themselves) with or without the white dots hinting at fallow deer, while other people copied the sculpts!

 

The Vitacup sets, however, are drawn from various parts of the supplier's wider catalogue, and the work of different sculptors, with several other animals having the carved-wood look, but more being realistically sculpted and one or two slightly cartoonish, but still with more realistic fur/hides.

 

Now, I never got round to updating the post which tried to list them all;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2018/06/f-is-for-follow-up-vitacup.html 

 . . . following the comments of Jungle Kim, and both (that post and the listing) need to be sorted properly, but suffice to say, all the ones with the pale blueish-white background are soft polyethylene (elastische plastik) and known to be Siku (tools which don't seem to have gone to DS Plastics, of the Netherlands), which suggests that while I might like the Vitacup et al to be Siku, for neatness, they may be by someone else?

 

However, Siku are known for providing may of the margarine/tobacco/coffee/soap-powder premiums of the 1950's, in hard styrene, so it's still an open question?

C is for Cool Car-Booty!

A week or so before the trip that provided the Invicta dinosaurs, but f-all else, I'd had a little more luck wandering about the same Car Boot Sale one Bank-Holiday Monday, and that's what we're looking over, in this post

 

This was a quid! It's the kind of stuff you find a whole shelf of at The Range or TKMaxx, in three colours, and I'd ignored it, until I'd realised how little there is at these sales nowadays - pretty well picked-clean over the years, or ravaged by the 5/6-am 'early birds', so I went back for it at the end, but photographed it first as it was on top of everything else in the plunder bag! It's a hollow ceramic slush-cast, modern, and about 7/8-inches!

 

These were a revelation, Toyway WWI Aeroplanes, new to me, Google's AI Overview came up with another corker;

 

"Toyway WWI aeroplanes" likely refers to model or toy aircraft of World War I vintage, rather than a specific brand called "Toyway"

 

Technically, 'World War I vintage' means manufactured between 1914 and 1919! Dumb, and the highlighting is a mystery, it wasn't a hot-link? AI is dumb, it might be good for specific tasks like finding new drugs, but that's more about programming a good algorithm, rather than free-thought, or compooda learnin'!

 

From the card graphics I'd say an earlier product of theirs, from the 1980's, and probably by someone like Universal (but not their inherited Matchbox stuff, Matchbox never did 'planes like this), but made in China anyway, and a nice pair, adding to the WWI air-wing!

 

I drew a snake a bit like this, many years ago, and thought I'd scanned the image with some other stuff a while ago, but I can't find it, so I can't show it to you! But due to its similarity with my little sketch, I couldn't resist it. Like the ceramic astronaut, it's quite big and may be a companion piece/accessory from a larger action-figure/doll type thing?

 

These are fascinating, from the same seller, who had a lot of 'genuine' domestic/house-clearance stuff, so these probably went together, we have a marked and painted version of the believed to be (or more accurately; 'probably') Siku moulding of a fawn, which ended-up as one of the Vitacup premiums, along with two actual, carved wood Erzgebirge horses, in the same style of scalloped whittling. 

 

This is why I collect, to join the dots, to look for, and hopefully find the bigger picture, and put it up here so other people understand the connections, a fascinating trio, to me at least! And there'll be a follow-up on the 'Vitacup' deer later.

 

Probably home-made, possibly an apprentice piece, or turned for a Lancaster Bomber model-kit, I believe this is a reasonable rendition of an RAF Tall Boy, or more likely Grand Slam free-fall bomb of the WWII era, and in silver-plate brass, a rather unique thing? Except there may be hundreds of them? Who knows! It is (if either of the mentioned bombs) missing its pointy-tail, but it looks like that may have been cut-off for some reason?

 

The seller of the biplanes, had obviously had some good stuff earlier in the day (early hours of the morning!), and was selling her late father's collection, piecemeal, there were a bunch of Micromodel card kits, i was tempted by, but I left them, however at 50p I took these three, which are a - probably - Hong Kong racing driver from a carpet toy, and two home-cast replacements of an old die-cast or lead toy driver.

 

I think these were 10p each, so I wasn't too bothered by them, the space-car seems to be missing half its whole? The Thunderbird 2 pod-vehicle is supposed to be a bulldozer or ladder truck I think, but as it's a modern Carlton effort, I thought it might make a conversion project! And three probably duplicate Bruder, but there's always colourways to find, with them!

L is for Last May's Lots of Lovely Loot - Everything Else!

Given that I got a shed-load of good stuff yesterday and still have to clear the Plastic Warrior Show stuff first, I'm rather glad to be putting May's plunder-posts to bed! Mostly civil subjects, with a couple of oddments, there were one or two treasures among them.

 

This was one of those frustrations, only associated with those who don't carry a farty, nerdy 'wants' list around with them . . . step-up that man, 'cos it's me! The seller had several of these, but I really couldn't remember which ones I already had, and thought this looked like one I didn't, when I did, doh! And while I looked for them again yesterday, I didn't see them!

 

Should hold this for ITLAPD, but there's some nice stuff lined-up this year, so they can go here, they are soft, PVC, factory-painted, generic versions of the unpainted Webb's Supertoy pirate set, which is also still contemporary, somewhere, as both me and Peter Evans have been finding them.

 

Tudor Rose seesaw, I got it primarily to help ID the babies, and was surprised to find they are PVC like the Thomas ones (I was expecting polyethylene), which means I'll have to be doubly careful, when I come to sort all the pink babies!

 

Also, it's a bit odd that both companies chose a material which can melt the accompanying polystyrene toys they all came with, but then, at the time of manufacture, neither knew the potential for the melting, which AFV kit owners would be learning about by the 1970's! Not to forget the proud owners of Action Man diving suits - that sticky, orange hood!

 

Unpainted castings of possibly game-playing pieces, but I have to compare them with the Lilliput one, before I decide if they aren't actually just home-piracies of the Britains ones? If they are copies, I might paint them up, at some point in the future, before the task is beyond my eyesight!

 

These are composition, and a pumice type, which suggests British or French production, but the little red collars mirror those of wooden erzgebirge stuff, so they maybe from the Ore Mountains area of Saxony (Germany) or Bohemia (the Czech Republic - formally Czechoslovakia)?

 

The two nearest the camera are larger and lack the scenic bases, and also might be bisque porcelain or chalkware, they seem a little harder (but you don't casually test things this small) so I bagged them separately.

 

Some Japanese stuff I guess?, I don't know if they all go together or not, some are harder, some softer, some have pencil-holes, some don't, a few won't stand up, alone, some are transparent, others opaque, so I arbitrarily grouped them into three for shooting, and await further info' on what they actually are!

 

Circus! A Frazer & Glass clown, who has no signs of being glued to any of the accessories, or his compatriots, so one assumes that when they were being sold from the glass-compartmented shelf-displays in Woolworth's, you could purchase single, unadorned clowns? Of course you could, and he was in the sets as well; A1 Clown!

 

Two of the Merit 'Travelling Circus' wagons, which gave rise to various Hong Kong copies, both of the wagons as wagons, and as trains, and a lovely spirit-painted, wheeled, Japanese novelty, a celluloid blow-mould, of a monkey, in a fez, on a hobbyhorse, of course and why not!

 

These are definitely bisque, and probably French fèves, fox-hunters in hunting pink, with their hounds, around 35mm, they are a bit bigger than the common, modern fèves, so may have been more decorative, or even cake decorations, in which case they may be British; but, they need black boots?

 

These were a lovely find, Sima (Sixtus Maier, of Fürth, Germany) model railway flats, these were made for Märklin HO railways, back in the 1950's, although they measure a little larger, and presumably pre-date Märklin's own sets, and the similar Wettig sets? Note how the gosling doubles as a rearing chick!

 

I found another bird on the floor and retook the image, but the colour is all wrong, so I left it down here, purely for compleat'ness!

P is for Potpourri of Plastic Peeps! Sports & Civilians

Off and running with Chris's donation parcel from late March, and it's the sportsmen and civi's first, with some interesting bits and a couple of all new ones.

 

This is a set I'd always hankered after, not so desperately that I sought it out and bought it, but unless you specialise in Merten as a core section of your collection, there is so much stuff by them, you just grab what you see, when you see it, if it's affordable, but I'd always looked at them in the catalogues and thought "That's a useful set", and here it is courtesy of Mr. Smith!

It's one of two sets in the catalogues, and if you were a wargamer, making an Italian Army, these would slot right in to an alpine unit, with the Esci-Ertl, Atlantic and - if you're lucky - Co-Ma Alpini figures! Also, I don't think there's a comparable set from Preiser, their's are walking with slung rifles I think? Something to check for another day!

 

Note also that an untouched set has the figures in the same configuration as the catalogues, a continuation of the very early issues where they were sold with the runner (incorrectly 'sprue') still attached to their heads.

A couple of the footballers usually associated with Parker/Palitoy, but there is more to it and a longer article is in the long queue, these 'novelty' games tend to generate copies and/or get licenced out to other brands or as cheap generics.

 

The fact that the blue one was in poor condition has allowed me to show some of the components, and you can see how the bent wire runs down the spine and hooks into the thigh, allowing a spring in the body to operate the kicking action when you press the head.

 

Another of the little Spanish terracotta figurines who have been slowly growing as a group, over the lifetime of the Blog, most as gifts from Chris or Peter Evans, or charity-shop purchases, I think we are over the baker's dozen now! I believe this chap is a shepherd?

 

Speaking of shepherds', I suspect this is German, I think I've mentioned before, when we were kids, (1969; so I was only five) we had a motoring holiday of Germany, and one of my abiding memories is of this mountain, possibly on the NATO side of the Erzgebirge, up against the Rhine (?), which was called something like Dwarf Mountain, and had a kind of Greek-columned building at the top (which was buried in low cloud the day we visited), and where A gift shop had this kind of stuff. I'd love to know where it was/what it was really called, if any German readers can recognise the description!

 

10 years later the shops in Bad Tölz were still full of similar stuff, but, while the later stuff was mostly real, wooden Erzgebirge, this is plastic, after the wooden patterns, as were the little chromed-gold dwarfs we bought that day, up the mountain!

A Betterware gift spoon with figural handle, this was actually the second thing ever blogged on the Blog, back in December 2008, but that one was a pinkish-maroon (what fashionista's probably call 'cherry yogurt'!), so a nice colour variation here, and presumably more to find?

 

Assorted sportsmen, I think the riders are Christmas cracker types, they may be from a board game, but I've never found it, while these little toys turn-up in most mixed lots of small scale, and have many colours and quite a few pose variations, while also being quite crude flat/semi-flat sculpts, so one suspects cheap novelties.

The wrestler is probably contemporary/near-contemporary, and is actually a mini action figure (points of articulation), but at this size tends to stay in the collection, as the Galoob Action Fleet types survive! The blue & white footballer is a cake decoration in search of a base (with one of the earlier, better football strips?), and we've seen the athletes before, many to find in a dozen sizes and loads of colours/base types. The fallen figure is Subbuteo I think, one of the oversized players you used for defending goal or taking throw-ins?

The other civilians include a sub-piracy of the Blue Box copy of a British race official, a turquoise lady, probably from a boardgame, a Lledo baker's boy, a dimestore vehicle figure (? I think we may have seen them in other colours, so maybe also a boardgame counter-piece?), Blue Box road worker copied from Dinky and an ex-Britains zoo-keeper sculpt, whom I suspect is from a set of rack-toy firefighters.

 

Thanks again to Chris for all these.

Q is for Question Time - Seasonal Subjects?

Right! So that's the Bird in, with a carrot and a parsnip and a red onion, it's had half-an-hour on 190° to soften everything, I've basted it, covered it and put it back for another half at 200°, then I'll get it out for a bit while I do the spuds, which I'll squeeze a white onion in with 'cos I ran out of room!

 

Tray prepped with pigs-in-blankets and some very posh stuffing balls because I nearly forgot them, and all they had were rather smart ones with rosemary and a cranberry crown wrapped in bacon! And I've added a beetroot to roast with them, while I sort the rest of the veg out! No leeks, I forgot leeks!

In the meantime, and assuming you've consumed the previous post in full (there's been two hits in half-an-hour - everyone who ate early is asleep in front of the fire!), here's a quick question mark . . . 

 

We may have seen these before in various posts, and at least one is probably from Chris Smith? Plastic on the left, Hong Kong, composition in the middle (with a wood-slice base) and an all-wood, erzgebirge on the right, but who, what, when, where and why?

 

The Hong Kong one (approximately 75mm) is holding a key, which here in the UK might make him a 21st birthday-cake decoration, but normally that's just a key, set in the icing, and he's more of a wizard or even a Santa'? The one in the middle is probably a Noah, but he looks a bit prophet-like as well, St Peter? And the lady on the right is probably Mrs. Noah, so it's the one on the left I'm really keen on more info' for? Any ideas, as you digest your Crimbo' feast?