I is for Insect Lore - More Recent Imagery

Quickly getting the rest up here - see previous post!

 

2023

 

Thinking I'd published the previous post, in the previous two years, I just shot a couple of confirmatory shots of the Toobs, seeing nothing else new on the stand! Trying to count the Insects, I get to about 14-likely, but with some hidden in the heap at the bottom of the tube, and behind the labels, I suspect they are both a 16-count?

 

2025

So, fresh from this year's Toy fair, and we have now got the life-cycle blisters extended with Ants and Honey Bees, the Ladybird's card graphics have been brought into line with the other four, and sets with squishy Ladybirds have been added.

 

So, if you weren't familiar with Insect lore, you now know as much as I do! I didn't see them at the Birmingham Spring Fair, on either visit, but they may have been there, perhaps in one of the Halls I didn't bother with?

 

Websites -  

US https://www.insectlore.com/

UK https://www.insectlore.co.uk/

B is for Brenner?

Sorry, got a bit lazy after the Pirate-fest! It's always nice to add a new name to the tag-list, or sum-total of the hobby's knowledge, and to add two, unrelated lines in the same post is a bargain-bonus! Except there is a US Toy in the tag-list already

 

One of those situations where I sort of knew I knew, but couldn't remember where from. Turned-out it was an old dealer list from the 1990's which either Paul Morehead or John Begg gave me a very 'black' (no contrast whatsoever) photocopy of a copy, years ago.

 

Warrior Ants from US Toy (Brenner) is what I have, and of course, trying to Google US Toy just gets you a million US toys, same on evilBay and Etsy, so what was a patriotic company name back in the pre-internet days, is now a liability lost in a miasma of Adsense, Google-Ads, spam Ad's, hidden-Ad's. pop-up's and all the other marketing shite which has been tacked-on-to/embedded-in the Internet in the last 15-years!

 

However, they are still going and have a lot of novelty/party/rack toy stuff, including some of the figures featured in Plastic Warrior magazine (courtesy of Les White in the magazine, Brian Berke, here, the tag mentioned above - firefighters), a few years ago, but not, sadly, either of these sets, I don't know the significance of the Brenner in brackets, as annotated in the old dealer list, but will add it as a seperate tag?

Aren't they brilliant, probably taking-off the insect movies of the 1990's; such as Bugs Life  and Antz (both 1998, which may help date them) rather than the earlier Hasbro/GiG franchise Army Ants/Kombatini, there is also something of the Trigan Empire about their Greco-Roman get-up, but I accept it's a tenuous link, verging more on wishful thinking!

 

As is often the case, Shaun at Fantasy Toy Soldiers is the only other source of info' on them and he has had them as unknown, for some time, which I've just been over and solved, but a larger sample, with a better selection of colours.

 

Also credited to US Toy (Brenner) is this set of anything but grey 'Grey Aliens', in a palate of lovely metallic shades. A bit bigger that the Warrior Ants at around 54mm vs. 45mm, and both sets are supposed to have eight poses for a full set, ants in four pastel shades (I have no green ones, yet!) and hopefully each of the aliens available in all six of these shades?

 

Seen elsewhere only the other day, a quick alien comparison with, on the left an unknown 65mm, glow-in-the-dark figure (I may have a note on them somewhere?), the silver chap is a pencil-top, we saw the next two here (Soma on the left, Imperial on the right), then the US Toy (Brenner) and finally a counter-top/point-of-sale type, pick-tray/carton novelty, 45mm alien of unknown brand'age!

I is for Interim Invertebrate Index

It must be the best part of a year or more (last Rack Toy Month?) that we saw [toy] insects here at Small Scale World, but there haven't been any or many, still enough have come in for a yearly round-up, and these are they.

I kept not buying this at 3-quid, but when it was re-anointed with a £1.50p sticker it seemed like a better idea, and it's a shed-load of bugs! From regular visitors to these pages Tobar (Hawkins Bazaar) these were actually purchased in an independent general/hardware store.

The maggots are that clammy, soft, stretchy, silicone rubber, the spider is a bit small, the fly a bit big, but the ants are fun, the glow in the dark ones cover for termites, then you have black-ants, red-ants and errr . . . . 'Red' ants! Heliotrope-crimson-scarlet-red-ants; 'slot that Commie mo'fo and put a cap in his Soviet red'ass'-ants! Too funny! Did the factory have some lipstick pigment left-over from another job?

Also, it's often interesting with these multi-lingual packagings to see what familiar things are in other languages, but usually it's only curiosity sated, however with these they are all Excellent Dude!

Creepy Crawlies is a fine phrase, it says it how it is, not like 'door', what's a door, could be anything, but creepy crawly, you know you need to look out, tread carefully, probably shudder . . . you know what I mean, yet . . . Kribbel-Krabbler? Fantastic! And the French; Horribles Bestioles . . . even better!

I don't know if it's correct but I pronounce it Hor-reeb-ler best-ee-oles, and I can think of a couple of people I'll be calling bestioles before the year's out! That Boris Johnson - he's a Horrible Bestiole!

Giants - these have come in with mixed charity-shop lots over the last eight-months or so, the stag went straight in the recycling as it was missing three feet, while the other two are even bigger and they have gone in the big-ugly-stuff tub!

Actually I think we saw the spider at Halloween last year and I re-shot it for a size comparison?

Again from a Charity-shop lot; I thought these were old Gum-ball or Christmas cracker type novelties and they may [currently] be both, but I saw them the other day (a week or so ago) on a kids comic/magazine, so they are contemporary novelties, not old ones.

Shelfie from TKMaxx about two months ago, Melissa & Doug do vinyl-rubber; a bit big, a bit bright and a bit cartoony, but a bit of paint would improve them, not enough for me to take them off the tack though!

See what I mean about the translations - interesting; but they're no Kribbel-Krabbler!

Ohhhhhh! I should have done K is for Kribbel-Krabbler shouldn't I? hey-ho! Ich bin ein braindead bestiole.

M is for Minus One (Countdown to Halloween)

Found far too late for the countdown, this is Morrison's effort in this year's apparent 'competition' to see who can carry the most of an extended series of bugs and things!

And it's the winner, with 12 items - all the ones we've seen, a frog, a new spider and two snakes! The skeletons looked familiar too, but as the others went straight to recycling, so did these!

Couldn't wait - opened them on the train! But a red background wasn't the best medium for shooting them. Due to the lateness of their being located, I've not done comparisons, but they seem to be the same - or from the same source - as the Sainsbury's ones. I will do a follow-up of all these sets with the Morrison's one's included.

Better picture, but I forgot one of the snakes! The bat is even worse than the first one we saw, being a rigid  polyethylene semi-flat, yellow passes for glow-in the dark, it's another 'colour rule' with this stuff, and we have pumpkin-orange (Halloween) along with black (dark side).

Viper and Cobra types are the obvious additions to the 'oeuvre' and apart for the comedy-tongues, they're not bad.

Countdown to Halloween - 3 - Sainsbury's Creatures Bumper Pack

Next to Sainsbury's where we find a bag of mixed critters, some more familiar, so less, to those we have looked at in the last few days.

A better mix than previous sets, with some duplicates and some newer specimens! Orange spiders, it's one of the rules - Halloween = Orange, it's connected to pumpkins, not a particularly scary or ghoulish vegetable as they go, and not really grown here until about ten years ago, however now that the marketing machine has succeeded in importing the 'festival', they are grown in numbers, and the orange parallel now applies here, as in the States!

The scorpion is a copy of the rubber one which came in a mixed lot the other day while the flies are similar to those we've already looked-at along with the centipede, the ants and mice are more unique - although I'm sure you'll find similar copies elsewhere!

Comparison with the rats and scorpions; the orphan scorpion is PVC, the Sainsbury's one polyethylene, but the design is almost identical, while the rodent is - I think - slightly more rat-like with its shorter, fatter tail, big feet and wiry whiskers? This is - of course - ignoring the fact that they are both (all four!) crude infant novelties!

A second comparison between the Sainsbury's and Poundworld Plus centipedes, neither gets the biscuit as their legs are all over the place, and while they do add-up the same both sides they are not always opposite each other, some segments have two legs within their bounds (which would indicate millipede traits!), other segments have no leg on one side, other legs are at the junction between segments . . . another ten minutes effort with the master would have made all the difference, but the makers know 99% of this shite will be in recycling or landfill, or on the way there by next Wednesday!

If this stuff lasts an extra week for Guy Fawkes Night parties (the proper autumn festival here), it's all it can hope for and pretty-much as good as it gets!