F is for the Flintstone's Flyer!

I could have spent the last couple of hours chucking a few posts up here to blow the record, but I'm going to that anyway before the month is out (I think this post equals the record?), but I was sent a bunch of card buses earlier and said I'd go through P-Z looking for the last of mine, which I've just done, only, one of them wasn't a bus, by any stretch of the imagination!

Somebody called Cleo (the printers?) for a Thornycroft of Gerrards Cross (not the HGV manufacturer!), for a chocolate egg! Well, Cream Eggs and Cadbury's Mini-Eggs will be in the shops by next Tuesday, you know it and I know it!

 

Scale is all over the place, but realism doesn't have to come first when you have prehistoric men using dinosaurs as earthmovers! Also, the artwork on the three sides doesn't tie-in, as it has on the buses, so just a bit of fun!

X is for Xandria - Part Two

So a closer view of the little pile of Xandria (or related) loveliness from Theo, a while back now, and you can see a couple of the Thunderbirds one, Tracy was missing his gun, but Lady Penelope just needs a clean, her shoes have that gold paint made from brass-filings which goes green if it gets too damp, so they may need a re-paint!

The rest we are going to look at now, and apart from the two Gerry Anderson characters they were mostly quite clean . . . PVC does have a tendency to collect dirt in a way no other plastics do, Yogi needed a clean, but didn't get one until I'd shot them and there appear to be two grey boots or paws sticking out of the pile, belonging to someone who is in neither post?

I do remember one figure having a  loose component at buckle/belly level which I had to de-gunge and re-glue, it must have been put to one side and not shot, but it will re-appear at the other end, and can star when we return to these, which I know we will.

We've seen the policeman/dog yesterday; the comedy policemant Bromsnor  from TV series Swiebertje and the De Betuwe jam premium's Agent Bulderen  while the other two seem to both be from the Pixie line, the thin guy on the left might be advertising a local Dutch tailors, or just wearing a sticker to explain his Grimm's fairy tale character; Het dappere snijdertje (The brave cutter) ['Zeven in één klap'] (Seven at one strike); the tale of the tailor who kills seven flies in one go and gets dicked into tackling Giants by a dodgy King!

The fatter chap has lost a sticker (you can see some glue remains), so I don't know if he was advertising something, explaining his own character or just had some fancy paper undershirts, like one or two in yesterday's post! Indeed the sticker on Bromsnor's hat has mostly had it's detail rubbed off and is loose, some of the stickers are 'vehicle-vinyl' and the glue turns to a sticky liquid under the onslaught of the substrate PVC's free radicals, a problem with the Thunderbirds set too.

The Indian, I have a feeling Theo did explain him to me, and that he might be connected to the similar non key-ring ones from the donation posts the other day, but I can't remember or find the relevant eMail, so we may return to him at some point.

And while I said the clown probably wasn't Xandria, forgetting it was in yesterday's post (and below!) I then said I hadn't seen any Hanna Barbera ones, forgetting Yogi was here! As I said; I could forget something if it was glued to the end of my nose!

And; like the Disney Pete yesterday, fully marked but on his back not his foot, so the chances are other franchises got the Xandria, multi-part PVC treatment?

Not that he's necessarily Xandria, even if the rest are; his ring, chain and loop are all different, and his collar & tie are polyethylene, but so are Lady P's pearls, as other accessories on other figures also utilise the harder polymer!

These are all from the jam maker's Flipje Betuwe set, and from the left are; Klaas Ram (Claus/Klaus?), Sjoerd de visboer (Sjoerd the fishmonger) and Schoorsteenveger (chimney sweep), and again we see Klaas wearing a sticker to represent his nautical-themed jumper, while the sweep has a PE ladder.

These two are damaged, but interesting nevertheless, the clown is in the style of Xandria's output, but not configured as a key-ring, therefore without a central core and so all glued together rather than stacked like most of the others, while the Santa Clause is all polyethylene, and over-moulded just like Timpo figures. Again a very different loop/ring arrangement, and no chain, suggests a copy-cat/rival, maybe even in Hong Kong? Perhaps he was sold as a tree-decoration?

On the over-moulding; it would be interesting to know who did it first, now we know George Musgrave at Gemodels was wrestling with the technology, and swoppets came before over-moulding at Shotts (the cavalry/ACW were the first with true hot-polymer over-moulding I think), while some of these Xandria's are from the 1960's, it's more questions without answers!

These are lovely figures, rather opening-up a whole 'new' field to study (four winging their way here in the post as I write), and many thanks to Theo van de Werden who sent me to the Flipje Betuwe site (which has gone now, but I copied the two relevant pages), and for sending the Blog these for us to look at - Thank you, Theo - job done!

Y is for Yabba-Dabba-Doo!

Here’s something nice for the festive season which doesn't include guns and stuff! Not that I don't post military stuff over Christmas but I like to try and keep it light, and it's a good excuse to Blog some of the more esoteric novelty stuff, and this is pretty esoteric and definitely a novelty!

Kohner's window (and door!) tray of the Flintstone Circus; they have grabby hands and feet giving them the stack-ability of Kleeware (and other)'s clownsand policemen, but with a circular grip allowing for stunts!

Nine main characters and a policeman in three colours of a pretty bog-standard, softish, polyethylene and while being semi-round/semi-flat caricatures, or at least accurate renditions of their cartoon personas, are also about 54/60mm, although with the kids and pets all the same size, it's really 'no scale'!

There also a bunch of chocolate-brown 'circus equipment' being half gymnasium stuff and half tricks with two drum plinths of the type you might have expected a man with a whip to be trying to get lions, tigers or elephants to stand on! The weightlifters barbell is made - appropriately - with rocks on either end, while the stool and a trapeze frame are in clip-together parts.

I only took one shot and it clearly looked better to the naked eye! It's a single pile of everything and everyone! So a bit of a box ticker and as they are now in storage; I will try to remember we need to return to them; in a year or two!

F is for Follow-up - Novelty Toppers & Sharpeners

Last time we looked at these I titled the post "M is for More to Come . . .", so confident was I that we were only going to scratch the surface, and further predicted a return, and while this isn't perhaps as full as I had visioned that future follow-up, it does widen the field and reveal some new poses . . . although it also clears a few duplicates out of Picasa, so apologies for that!

The first duplicate shot is - I think - the original Shackman set's listing shot, which I'd downloaded before winning the lot we looked at last time! But it reminds us of what we looked at then!

I'd also shot the comparisons and the 'new' policeman several times shoving the images in different folders, only to re-take them for that previous post!

This arrived this morning; I haven't even done the feed-back yet - next thing on the list, it's the man for the lady dancer in the boxed set, no branding, and very different packaging to the stock-box from Shackman, and never/hardly ever been out from the looks of him.

Clearly not a Spanish-anything, he's sort of Tyrolean, but more accurately a Slovakian Folk Dancer (Czech's tend to red or white trousers, while the true Tyrolean's wear short lederhosen or longer, black velvet trousers with high white stockings), not that the blue seems terribly Slovakian, but A) it's a cheap toy, B) it was a very brief Googling, in image results and C) I don't really care, but he's not a Spanish Dancer, whatever the HONG KONG box says!

These were (are?) both still being offered by an Argentine seller on feeBay, and seem to be an earlier iteration, loosely channeling the Disney cartoon of Peter Pan, base is flat (no step/plinth), but sharpener looks to be the same design as the others. L-in-a-triangle brand-mark means nothing to me, yet?

While these chaps are from the 1965 (or '68?) catalogue from Wilton in the 'States, we're looking at a full license here, I think, from Hanna-Barbera Productions, but the same bases as the Peter Pans', and definitely the same sharpener-units, it may be that they were all coming from a smaller factory among the many in HK, who only specialised in these and jobbed to everyone?

A new colour for the sharpener in the Policeman's pale blue, and a new pose in the Native American lady - another Commonwealth knock-off - both from feebleBay.

Returning to the new figure, a bag of what I suspect are wholesaled Christmas cracker inserts and a cat! The inserts include a green plastic copy of the standard die-cast alloy sharpener of our youth, two hexagonal ones, a hippo-outline (or at least I think it's a hippo, it's not terribly clear!), a heart-shape and a round one pretty similar to the one basing many of these figurative novelty sharpeners, but quite modern/current.

The new one is marked Hong Kong on the underside of the sharpener, has an unmarked plinth, and a box code which is in sequence with some of those we saw last time, but not the Wilton or Shackman codes, I guess it depended who the end user was and whether they chose to adopt the manufacturers code, or re-number in line with their own 'in-house' cataloguing system/s.

All of which brings us to three plinth types; flat, flanged single-step or edged double-step, coming with or without a pencil sharpener which itself can or cannot be a separate piece in crackers, gum-balls etc . . . and a selection of subjects from the Wild West, through dancers to civic & ceremonials, some of which are ex-Commonwealth, some based of Commonwealth-Van Brode sculpts and some quite original, with - now - Disney knock-offs and HBP characters . . . what next?

Because we're looking at mostly sharpeners;this is a follow-up to this post and suggests there were two each, cowboys and Indians in the 'West Germany'-marked set of pencil sharpeners utilising the Crescent/Lido poses? There may - of course - be more, but four as two-pairs seems sensible, and only those four keep turning-up? Another evilBay image.

D is for Dunkin, Disney and Deutschland!

Reader/follower 'Gerhard' of Germany sent me some interesting shots the other day and although he's missed my return email and plea below somewhere, I've cobbled together a couple of posts round what he sent.

This is entirely collage'd from Gerhard's images, and is very interesting as it shows the Tito logo on an Americana gum envelope. It also states MADE IN SPAIN when the Americana company is centred near Aachen south of the Ardens (although Munich is stated on these packs), so I guess they were all part of a bigger multinational that also involved Dunkin, Tylers/Mundi and Jopar...all part of the Sanchez group????! - In the end it does your head in!

Anyway - nice shots of the envelope and a full set of the Disney figures, as Gerhard stated in his eMail; these were originally Marx Disneykins, manufactured in Hong kong in hard styrene. At some point the Marx arm in Europe; Heimo got sets of moulds for a fair few of the TV, Movie and cartoon character sets in various sizes and produced them in unpainted softer ethylene's, even shipping some back to the states.

Somehow they - the 'kin' moulds - seem to have gone to Tito (and/or Olá?) where they were supplied to all sorts of bubble-gum, ice-cream and other food companies as premiums from the mid-to-late 1960's until the early 1980's, after which some (Tin Tin) ended up in Mexico, others got as far as Taiwan (Asterix) where some of the original Marx Miniature Masterpieces had been made!

I meant to knock-up the notes for this post at home and forgot so I can't remember the name of the show from which the characters in the two lower left shots come from! It was an European TV cartoon though! Some kind person chuck the name in 'comments' if you know it, I won't be back here till next Wednesday! Added 24th Feb 2013 - Jan Koolen has let me know they are from the European TV cartoon Nils Holgersson, thanks Jan.

The other shots are either colour variations from Portugal (Olá) or Spain (Tito) or other characters from the old TV Tinykins range, taken from the oeuvres of Warner Brothers or Hanna Barberra.

Although distorted by my collageing them together these are pretty much all between 25/40mm. Again - because I didn't pre-load the article, I'm sitting here doing it off the top of my head in the Library and will NOT attempt to name half these critters!

Marx originals; Top is a Swansea large scale ethylene Panchito and two colour variants of the Disneykin.
Below him we have various Peter-pan characters, again all Disneykins. The last shot shows Hong Kong and Heimo treatments of Captain Hook in both Styrene (small) and PVC vinyl (Large) respectively.

Larger Vinyls at top, these are mostly unlicensed HK copies of Schlich, Bully (Heimo's modern trademark) or Papo, Daisy Duck is Heimo to the left and Marx to the right, Gerhard mentions getting the Schlich ones every time he went to the Dentist, any other German readers remember freebies. Also it wasn't clear if he was talking about the larger vinyls or the smaller ethylenes?

Below are some more old Marx figures to the right and a Heimo character who's name I've forgotten, but she was a US TV cartoon from the 50's (Little Orphan Annie, Dagwood? - something like that!)

Pecos Bill - one of the most pirated figures in the history of toy figures; Top row are all Marx/Heimo (Swansea ethylene is the unpainted yellow one on the left), bottom row are all Christmas Cracker/Lucky bag giveaways, with various stages of remoulding or decrepitude from 4 different sources!