L is for Lots of London Loot - Sandown February - Space & Pop Culture

So, I would seem to be catching up with the stuff that's come in over the last ten months or so, and the Sandown Park show, just gone, produced quite a collection of bits and bobs across scales, types and genres for the stash, this post is what I'd normally call the Space and TV, but they weren't TV first, being corporate mascot and comic characters!

 

I have quite a few Bibendums, and we have seen him here before, but this is far more animated than the usual standing types. Quite large and a modern PVC-substitute, I'm sure it's a pretty contemporary promotional piece?

 

Slightly futuristic lines to these dime-store pieces, the car and caravan being more conventional, and marked ACME, one of the trading names of Thomas Toys in the US, I think the truck is unmarked, but I'm sure it'll be in Bill Hanlon's book? Looks like a simplified copy of Archer's 'Future Cars' sculpt?

 

Adrian had saved these two Cherilea / Hilco's for me, the standing guy has a damaged weapon, but they both have their correct helmets and put my squad, much enhanced with superglue up to about ten, with most complete, but all short on helmets!

 

Bully Lucky Luke figures, the eponymous hero, his horse Jolly Jumper and his dog, Ratanplan, these are soft PVC and scale well with the Comansi/bubble-gum premium ones seen here before.

 

The Dalton Brothers, from the left; Averell, Jack, William and Joe, also Lucky Luke characters, these are in a hard, possibly phenolic plastic, or early 'styrene, from JIM in France, and are in a larger scale.

 

Brabo bendy toy! Larger again, and manufactured in that slightly sweaty PVC, some Hong Kong makers used/favoured at times, but only to a slight shininess, not the full-on weeping stickiness of some old toys from the colony!

 

Mixed, larger-scale space figures with two of the Marx metallic blue ones, a Tudor Rose (marked) licensed copy/mould swap of Premier's pulp spaceman waving pistol and a - probably - 1970's PVC gum-ball, capsule-machine robot.

 

Three of the LB (for Lik Be) copies, I couldn't remember which ones I already had, so just grabbed all three against the possibility I might still need some poses, which may be among this trio, and because paint was quite good, except the bases!

 

We've seen them before, and now attributed them to two names, Toyway and the original GLJ, with packaging, so I thought we should see them from the back! I got excited as I thought I'd 'found' a fourth pose, but we've actually seen them all before!

 

These have been a steady stream-in, over the last few years, Italy's sub-scale copies, titled Space Legion (Legione Epaziale), from little pocket-money cards, again copied, but from Archer as well as the Premier biggies. I like the marbling, it gives each figure a certain character or uniqueness!

 

These are the Giant sub-copies I called 'Copy 2' here, and while the most common of the four types so far found, this particular batch is a late-production run, with a lot of heat-shrinkage dwarfism! They are also, mostly, in a darker gunmetal than the usual samples? You can spot the three more common silvery ones among them, and they are guarding two valuable dome-helmets (Archer / Glenco and Britains?) for the spares box!

P is for Potpourri of Plastic Peeps! Sci-Fi, TV & Movie

So, we reach the end of Chris Smith's latest donation, and while, obviously, toy soldiers/ceremonial, ancient/medieval, civilian and Wild West are the core of a collectors' stash, I always like this group for having some of the quirkier stuff, rarities and smaller production-run figures (even 'non-toy soldier'), and this lot was no exception!

 

A selection of Bluebird's Manta Force/Viper Squad and Exin Lines' Lego-likey astronauts, some arms missing, but the master sample will provide, or these chaps (and/or chapesses, they're all in suits) will donate!

A larger troll, a hard plastic, probably polystyrene, but could be a propylene polymer, robot type space warrior, who l;ooks quite recent/contemoray, but might not be, just clean! And a large PVC robot, who could be a specific character, I have a feeling I might have a smaller version in the plastic-pile somewhere?

A GLJ-Toyway astronaut, a Galoob Putty (?) from the Power Rangers franchise, a nice whitemetal Genie from some fantasy gaming range, an alien from Toy Story and a skeleton pencil-top guarding a keg of rum!

I think the Birdman is from Thunder Cats or He Man, while we saw the Star Wars Episode I/4 board game figures a while back, the daft lizard is from a recent Disney kid's thing, I believe, but is also a bendy and they have their own tub these days!

Have we seen these before? It's like all the cereal premiums, but in a soft PVC-type polymer. A mini Thunderbird 2, done here as a desk-toy hanger/fidget toy I think, but it could be flown in a Christmas tree, I wouldn't, I like my trees traditional, but many would, witness those Disney tree-hangers we looked at back in December, last year.
 

Speaking of Disney, one of the 7 Dwarfs, but not the usual set of generic cake-decoration/garden ornament ones (gardeners and musicians), although in the same two-polystyrene-halves, glued-together design, but a rather more obvious Disney character, I think Bashful, but could be Sleepy?

But back to the opening paragraph, and this was lovely, quirky as they come, and while I don't know how many pieces it left East Anglia in, Chris had put it in its own bag, so I'm assuming more than one, it arrived in five, one piece, being no more that a speck of dust, was ignored!

So, having had some success with the baking-powder/super-glue technique, recently, I prepared a station with a pad to soak up excess glue, a puddle of the same, some baking powder, a toothpick for applying glue and manipulating the white-mud, with a nail-file, filling-in for a snuff spoon! Once I'd begun, I remembered the applicator pen for Superglue Plastix, which helps speed everything up!

 

And a half-decent result was achieved! From the back it's a bit of a mess, as you would expect, but from the front it looks factory-fresh and ready to blast across the room from a sprung-loaded sucker-pad, although if I were to try, it'd disintegrate!

 

And, while cruder in the mirror-imaging than the previously found examples, it is another of the LB (Lik Be - it's so obvious when you give it some thought) knock-off's, given a less-robot, more-alien look, and raises the question of how many sculpts did they copy for the set, four, six, maybe three spacemen and three robots . . . only time can tell?

 

Many, many thanks to Chris for another fantastic parcel of odds, sods and unwanted's, those of you who know me, or who have followed the Blog for any length of time will know, I don't often wax lyrical about Britains or Timpo, Starlux or Elastolin, Marx or MPC, but rather tend to get excited by the ephemeral, quirky, oddities on the periphery of model-figure production, and it's all the stuff people save for me, give to me or donate to the blog which helps fill-in all the many missing links, such as the jumper-toy above. Thanks, Chris, much appreciated!

Character Games Limited is for CGL, Not GLJ!

Wouldn't want to get them confused, that could lead to all sorts of awkwardness, you would not know if you were coming or going, had seen them or not, or whether they were what you thought they were, all very confusing, what with GLJ, the makers of those cheepo Hong Kong space vehicles we've seen here a couple of times in the last few years, looking a bit like CGL! Anyway we're definitely looking at CGL in this post, not GLJ which we haven't looked-at, at all today, all day, no need to mention it really!

Shot last year on the way to storage, and what can I say about it, it's a chess-set, for chess-players to play chess with, it's modern, the pieces are a dense resin of some kind, quite heavy for the faux-ivory they are aiming at, but injected, not poured, so relatively robust and nicely detailed.

Tied into the second movie - 2002

The tray

Set-up, have I got the kings on the right colour?

All that effort on the figures and the board's a bit naff!

Boooooo! Boooooo!

Raaaay! Raaaay! Lovin' the Ents!

White wins because it's a morality tale!

Black looses because it's fiction!

F is for Follow-up - GLJ is for Get Looking in your Junk pile!

Weekend Job! Just a quickie, but quite important as it's a new name which will enable all sorts to be ID'd, and, while the images here are a bit shite, you can look at the original post to get a better idea of the contents.

You may remember when we looked at these a while back; Original Generic Primogenitor, well, they weren't generics, they were fully marked underneath you just couldn't read it the way they were tied-in at the back of the card, in actual fact they are claimed by the G.L.J. Toy Co., Inc., of Syosset, New York.

 

The toys are dated 1978, GLJ applied for trademarks in 1979 and 1980, so must have flourished then, with various infant toys, rubber gorilla's (KK) and other stuff coming-up on search results, but that's the brand for those Toyway astronauts, and the various other mechanics, firefighters, GI's and farmers shown in the previous post, so you can dig them out of the shite pile this weekend, isolate them and give them title!

Aaaaannnnnnd, wouldn't you know it, a few months later, and for the ninth time in the last twelve months Woodsey has managed to find/post something, recently seen here, feigning complete ignorance, despite the fact he always comments here at Christmas, although he sometimes deletes the comment after I've got the eMail notification? It's getting boring, Paul. "What do you think, readers!"

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2023/12/slo-mobile-space-alien-set.html

Different contents, and a better-branded box, two discoveries over here, and a Google-search result over there, but don't credit your source 'ay?

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2023/12/slo-mobile-space-alien-set.html

O is for Original Generic Primogenitor?

This is a bit of fun, bi-lingual (English-Spanish (or Italian)) but with no branding or clue to branding, however it seems to be either contemporary with, or - more likely - an earlier iteration of the figures later cleared in header-carded bags by Toyway?

It's probably a little beyond the Rack Toy classification, through contents and price-bracket, but it's still a collection of Hong Kong/Chinese plastic-tat, so in to RTM it goes! I took two sets of Photo's so have picked the best of each for this post and here it is in its entirety.

The packaging was a bit dog-eared, and while I straightened it somewhat with an iron, it was a temporary fix for the photo-shoot. Note how different the two vehicles are in the press photograph on the back of the card.

Close-up; the figures were obviously pegged-on randomly, as there are two pairs here where all four poses could have been used, something to keep looking for, as their finish is different from the Toyway ones.

The vehicles have a lot in common with the set of three 'fliers' from Blue Box, but here have those strange motors which if you push them too hard, slow down! So you give them a steady push and they sort of grind themselves off the kitchen counter at snail's pace using an 'inexorable momentum drive' engine!

In the artwork they have red or sky-blue transparencies, but mine both have blue-black canopies which show little of the crew-interiors, and if there is any clue to brand it would be in the logo on the bonnet, which is a meaningless W-plus!

Direct comparison on the left, a reminder of the Toyway's contents on the right, the two vehicles and the flag don't seem to have been carried across, but the hillock/rocky-outcrop and both items of ground-equipment have been, while Toyway always include the four poses.

The main difference is that the Toyway are plain gunmetal 'silver', while the generics have a coat of flattish or 'silk' finish silver paint. The blue / black / pink & red detailing is the same on both issues.

On the base we have clues to both unknown firefighters and mechanics we looked at a year or two ago, plus other figures which may or may not be in the same hard polystyrene, the farmers are common is a dozen versions of softer polyethylene and I have yet to encounter hard plastic knock-offs of the Airfix US Infantry, so as always with these art-room/press images; one can't take them as evidence of anything, and with no brand it's not proving much-else!

I suspect these will be found in old 1970's catalogues; Kays, Littlewoods, Index or Argos, here in the UK, whether the Spanish had similar I don't know, they could be seaside whinging-stopper's too?

A trizion lenta seems to be with slow traction but it could be with slow friction in Italian if the 't' is a poorly printed 'f' - A frizion lenta? And was this an early Pocketbond import?

08-07-2023 - US imports (with a different sticker on the bonnet of the 'saucer') are clearly marked (C) G.L.J. Toy Co. Inc., Syosset, N.Y. and 'Made in Hong Kong'. According to the US Coastguard (the wonders of Google - and the fact GLJ seem to have been in inflatables (and bendies!)) they also had Offices at the Toy Building 200/5th Avenue.