F is for Follow-up to Plunder Posts - Animals (Prehistoric)

Confirmation of the 30mm rubber cavemen being issued by Harett-Gilmar (HG Toys), and some of the rather fat dinosaurs they lived alongside, in the well-known prehistoric continent of Gondneverwhen!

 

Sometimes it's those mid-era (of one's life) toys which pass one by, those issued while you're busy doing other things, but which have disappeared from the retail market by the time you return to collecting, full-time, and I only discovered these, looking for something else, in 2023!

 

The dinosaurs are fat, I mean there's something wrong with their metabolism, which may be a clue as to their demise, if the meteor theory proves false . . . they ate themselves extinct by getting too fat to mate, or move! The shrub, being like everything else, a softish PVC, could easily be mistaken for a Bata accessory, with its semi-flatness?

At least four poses, although I've also seen the guy with stripey loin-cloth ascribed to another toy line (Mighty Max, I think?), but that was almost certainly a false identification, and I'm guessing the string on the bow is a home addition (in fact I think the whole bow is a replacement), and the club is missing from stripey-pants, but you get the idea!

P is for Payton, Winneco, Palmer, HG Toys . . .

. . . and now could be Victory Buy for/or by BMC? And there's bound to be a Hong Kong version somewhere!

Another post which grew organically over time, starting with Brian Berke's purchase of a re-issue in a local hobby store in N. East USA, prompting me to locate a couple, in the course of which the riders were identified (they've been in the unknown's for years!) and Hong Kong squeezed in at the end!

2.99 seems like a steal to me, Toy Soldiers Depot have some at 1.99 plus postage, so about the same in the end, if you grab a few. Now manufactured in neutral grey plastic so paint will be everything!

I don't know for certain if the originator is Victory Buy, and the packaging is generic/near-blank but they seem to have a lot of this old stuff now? It never stared in BMC publicity as far as I know (they have been carrying the Payton twin-flak 'space tank'). . . and can anyone hazard a guess as to what CHD might mean or signify - Cargo Handling Detachment? Could just as easily be coming-up from Mexico?

So I managed to track down what I guess is an earlier one (olive green, stickers) and a later one (cabbage green, no stickers), and I should point out - as we go through the post - my olive one has the slightly smaller, wider-axle'd wheels of the gun/jeep as it's front pair, not that noticeable, but it needs to be sorted at some point!

You can see from the series of mould-damage 'glitches' on the right-hand door's interior surface that all three trucks have come from the same tool.

I hadn't noticed to begin with how filthy the cabbage-green one was, I think it's been knocking-about in a box/tin/tub with lead (hollow-cast/pod-foot) or whitemetal (war gaming) figures for a couple of decades or so . . . but it might have been a pencil case, whatever the cause, static had given it a good coating of some graphite-like substance!

A scaler from Brian with one of Crescent's finest, it's really carpet-wars scale! The flash round the rear corners and on the foot-step/running board has got worse over the years as the mould ages, but it easily removed with a sharp blade.

More shots and the bedspread one shows them after I gave them the TFR treatment, almost factory-fresh!

We looked at the figures briefly ages ago in an ostensibly Marx post, but I didn't - at the time - clock the seated figures that went with them (or I might have, and not mentioned it/soon forgot it, as they were in storage at the time!), they are dead common in mixed lots, junk lots and rummage trays at shows and on the internet, so the sets must have been almost as common as the Tim Mee 'Vietnam' GI's sets were, over the years.

Brian actually sent some of them (the other figures) too, a couple of years ago, we saw them here briefly (in a bag!) and when everything's sorted we'll have a proper look at it all again.

Hong Kong took the seated chap, added a loop to his helmet and dropped him out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane on the end of a bed-sheet! MS could be Ming Shing, a known novelty issuer from Chai Wan, Hong Kong, but there's nothing concrete.

I'm pretty sure there's an Italian branded import version of this somewhere, but I can't find it or the images, so that's a big question-mark against a possible false-memory!

Thanks to Mr Berke again for the shots (all the grey ones) which got me tracking down the others and pulling it all together a bit; Payton subsequently owned by Winneco and Palmer, issued by HG Toys in a 'rack toy' style boxed play-set and now . . . by . . . someone? And the grey one's not a 'recast'; you cast metal, it's a re-issue of moulded product from the original tool.

S is for Stamping Thundercats

Licensed from Telepix by HG Toys (the same Harett-Gilmar who made that series of TV/movie related play-sets in the 1980's), I don't know how many were in the set but hope this is all of them - two good guys and a pair of baddies, bought together from an aged shop-stock box in an older corner-shop around ten years ago?

Good guys (fluffy-cats?) are the outer pair (red bases); Thundercats which I could look up but can't be bothered to, one's a lion/man the other a panther/person . . . I think! The bad guys (blue bases, smelly-cats!) seem to be based on a simian of some kind and an explosion of purple crazy-string!

Seven years in a storage facility's shipping container has somewhat dried-out the blue inc-pads - found in the cap - but the two red ones are still going strong (good always triumphs over evil!) and they produce 20mm paper flats . . . sort of!

As you can see - from the risks our 'Berserker' takes on your behalf - they are 65mm if you remove the stamp and stamp/ink-cap. And it won't have escaped your notice that their role as handles leaves them a bit statue'y - Oscars for kids!

It's funny - of all the stuff I missed gallivanting around as an adolescent farmer, soldier, ski-instructor and festival-goer (box ticking!), these were probably the one's I know least about, I caught the odd episode of He-Man, watched the rise of the execrable Scrappy-Doo, joined some late-night stuff sobering-up with a microwaved pasty occasionally (Serenity, Terrahawk re-runs), saw PC'd TMHT quickly revert to TMNT in the early nineties after I returned to UK, but never really had much awareness of the Thundercats (or the various giant robot ones!), yet I have managed to accrue quite a bit of it in the last few years, even the last few months - I scored a bunch at a charity shop back in September, in two scales.

M is for Marx and Matchbox

While digging out the Marx WWII G.I's the other day from the 'Marx - Odd Sizes' box; I found my little 'space' fire engine, God knows where it came from, although I remember having other vehicles from the range as stocking-fillers one Christmas when we were kids. I seem to remember the guys over at Moonbase Central showed a few a while back, and a Google search might help find the article, although they are starting to add 'tags' to their blog now.

So here it is with the 30mm Space Commandos from the Matchbox 'Adventure 2000' series of 1977. There was a bit of a fad for this type of vehicle around the early 1970's, as I also remember small animals with similar wheels (mouse, puppy, kitten etc...) and others with wind-back-and-run motors.

Having enhanced the fire truck 'photo-shoot' with the Matchbox figures, we may as well have a look at them - all three from both sides, they are in a pale blueish-silver metallic polyethylene and are in the same rather dated style as the Airfix 54mm set that would follow these in 1981, not surprising as both lots were the work of one man - Ronald Cameron!

HG, a US play-set issuer in the 1980's produced several Buck Rogers sets with cheap Hong Kong rip-offs of the Matchbox figures, which were slightly larger, slightly cruder and a more greyish-silver, the HG figure is the left-hand one in both shots above. Click and enlarge the image and you'll see the faint 'HONGKONG' on the much fatter base.

A few lose-ends; A nice painted figures that came in with a mixed lot - top left. The connecting plate that held the figures in under the card liner to the box and the little spruletts - as I call them - on the base of the figures in the shots top right. All three can be found with them but only the two ray-gunners are joined.

We looked at similar nodules Here and the main perpose of them is to ensure that the figure itself moulds completely by giving the hot resin somewhere to flow to 'beyond' the product itself, rather like the channels in a hot-metal mould.

Being metallic, these figures are starting to get quite brittle now, a fate they share with the very similar coloured Marx navy and others, bottom left shows the detritus in the bottom of their tub! The final shot - bottom right is a comparison with other Matchbox products, showing how Mr. Cameron has his favourite poses, with two Battle Kings and a figure from the Super King airport crash tender.

Added 17th July 2012;

Courtesy of Gog over at Toys from the Past comes this image of the guys in situ, the box is actually a reproduction, but a good one! Might actually be an original...translation issues!