R is for Resin Rascals

I meant to post this last night, but I ran out of time, or, work ran me out of time, which is a different state of being altogether, if you know what I mean, but anyway, heeeeere's Horror! Brian managed a visit to another discount chain; Family Dollar, and found this pair of rather nice sets of ornamental poured resin delights!

 

Imported by Midwood Brands, LLC of Virginia, we just don't get little sets of small scale stuff like this over here, there are large boulders of resin crap in most of the supermarkets, and TKMaxx is good for a shed load of unnecessary, easily chipped crud in the several-kilo's category, but these are nice.

 

So many thanks, again, to Brian for finding them and shooting them, and it reminded me I had some resin downloads in the Halloween 'junk' folder (there's probably more on the dongles, but these (below) were to hand), so a post developed!

 

Dated to 2021, and I converted it from a bitmap, so I don't know how it will show on your machine/'device', but here's a whole group of similar, small scale, novelty Halloween stuff, including, front-right, a long-dead pirate!

 

And here's more pirates, which as we had a coronary-related non-ITLAPD this year, is about as good as it's going to get! These are apparently copyrighted Spoontiques, of China, and I seem to have found them a year ago (November '25). Real West Country gift shop (rather than specifically Halloween themed) faire, I suspect they are about 60/70mm, but they could be a little bigger, or even smaller!

HB is for Horror Bargains!

And Home Bargains, where I went at the end of August, and found a few bits of interest to readers of the Blog, ticking two boxes here, edibles and white button toys,, and incidentally; I spent a couple of hours last night re-Tagging White Button, which now shares the Clockwork Tag, but Clockwork of the vintage, large or tin-plate variety won't have the White Button Tag, I also added Cable Drum as a Tag!

 

Hallow Scream . . . geddit! Well, once you have a few, you just have to keep getting them! A gangling ghost and a perambulating pumpkin, similar to the garden centre ones we saw last year, and with a growing selection of robots, marching troops and a couple of dinosaurs, not to mention a Grinch (also Home Bargains), it's a race to see who dominates what will become a dedicated tub!

 

I thought the 'BOO!' detracted from the overall character of the toy . . .

 

. . . so I removed it with a bit of hand-sanitiser mixed with de-icer!

 

I also picked up these chocolate eggs, and managed to remove the wraps carefully (another collection of mine is old sweet and confectionery wrappers!), and managed to take the outer liner home with them, so I can scan it for the eventual A-Z listing, which in this case is Mon Desir, the people who brought us the chubby, semi-deform Superhero gift-eggs, about ten/twelve years ago.

 

Pretty standard chocolate, not unpleasant, no white chocolate half, and a fun thing for a lunch box, or even the breakfast table - Halloween falls on Saturday this year doesn’t it?

 

Sadly the contents aren't Halloween related, being 'bog-standard' stuff we've seen before from other minor brands, with the bobbing 'chariot' and  jogging dog-team, both mirroring such items from Kinder's past, the frog a common capsule toy, and the 'space' pick-up truck is fun!

T is for They Did What???

You won't believe what they've done? But first, to other things, as this is Brian Berke's findings on a recent visit to Dollar Tree, on the look-out for Halloween stuff, or other figurals, and I'm posting them in shot-order!

 

Starting with more erasers, and we like erasers here, I don't know why they switched the position of the pumpkin and Dr's Monster under the blister, but not the spider, however, it must be a nightmare packaging for someone with OCD, and on two levels! Either fully reverse the order, or keep the order on both levels, but this? The horror . . . the horror!

 

Loving these, the ghost is similar to the one we saw, also from Brian, the other day, but the cat looks to be an Iwako knock-off? Given that Iwako do two mouldings in a dozen or more colourways, and one of those has already been copied, someone with a limited budget, or limited space, could start just collecting Iwako and similar cats! And nothing to upset an OCD sufferer here!

 

White button toy, it looks like a walker, but claims to be a jumper, so might be a combination jumping-walker, it's probably only another piece of eccentric bent wire under the case? There are some more white button toys to come. Seasonal Collection looks like a Dollar Tree branding?

 

Rather nice, if slightly large solids from Harry Potter, depicting Hermione, Harry and Ron, I can't see any kind of brand or brand mark, so they may be Dollar Tree exclusives? But . . . look what they did!!!! . . . 

 

. . . they killed SpongeBob SquarePants and his friends, killed them and stripped every scrap of flesh from their bones! Who could do such a thing? Legend Toys with/for Niclkleodeon, that's who; the despicable monsters! And SpongeBob does not look happy!

 

No link to Halloween, but I rather like the M (for Marvel) bases on these, also solid figurines, Hasbro marked, I think these are what are now called 'classic' versions, the new movies having taken them to a far darker and more GCI'd sci-fi place!
 

Thanks, as always, to Brian, for shooting these for us, and he has sent one more item, the most horrible, terrible nightmare-inducing thing ever to be sold to kids, but I'm saving that for the 31st!

G is for Glowing in the Dark!

T is for two! One of these continues the Halloween season, the other I got a while ago, and can't remember where but probably one of the supermarkets? And while it wasn't sold as a Halloween item, it's on message twice, so fits this post perfectly!

 

Google says Legogide of Denmark (nothing to do with the Billund thieves), so for now, we'll go with that, but I haven't been to Denmark, so somebody over here is handling them! Various designs of Spider, in various colours, seemingly randomly packed, and all of 'bird eater' or Tarantula size, and . . .

 

. . . they glow in the dark! The random painted black spots being even more effective in the dark, than the light, where they just look like random black spots! Image dates say they were found back in February?

 

These are in Asda at the moment, and at a pound a bag, good value for what they are, that's an old school rack-toy price! Contents vary, with six millipedes in a greenish glow-in-the-dark PVC-alike, only three of my 'love to hate' Flower Crab Spiders (Misumena vatia), in a paler but also a Photoluminescent polymer, and six large flocked polyethylene solids, and they are 'long-haired' flocking, the hippy fucks!

 

Close up of the three separate elements.

 

Look at it, the long-haired git!

 

Activate glow!

 

 

I shot these back in August 2025, I think we've seen the white ones you find in Buddleia’s before now, it's actually less hateful in this greenish-yellow, but they do have a sinister aura, more so than the increasingly common False Widows, which I've also shot on several occasions. And, I've said it before - Spider Crabs, Crab Spiders, Spider Monkeys, Monkey Puzzles . . . we're really crap at naming things.

T is for Targeting Target!

Back to our Halloween dispatches from the New World, and we're looking at the shelves in Target. As we've had Costco here for a couple of decades or more now, it's a wonder why Target have never tried, but if they did, they'd probably destroy what's left of the High Street, and two of our smaller supermarket chains, so maybe a good thing they haven’t bothered!

 

Dastardly Duckies! I love the bat-duck in the background, and is the one on the left channelling Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice . . . Beetl . . . ooh, nearly!

 

A huge orange pumpkin skeleton, but what's that, down the bottom right? How quintessentially American is a Road Runner skeleton? That's what it is, isn't it? That's as WTF cool, as the alien/monsters in the previous post!

 

Andy Warhol’s pop-eating-itself here, with Star Wars stormtrooper skeletons! They look to be fired ceramic too, proper novelty ornamental tat! And loving the pumpkin-snowmen next to them, too!

 

We love erasers here, we love pencil tops, and we love finger-puppet figurals, so with this set triggering all three nostalgia buttons, we're happy, until the next post! Two of them, the Mummy and Pumpkin, were found in the TKMaxx set, last year, so I'll be looking out for the others? Many thanks to Brian Berke for popping down to Target for us!

S is for Spooky Sweets!

We (UK) may not be good at figural toys, compared to the ''States, come Halloween, but on the edible figural front, we always seem to provide, and while B&M had the same lollies as the last two years, I managed to find these iced jelly lollies in The Range.

 

Jelly Pops, produced in the Republic of Ireland (first for the Tag's maker list?), for CDS Group, they are iced with a sort of hard fondant, and we have two full figurals in the cat and ghost, along with a pumpkin and witch's head!

U is for Undying Undead!

This must be year eight, maybe year ten? Our roving reporter in North America, Brian B, has managed to visit three of the 'household name' discounters, to see what they had on offer this Autumn, and he's found a darn slight more than I've managed to, over here, and we're starting with the new packaging for an old favourite.

 

They've lost their blister-cards, in favour of card-headed bottle-bags, and there seems to be the one card 'Skeleton Army', despite the fact that some of them have the Mummies, but only the two types were to be found in New England!

 

Now claiming to be made in Vietnam, and imported by the Old East Main Co., Dollar General is carrying them. Thanks to Mr. Berke for shooting them for us, like the cyclamens under the cedar, they just keep popping up every year!

H is for Hobbycraft Horrors

Yes, ''Horrors' is a bit strong, mildly enduring maybe? I didn’t find - or haven't, there's still a week or so, but it's already being concentrated to one or two shelves/tables, to make way for the Christmas merchandise - found much Halloween stuff this year, but there are a few bits to look at, and some bits from across the pond, to come.

 

Not much in Hobbycraft beyond the usual craft stuff, paint your own and purple pipe-cleaner stuff, but they did have these at the beginning of the season (sold out when I went back a week later), resin decorations of the cake variety,, although so small, they are almost 'sprinkles'!

 

There appears to have been a tweak in the world of poured-resin technology, with both a glossy glassiness to these, and transparent, coloured resins contributing to two sets of ghosts and the pumpkins,, the cauldrons being a more standard polyethylene, or polypropylene?

 

I found this in a charity shop in Frimley, and initially thought it was a 'styrene cake decoration, in the style of our Christmas stuff, but after cleaning, it was clear it too was this newish, pure white glassy resin, obviously Ganesh (Ganesha, Ganapati, Vinayaka, or Pillaiyar), the Hindu god, a four-armed elephant, also revered by Jains and Buddhists, and is probably aimed at miniature home shrines? He was probably on his way to someone's home for the festival of Ganesha Chaturthi in the month of Bhadrapada (August/September), so almost overlapping Halloween!

D is for Donation - Chris - Sci-Fi & Fantasy

There was some equally interesting stuff in Chris's latest parcel, some of it ID'd thanks to Shaun's excellent Fantasy Toy Soldier Blog (link below), my go-to for a lot of this stuff, although I probably don't consult it as often as I ought to!

 

My second Crackerjack space figure, there were ten, not twelve, which I know because soon after showing my first here, all ten were posted elsewhere by three different authors, well, fancy that, as Private Eye would say!

 

These were the chaps ID'd on Shaun's Blog, here;

 

https://fantasytoysoldiers.blogspot.com/p/name-brand-sci-fi-toy-soldiers-after.html

 

About 2/3rds of the way down the page, as Trendmasters' 'Rumble Wars', and there are many more on that page, but it's nice to have a reference sample, for future comparisons.

 

One of them however, the one on the right here, would appear to be a copy or second tranche figure, he's smaller, unmarked and a slightly different pose, to the figure he appears to be aping, on the left in each shot?

 

I don't know if the larger figure is a King Kong knock-off, or more of a monster-monkey-man, but standard 'zoo' fare, he isn't, and more of a Halloween-targeted 'rubber jiggler' item I suspect.

 

The cat might be from a board-game, while the two googlie-eyed critters might be from the same maker, despite being quite different subjects? The eyes are the same size, they are both the same dense PVC, they are both pencil-tops. Although one also has a charm loop, which could be for a tassel, and it could just be coincidence!

 

More anthropomorphic animals here, with a flocked bear, blow-moulded cat, and several of those 'small animal family' types, which predate Kinder's hard plastics by a decade or so. Particularly interesting are the two Tony-Tiger charms, as they are umpteenth-generation, much size-reduced, copies of the original sculpt also seen here as a larger key-ring.

 

The three-wise monkeys are teeny-tiny, and may be from a kit of some kind, they are 'styrene, and possibly too small for Christmas crackers? While the large black cat must be a Halloween thing?

 

Trolls! Two cracker/gum-ball charms, and what I think must be one of the Wheetos premiums, there have been several sets over the years, having the coiffure'able hair of earlier trolls, the Wheetos ones also have distinctive faces and props/costuming like this guy's fiddle and shorts.

 

A pair of Sugar Puff's aliens, I used to think they were 'cutesy', as you might expect of kid's breakfast cereal premiums, but increasingly, they now seem to look a bit sinister?!

 

Barbarians ('Doomlords of Gulch' if Tomy version) from Crossbows and Catapults, I have mentioned in the past that there are different versions of these, and it's a future post to try and sort them all out, here you can see a clear size difference between two issuers' figures, with a probable Tomy original on the left.

 

Blind-bag Star Wars deform, a couple of novelty cracker/Halloween skeletons, and a damaged Hilco spaceman, with two new to pile figures; a large (60mm'ish?) manga/anime type ninja superhero and a smaller figure who may be a Robocop clone?

 

A large robot, who has a mechanism underneath, which resembles that of a bayblade, and may indicate he was some kind of launched, spinning novelty? A pair of Manta Force from Bluebird/Tomy, and another Buck Rogers 'C3P0' pencil-top eraser to be colour checked against the master sample, and that bloody beebly-beeble from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!

 

He's damaged, but fully marked, so gratefully received, as a sample, but I hate the little twat! I have a bagful of the Corgi ones and I hate them too - in fact, checking the Buck Rogers Tag, I've never had a good word to say about him, and always manage to insult him anew! He ruined an otherwise good TV serial!

 

Classic, big-box, TV-advertised, this-year's-big-Christmas-hit toy! I'd gone off to be grown-up, or as grown-up as I could manage, and missed most of them, but remember "Tee-Cee-Arh . . . totalcontrolracing!", the Star Bird one, "Em-Be-Games!!!!", Chutes Away, another with a helicopter and the exploding-bridge one!

 

This, originally from Tomy, was one of them, a bit big for me, and it will probably be offered-up as a swap (for other toys), but Chris explained it was only included as a space-saver/packaging. It ran up and down a track while two players fired ball-bearings at it, loser saw his bunker go airborne when the Terrible Tank reached it!

 

British Palitoy TV Ad; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSfzxSy2FY

 

Finishing off with a few more of the Christmas cracker putti, it will be fun returning to them all one day and finding there's a whole, multicoloured orchestra, even if they have a limited number of intruments!