P is for Post Office . . . Rack Toys!

Specifically, the Cranleigh Post Office!

 

For those loyal readers who aren't aware of the fact (which is probably most of you), Cranleigh is a rather smart villagey-town in an equally smart corner of Surrey Hills, a 'stockbroker dormitory' for those who 'come down' from London at the weekend, in their shiny, black SUV-4x4-Crossover wanker's tanks, and where they park their trophy wives and Eton-bound brats!

 

It also serves some of the smartest villages and hamlets you'll find, like Plaistow, and the 'folds (Ifold, Dunsfold (home of the Hawker Harrier*) and Alfold) and is known to describe the feeling of "A mood of irrational irritation with everyone and everything." from the little-black-book The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, a surprise, comedy, Christmas-hit, decades ago, now, which was contemplative reading in our loo for years, and rather sums-up those stockbroker residents! Indeed, the less kind might accuse me of suffering chronic Cranleigh! I would - of course - point to the bell-curve (and what's happening in America right now), and argue it's not irrational.

 

* I served in the TA for a while with a Mr. Boxall who was in the paint shop at Dunsfold, and used to do all the markings for Hawks and Harriers, new and refurbishments! I don't know if he did the Red Arrows, but he told of the flurry of activity during the Falklands crisis.

 

Anyway, I have been driving round there, for work, recently, and saw a sign behind the trees in the main street saying "Balloons & Other Novelties", and thought that sounded interesting, so made a mental note to return, on a day-off, when it (which turned out to be the Post office) was open, and did so! Finding a quite well-stocked corner of cheaper toys, gifts, craft work stuff and, yes, novelties!

 

This is what I found;

 

The latest iteration of the set of six largish, but cheap dinosaurs we saw here under several brands about eight/ten years ago (Poundland, TKMaxx, 99p Stores and others), singly or in threes. Currently wearing Kandytoys moniker, and I think this is one of the second paint versions, we saw last time?

 

This was actually branded TKM, so must have been a bulk purchase at some point, from, probably, Home Bargains? A nice set of larger animals for those who collect such things, the elephant is nicely sized for conversion to a 25mm war elephant, but I'm not sure why the lioness is a completely different colour from the lion!

 

This was HGL (Grossman), and goes well with my British Museum ruminant Sauropoda (future post!), it is what it is, but collaged poorly due to its dimensions!

 

This is the 'other' Alien illustrated on the card of the Whitehouse Leisure one I found in Stansted the other week (https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2025/08/r-is-for-recent-rack-toy-roundup.html), without the Elf's ears, and while I didn't look closely on either occasion, and got both sculpts out of two purchases by pure accident, I think it can be assumed both come in both brandings? This is also badged Kandytoys.

 

I left him in the slime for now, as it has a heat-sealed lid, like a milk carton! The cap, however, is a whacky, LED-embedded, screaming-loud, multicoloured UFO, which is operated from the button on the top, but with a sealed-unit battery, won't last forever! It adds to a growing fleet of mini flying-saucers!

 

It was mostly dinosaurs though, and here another from a set of, err . . . several, each of which has a mini-saur in a decorative egg! I only got the one, to help with future ID'ing, and it shares branding with both Kandytoys (the reused sculpt above) and 'Jurassic Era', but is a new sculpt as far as I know

 

As do these (share the brand/brand-mark), but which, again, I think we saw years ago, as generics or in Pucator branding? These were cheap as chips (not that chips are that cheap these days; even a child's portion can be a fiver!), so I bought two, and will un-dig one of these glow-in-the-dark dino-skeletons, one day!
 

Heading back, I dropped into Borden to check the Poundstretcher for those Supreme knock-off Wild West sets - they hadn't had a re-stock, so no Cowboys (they were in the bigger set we looked at a few years ago), and instead I left with this soft-vinyl, metallic dry-brushed, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, robo-stego-dragon, for something daft like 70p? Bargain! And ideal for figures between 20-40mm.
 

Right, I've got a week or so to fire out as much rack-toy stuff as I can, and will try to make an effort!

M is for Megasaurs!

Quite small 'Megasaus' actually! I've had a bit of a mini-adventure getting to the Sparing Fair at the NEC and back again, but it was mostly my own fault (the adventure bits) and proved a successful trip, although I slept for ten hours straight when I got back! Hence, a slight hiatus on posting the Chris/Dinosaur series!

Also note, the late Michael Hyde's collection is live, under the hammer now at Wessex Auctions with interesting religious and ecclesiastical subjects to the fore.

 

https://www.easyliveauction.com/auctions/?ah=115a7542f7992a40b2c6366ef3bea500

This is a quickie, looking at some small pocket-money bagged rack-toys from HGL which Peter Evans donated to the blog the other day. I was actually challenged to a game of football yesterday, in the aisles of Hall 5, by an HGL sales rep' who was clearly going stir-crazy at the end of day-three! I politely declined and continued shooting their quite extensive Dino' range!

Four bags, three different content assortments.

Those contents, shot as best I could!

The duplicate bag got opened, and as you can see, for one of the lowest price-points, they are really quite good, with nice detailing, and a reasonably dog-like Dimetrodon, although his sail's a bit small, maybe a juvenile, there'd be no room in an egg for all those spines, so they must grow in 'childhood'? The Carnosaur's a bit generic, the Kerthunkersaurus looks particularly leathery, and the Stegasaur could happily join any herd. Many thanks again to Peter for spotting and saving these.

O is for One for Fun

I was going to add these to the end of the Christmas cracker post the other day, but I realised they are very different really, being not small monochrome blobs, but a more sophisticated product altogether! I know! But they can go here, in their own little eraser post!

 

I bought these in a supermarket but can't remember which (Tesco or Morrisons I think, Home Bargains as a maybe?), however it should be available elsewhere or online, as it's an HGL product  from One for Fun, who are the over-brand now, holding Ozzbozz and Tobar in the same stable.

It was less than three quid I think, and for that you get quite a lot, with three plug-together Iwaco knock-offs, two flowers (tulip and rose) and a stegosaurus, three other monobloc dinosaurs which we may have seen before from The Works, three 'flat' sports balls and two space flats, an astronaut and a rocket, all five are polychrome extrusion slices, and another five; random items of over-moulded, miniature domestic household goods/food items. So quite a mix, almost a 'starter pack' for someone new to erasers. Bargain!

L is for Late Layabouts Languishing in Limbo!

As well as lots of old Charity shop stuff, there's also a lot of toy show/toy fair stuff, which will probably be broken-down into box-tickers, or thematic posts now, and a few Shelfies which seem to have missed previous round-ups, including these, most of which are from the Autumn/Christmas just-gone, despite the fact we did have several 'shelfie' posts from both my Camera and Brian Berke's? But there you are, they hide from me!

This is actually from 2021, so a real hider! It was, then, the latest iteration of the rather generic and poorly-detailed/sculpted 30mm'ish figures Mark, the Man of Tin, has such success, and apparent delight with, in turning them into spacemen, monsters, Napoleonics and colonial thin-red-lines, among other things!

 

We've had various shelfies of these, over the years, since they started appearing, not long after this Blog was born, and Poundland, Poundstreatcher, the defuct Poundworld Plus and 99P Stores (along with others), have all carried them, often in more than one packaging, while Amazon has carried dozens of generics and phantom-branded stuff, tubbed, carded, bagged, blistered and clam-shelled!

 

Which is why I only shelfie them, I have samples of various sizes, in dozens of colours, and they will be findable, mint, on evilBay for decades to come, as ex-stock, if you really need them in packaging! 

I hate this shite, I phuqing hate it with a vengeance, and to be fair to my sensibilities, I hated the big-head/bobble-head/nodding crap of our childhoods, and I hated the Corinthian cricketers and footballers of the 1990/2000's, it's awful stuff. I think it's an extension of clown-phobia?

 

I even hate the 'Nutty Mads' from Marx . . . "Let's apply teenage, 50's surf-culture to World War Two murderers, shall we? Make them look silly! The Butchers of Nanking will look harmless after we've given them some racially-profiled extremities!", said no sane person, ever. Garbage!

"Yeah, but the kids like them", go the supine, brain-dead, left-of-bell-curve parents! Because unethical, immoral, capitalist Toymen, who have a greater love of money than the future mental well-being of the human race, have sold them the concept, while you were getting drunk and watching porn, to blot-out current-affairs and drown the misery of your existence, you dullards!

Deep breath Hugh, take a moment, and then see if you can find some nice dinosaurs . . .

Self-branded/in-house from B&M, I think these are the latest from HGL (Grossman) or HTI (Halsall), repacked for B&M, and at less than the price of a single larger Schleich or Papo, a bloody bargain! Who wouldn't like this under the Tree on Christmas morning?

 

These - Wenno - might be a phantom brand (also for B&M) or an actual brand mark for a China toy maker (I haven't seen them at the trade-fairs?), but they seem to be newish sculpts (albeit, maybe copies of other makers) and relatively well done for the price-point, which, again, beats the big-names hands down, and I thought the giraffe was particularly well done, compared to the rack-toy giraffes of our youth!

 

 

 

We're on safer ground with Teamsters, having seen them several times before, an imported sub-branding of HTI, covering a variety of die-cast or 'toy car' lines, and I wouldn't buy any of these, new, but they will help ID loose dinosaurs at some point in the future! Also shot in B&M.

And finally a similar set, in B&M packaging, really a generic, but helping to pinpoint an origin for some of the many teeny dinosaurs, if no better candidate comes forward in the future.

T is for Toy Fair 2020 Reports - Tobar

Tobar didn't have much on display this year, or at least not much new or exciting for the readers of this Blog (so this is another post with no inherent or actual urgency!), but if they were busy in December extricating from or protecting themselves from the fallout of the Hawkin's Bazaar collapse, they probably had other things on their minds?

They did have a set of dinosaurs, which are of interest only because we will be seeing them again twice - if I get all the Toy Fair 2020 reports out . . . in a vague and untimely manner!

In case I don't [get them out in a timeless fashion], I'll point-out now that the same weirdly decorated (mouldy birthday-cake? Cambazolasaurus?) stegosaurus (far left - bottom) was to be seen on both HGL (Grossmann)'s stand (top left) and in the inventory of Keycraft's 'Fumfings' (top right) pocket-money/rack toy lines.

I think we saw these last year (I shot them while I was talking to the sale manager about Erwin's bullshit re- both Schylling and Supreme!), but I thought we'd look at them again in such an untimed procedure as they are really rather good sculpts of fancy goldfish, for what are really 'only' simple bath/garden toys - except for the cartoon eyes perhaps! Note the differential between the unit price and the Recommended Retail Price (RRP)!

So, if you're timing the exercise; that's Tobar 2020! Did you see him this week; TJF? I don't live anywhere near Woking, and have mentioned Fleet so often we can only conclude he's a very stupid man. he then grandly announced a post of rare or unusual figures and showed us a bunch of mostly seen-before stuff, half of which was Dulcop, common as muck . . . common as Airfix . . . box-ticking!

The next day came two good'ish posts and I began to think they'd turned it round (the good ship shitestuff), but it all seems to have petered-out in the second half of the week, and that was with all of them running around like busy  bees! Sweet little Merkle Lickspittle was dispatched to buy the jeep I showed you a couple of weeks ago, and while it's lovely to know they use this Blog as their purchasing guide (that the whole point of the New Production News tag!), they then Blogged it without a brand, so what - exactly - was the point? To show that they can sit in my dust any-time; badly? We already knew that! Very stupid men, and one of them's a university type!

T is for Toy Fair 2019 Reports - HGL - Rack Toys and Counter Displays

As I'm well behind with the Toy Fair '19 stuff, and as it's Rack Toy Month, it seems to make sense to combine the one with the other by clearing one of the UK's bigger Rack Toy, novelty and pocket-money plaything importers from the 'Toy Fair '19' sub-queue!

POS (point of sale) novelties included wind-up robots (becoming another perennial favourite here at Small Scale World) in red and black (left hand bin) although there were several color-way/design combinations on the two base-plastic colours, for a four or six 'set-count'; two or three black and the same - red?

The right hand bin is larger scale - several times life-size - insects, which may be of interest to insect collectors, but they may already have found them, January was a while ago now!

Smaller blister sets and larger, bagged sets with header-cards containing all the common tropes; insects, reptiles, farm & zoo animals and dinosaurs, there's also a single - Halloween-ready - bat (sans blister), and a slight departure on the normal fare; a set of flying birds, or birds in flight!

Some close-ups; I didn't think to get the birds properly and the bat was a balancing afterthought crop! The birrds are a departure and you can see the mallard clearly, I think/suspect the others may include an eagle, vulture and owl? But the orange one may be another duck-like bird and you'd half-expect a sea-gull?

I think a few of the dinosaurs have come-in over time, in mixed lots, and while these are technically generics, with the animal collectors often having the China-maker's name, it's nice to be able to round a few up next time I sort the 'unsorted' and scribble an HGL moniker on their bag!

Larger scale farm and zoo sets include counter dispensers for the biggest and tubs for medium-sized animals (54/60mm compatible stuff in the main), while the little zipper-satchels with their animal-pining, vac-formed trays bear a striking resemblance to the small-scale horse sets from Brayer!

When the biggest animals come-in they tend to go back to charity, but I always photograph them for the archive, and shots like this might help ascribe them all one day. The bigger insects we saw at the top also have a counter-top dispenser, huge snakes were a regular in the toy-box when we were kids, often an 'attendance prize' when leaving someone else's birthday party - and a pack of cetaceans, which brings us to . . .

. . . the oceans! Sharks! It's all sharks for 2019 . . . I think there's a dolphin in there somewhere, but basically sharks are it! They all seem to be the same line but in a variety of packaging options. Then there's the cartoon one with a pink-monkeys foot in its mouth!

Pan-out and it's still 'all sharks' on the left, while on the right we get down to the serious animal for the serious young animal collector to seriously collect - My mother volunteered for many years at the Bernardo's charity shop in town and reports that there were several small boys who would come round buying the dinosaurs and nothing but. And they knew all their proper names, no "kerthunkersaurus" from them!

I think we've seen most of them before, but to note are the larger squidgy ones and the small rack-toy bag of older 1970/80's sculpts still going strong.

Again, these were all in last year's shots I think and I know I highlighted the Magasaurs branding across the lines/range then.

The smaller bag and the tubs have the older sculpting while the larer bag looks to have all new sculpts with the more on-trend decoration taken from the more colourful lizards and birds alive today, rather than the dowdy twin-tone or monochrome, often muddy decoration of the past.

Note: HGL has totally replaced H. Grossman formally (corporate usage), but Megasaurs.com has not replaced Ozbozz, just sits alongside it!

P is for Puff-powered Paper & Puffy-Polymer 'Planes

In my day (he says; making himself sound like an old git!) they were all paper or balsa-wood, now they are mostly expanded polystyrene foam, but you still find the odd paper one!

This post is a bit off the beaten track of Small Scale World, and was in part the result of unexpected consequences, following that weird sycamore-Superman I showed back in February, in that Brain B sent a couple of shelfies of equally wacky playthings to the Blog, and it encouraged me to build a post round them, mainly because one set were . . .

. . . Cars tie-ins and I hate Cars like I hate anything, so probably would not otherwise have used the images! From Unique who do appear here from time to time as purveyors of quality tat and novelty polymer loveliness, they are four to a pack and probably as much-fun as anything else in their price-bracket.

There is a Marvel Avengers Assemble set as well - also with four models, but they all appear to be the same; both sets seem to be made from die-cut foam-core sheets which may make them a tad heavy, still; a sharp push into the wind and they should do the business.

And the business is . . . ephemeral fun, which if not timeless, probably goes back to well before the Wright brothers - if Da Vinci was drawing them, chances are kids were experimenting with toy ones?

As Mr. Berke was sending me his shelfies I had been buying this from Clinton's as a birthday card for someone who's hard to buy cards for!

I went back for a second; the wings were a bit loose until I worked out how to shove them back into a tightening section, not bad and all-paper! Despite the militaristic marking, it's unarmed, clearly a two-seater and probably based on a trainer or powered-glider of some kind.

Ah, yes . . . this, believe it or not; is HTI's Thunderbolt. Back in the day - the balsa-wood day that is - they were either outline printed in black on wood, or they came with a reasonable two or three colour screen-print; this has been fully litho'ed, but poorly and onto un-sized, expanded-polystyrene, which gives a opalescent look.

It has fold-up ailerons and stabilisers in the wings and tail respectively which the old balsa ones didn't, but we sometimes put them in our folded-paper 'planes at school, it usually resulted in a nose-dive or a tail-stand . . . followed by a nose-dive!

By now I was on a roll vis-à-vis getting a post together, and discovered that not only do women get less wages and pay more for their pink stationary, but despite making-up slightly more that half the toy-buying population, they pay more for their glider-toys too! This was £1.50 against the 99p's and flat £'s of the 'boys toys'! Investing in journalistic excellence, or being taken for a mug? Doh!

More like the ones Brian sent to the Blog as shelfies this one from Grossman's HGL is properly three-colour printed on foam-core board, and despite it's odd look, fly's as well as any . . . oh yeah; there's been ruthless testing!

Only this weekend I saw Tobar gliders of Dinosaurs, the same fighters we're about to go back to, and something else which I've forgotten, something cartoony and/or thematic? And I remember birds from when I was a kid.

But here's a thing - when I was rushing around looking for a couple of these to Blog a few weeks ago, at 5.25pm in a small parochial town that goes dark at 5.29 on the dot - I went into the discount store and asked if they had any and they didn't, but on Saturday - they had three different boxes of them . . . clearly; it pays to ask!

Although now I feel guilty for the little toy shop, as they did have them last time and that's where I ended up getting the four in this post, but now they have competition a few doors down, and it may be my fault! They had HTI and Tobar mixed in the same dispensing box, and after getting the Thunderbolt, I went back for a spitfire and Tomahawk, and half-wish I hadn't, as we'll see.

But first a comparison of the two packagings reveals that there is a slight difference in line-up, both companies are offering 12 aeroplanes, but only 11 are duplicated between ranges with HTI offering a MkII Spitfire to Tobar's Hellcat, as these sets always had a Messerschmitt Me.109 when I wer't'lad, I can safely assume they are both purchasing from a longer list offered by the Asian manufacturer. Also there's a couple of oddities on the list - Focke Wulf trainer?

Tobar's artwork shows them as they could be, HTI's as they are, you will notice there are only a few different pressings, with HTI the different artwork used is 'best as can be'; once you've opened the packing the actuality . . .

. . . is far more disappointing, with very poor QC, very poor registering within the cut lines, very poor pigmentation, very poor accuracy (we have a Japanese Tomahawk!), mirror-image of fuselage-halve artwork, leading to inverted lettering and reversed codes, all very poor!

The reason all the shots of the Thunderbolt above show the same side, is because the other side looked more like melted bubble-gum than aircraft artwork! And these were almost as bad, all over - a pinky-purple mess.

At least HTI aren't going to disappoint to the level Tobar's are!

I will look out for vintage versions and maybe come back to these in a few years - there were advertising premiums and some used to have a central balsa spar to which a rubber-band motor and wire-mounted wheels could be added, but if you're of a certain age; you know that, we all got through a couple or more - every summer!

I think I may have a four-engined Lancaster Bomber from a beach-day in the 1990's somewhere in storage, which was a better print, but the same sheet-foam construction - for now though; that's 'paper' planes!

29-03-18 (Very auspicious day!) Re- Tomolio's comment, these are being imported into the Antipodes by Pink Poppy - anyone recognise the logo on the stock-box?