B is for Billions of Blistering Blue Bi-Trons!

Well, over a dozen, and they're not all blue! Just a quick follow-up to one element of Chris Smith's recent donation to the Blog, purely to get them in the tags and attached, that way, to the previous posts as extra imagery for Pikit Toys/Gordy International.

I know that my storage sample of loose ones has more blues, or paler blues to be precise, and while the camera's flash has washed them out, the front pair of red ones are a discernably darker-red than the rear trio.

 

I mentioned last time how the turrets of the little micro-AFV's can be used as back-packs for the Bi-Trons, whether as turrets (which would require some severe bending forwards and looking at the ground around their feet) or as comm's packs is - I guess - down to the owner's imagination!

 

A small patrol of those AFV's out of their blister-packs! And as last time, a reminder that  there is a resemblance to some of the Votom stuff from Tomy-Takara, beyond the similarity of the line's name!

M-Toy is for Marty, May, Moon and . . . err . . . Sun!

This should have been combined with last night's post, but I was tired and running out of puff, so I just split it and went with the circus stuff first, although, as I then spent an hour or so, finding and adding the last three images in that post, I might have been better integrating this lot and leaving the others for another day, but there you go, some pretty fluid evolution here at Small Scale World!

The press page as presented in Bill B's catalogue, I've enlarged the relevant or interesting bits below, and we'll look at it all in more detail, bearing in mind that extracting decent imagery from a .pdf folder is never easy!

The company is called May Moon, but I don't think I've ever seen a toy branded to May Moon, or 'Maymoon', however we have seen here, an early (1960's) set of those I-Ton Humber mini-trucks in Maysun branding, while some of the Circus are marked Maysun, under the base, of which some come in M-Toy packaging, so we can extrapolate that it's all the same Maysun-M-Toy-May Moon, which leaves Marty, who again have some bi-branded cards (Marty and M-Toy)

The best place to go for the Marty story - which seems to be unique to the fantasy-Sci Fi set of aliens & barbarians (ray guns and axes!) is Shaun's site here, where one of the sets is in that same Gordy packaging as the Pikit sets we saw back at the start of this year's Rack Toy Month, so there may be a Pikit version out there, Brits?

As this catalogue is dated 1986 and makes no mention of Marty, we can safely assume from all the available evidence that Marty was a short-lived (one line) brand-mark and May Moon traded first as Maysun, then as M-Toy.

 

Any connection with Marty McFly (which would point to hellish-cynical marketing) is dashed by the fact that the toy set came out several years before the first movie!
 

Among all the usual rack-toy guff, I thought these two were worth enlarging as they are a copy of the Raphael Lipkin set we saw here, although they may have been changed to lay flat, but it might just have been arranged like that for the catalogue images?

The tractor/trailer seem to be a pure Timpo farm knock-off's?

While the above pair were enlarged for obvious reasons! The number of times I've seen these confused with Star Toys recently is a mystery, I mean, how do you confuse rubber copies of Britains with polyethylene copies of Airfix & Timpo? And years after other people have sorted it out? Well; because, the trouble with Faceplant is that some of these guys are whittering-away [as fact] from a position of pure ignorance!

I think we've seen the helicopter before, but nice to put a name . . . or three . . . to it! While I had the lower shot, of colour variation in the German infantry bodies, kicking around for a while, taken with a load of other stuff, so that's that out of Picasa, and Maysun, Moon and Star sorted out . . . d'yer see what I did there! I will do it all properly, one day!

O is for Old Crock ID'd

I've found the card for one of the old fashioned Mercers we looked at here, it turns out it's from Henry Gordy, who would become Gordy International later; From the price I'm guessing early-to-mid 1960's, for this toy, while the 'International' was added in the 1970's,  when similar rack toys were around .49 or .98¢?

It's definitely the right car, as the code - 814 -  ties up, even if the car is labelled as a Minimite and the card as a Gordy Mite! Nice thing, and nice to ID it, with Prosperity on the middle one, it's just the cheapie on the right to get that trio nailed down!

Of course; once you know what you're looking for, you find they are all over Etsy and feebleBay, with Wells-Brimtoy knock-off trucks and sports cars to add to the oldsters - and they instantly lose their mystery . . . heay-ho!

L is for Last One for Now!

Still with Pikit Toys! I did a quick entry for Pikit on the relevant A-Z blog last night, it only reminded me of how little I've done on them and how much is still to do (and I thought by now I'd be settled and doing it . . . this time next year, he says, hopefully!), but it's there now anyway!

http://smallscaleworld-n-o-p.blogspot.com/2023/08/moneyitem-limited-piket-toys-limited-pt.html

Z is for Zoo Animals

Continuing to look at Pikit Toys carded sets here;

Another Pikit Toys import, probably shared with Gordy International, and - from the unpainted nature of the contents - possibly from Rado / Ri-Toys, I've added close-ups of the bright-pink Airfix clones to their posts;

Airfix Zoo Animals Set 1
Airfix Zoo Animals Set 2

These are the unused shots from that compartment.

A Rado Industrial Co. / Ri-Toys zoo set (isolated from a larger image in Bill B's catalogue), the similarities lead to the above comment, but, while it's not clear, the elephant is a different sculpt to the one in the Pikit import, so the Pikit set may have product of more than one maker and Rado can't be 'called', definitively, even though they may well have had more than one elephant in their inventory?

B is for Battle of the Bi-Trons

You may remember that back in 2020, Chris Smith sent us some robots in one of his donations to the Blog, and at the time I didn't have a maker, but a few months later (2021) I found this set, too expensive, on a Buy-It-Now, told Chris, and put a note on the original post and have since mentioned it cryptically, as and when we've seen bits from it, in other posts, I kept watching until the price came down, and I've now got one, so let's have a look at it! Robots & Space Tanks!

 

Due to the lighting on the day and/or the colours, photographing the whole card wasn't easy, but between the two shots I think I've done it justice, and you can make out most of the elements, the Pikit Toys sets (for that is where we still are, this early in RTM) with this bordered cartouche card-art, were also issued by Gordy International in the USA, with their info' overprinted along the bottom edge.

You get two sets of Bi-Tron robot battle suits, obviously ripping-off several Japanese Anime series including - I suspect - the 'mecha anime' series Dougram or Votoms? One set, here in blue, are the 'good robots' the other; bad!

 

As I wondered at the time, the plugs in the backs are for the turrets which come with the accompanying accessories, a slight daftness, as being single mouldings they can't be bent or animated into a pose where they can realistically fire at anything other than the sky!

Bad 'Bots are red! Whatever colour each 'army' is, you do get four unique sculpts in each quadrigeminal (it sounds more spacey!) team, Only two are carrying weapons, one in each team, here it's the chap on the right.

Early indications were that these yellow versions of the good 'Bots are Gordy and the Blue; Pikit, but then I was reminded that Chris's donation came in three distinct shades of blue (from more than one set, there were duplicates), so I suspect it was a bit more random, or they were issued by another brand, maybe at another time?

 

But this lot did come from the states, with 'normal' red Bad's, and I've seen a second set with yellow 'Bots, also across the Pond, so it may be a 'rule'; certainly a guideline?

Space Taaaaaannks! These are always green/red, and the same oxide-red as the naughty robots, some of which may be copies of the old Kenner Mega Force sci-fi'ish armour? Slightly larger than 1:600 micro-armour, they might be around 1:300?

AT-AT . . . not! There's also a walker, who comes with four jointed legs to be assembled by Junior, and then lost forever in the garden! I'm really not sure on any of the specific origins of any of these models, but I'm sure they are aping other toys, maybe Tomy and/or Takara stuff which never got Western distribution?

For instance, I thought this robot transporter was from the Takara Votoms range (as I pointed out previously; Bi-Trons - Vo'Toms . . . geddit!), but the one I was thinking of, has a rigid chassis and eight wheels/four axles, in-line, but I'm sure I've seen this prior to the Pikit set, so it's probably out there as something else!

Likewise, I think this might be ex-Takara, or certainly I think I've seen it in a Mecha' cartoon, it's a twin-rotor, very sci-fi, heavy-lift helicopter/sky-crane for recovering damaged 'battle suits', and a rather nice thing to find in a rack toy!

The final item on the set's card is an attack helicopter, and given advances/changes in real life attack helicopters since this toy was issued in the 1990's; quite similar to some in service or heading for service now!

 

As rack toys go, with or without piracy, this is a really nice little set if you have the sense of imagination for sci-fi/futurism, or are a fan of anime Mecha's, however, for simpler minds it would be a bit of "shit" to be left on the peg in favour of a farm, zoo or 'Army Men' set, or some Chinasaurs!

O is for Oriental Oldtimers

[Heh-heh! I'd written this up at the time, so this was the Hong Kong shite which was supposed to go in front of this morning's Citgo post, while the French stuff was all found in the garage after I'd prepared this one and started the Citgo! 2022 additions in square brackets or with strikethroughs]

A couple more days with no figures I'm afraid, but these need to be ticked-off, a lot are or were rack toys and they were a big part of our childhoods, whether the expensive Yesteryear's from Matchbox, or cheap rack-toys, and whether toys or place-mats, mugs, ash-trays, linen kitchen-cloths, tin waste-paper bins, bathroom tiles . . . d'you remember the bathroom tiles! Yet; they've all but disappeared now?

I love these; they have that cusp of the sixties look about them, half-psychedelia, half early-'70's glam rock, seen in both the card artwork and the plastic colours. The only clue to maker is a submarine-logo which seems to be made from WS and while the card-back shows six vehicles; there may have been more.

It's tempting (and for some time was my general thought on the subject) to think these are Yesteryear copies for the main part, but in fact there are lots of sources, not least several French plastic Marques - as we shall [have] seen in later [earlier] posts.

Here we have what appear to be three Mercers, all plastic but all different when you study them, the support for the front mudguard (fender) for instance has three different design-treatments, the seats all differ, one has a radiator/headlight plug-in, one has only the separate headlights and the third has that whole section as a single integral moulding with the bonnet (hood).

15th August 2023 - The left-hand, better one, is now known to be a Henry Gordy 'Gordy Mite', see card here.

From a production point of view; the plastic also differs with the Minimite all hard polystyrene (apart from the tyres), the unknown all soft polyethylene and the one marked Prosperity Toys being a mix of components in both plastic types - it's also missing it's spare-tyres! [While the Minimite, arguably most likely to be based on the European one we saw in the Fuilor post, has its spare tyres in a different place?

[I've failed to find the links to the similar stuff on Moonbase, despite an hours search, even though I know it's there somewhere!]

Two more, both unmarked, the white one has the look of the Walgreen generics in the first shot but not the whacky colours, and it's not on the card-back, while we had the Matchbox version of the Rolls Royce as kids and the finer bits tended to break (windscreen, headlights), which they are less likely to on a soft ethylene copy!

I think this is a Renault? It's also a fifth or sixth origin/maker to those we've already seen and gives an idea of the 'parts-list' of one of these. Pulled from bins by assemblers working in a hurry; you end up with different coloured seats!

This is also Hong Kong production, but is as good as some of the better French examples we will look at later, branded to both KMC and Mini Models, the polyethylene tilt/cover and tyres are added to an otherwise well made polystyrene model, with the problem of the spoked wheels (simplified on the proceeding models) here solved with clear discs.

U is for Underwater

Only the one photograph, but a lot in it. Centre top is the lose Mini-submarine from Manurba with the driver/pilot underneath, to the left is the same machine issued as Scuba Diver Set by Gordy in the US (another company that remains unsung under Giant's shadow, despite producing a similar sized range of similar products?), while below it is the more common Hong Kong copy, note the full-round cross-section. This is a hard plastic model with soft diver, the Maurba one is all soft.

To the right of the lose ones we see the carded presentation of the HK one, entitled Frogman Set with colour variants below.

The bottom of the picture shows from left to right; Baking-powder divers from Manurba (these are different from the Kellogg's one's and I will look at them all later), while next are a couple of Hong Kong Mini-sub's in soft plastic that have kept the Manurba hollow hull, and came in Christmas Crackers, Sobres etc..

Finally, the same card as above, but with different contents and marked L.I.C. (Laramie Industries Corp.) Philadelphia. In the very centre is a Manurba rubber boat (sans engine) to compare with the HK copy of the Airfix US Marines boat.