C is for Cracker Crustaceans and Other Novelty Flats

I stated writing this last night, but realised I could barely keep my eyes open, and went to bed after the title (which isn't very good, but meah!), anyhoo's, here now and fit to go, more of a follow-up to the cracker posts, of a couple of days ago, and a fun thing for the Crimbo' season!

The rump of the late and still sorely missed Boysey-Boy studiously ignoring the goings-on, his equally missed mother would have been trying to stuff herself into that box, which is just too-small enough; perfect!

 

This is me sorting a bunch of 'cracker flats' into piles by colour, a few years ago, the duplicates to the left went to charity, god knows what they did with them! As you can see, there was a yellow for every animal, but shortages of green, white and red. Those on the right/lid stayed as a 'master sample'.

Aquatic critters

I don't know if it's by design or co-incidence, but the animals in the set break down neatly into four relatively distinct groups of four-each 'type', for a total pose-count of sixteen? You should recognise most, if not all of them, from your own childhood experiences with cheap cracker (the best, for this kind of thing), or from the many H is for How They Come in posts where one or two of these have featured!

The not-quite Insects

Who wants a tick in their Christmas cracker!

What struck me about both sets of full-sized crackers the other day, or indeed, the two mini-sets, and that whether the set with toys and puzzles or the other, there was no real duplication of boxes to tick, and for that to occur, I am imagining, there was a belt running through the packer's stations, where each packer has a bag of say, these insects, or rings, or curling prediction-fish, thimbles, wire-puzzles or whatever.

And with each operator (almost certainly women back in the day) practised to about the same speed of completing a cracker and putting it on the belt, you should with thirty-odd stations maybe, end up with a prefect mix of thirty different items travelling down the belt to the packers, within each 24-cracker group, arriving in line at the end?

Reptiles

I think the little-green is a gecko?

So, whether you have two, four or even six girls at the end of the line, and whether they can (with practice) pick 2, 3 or even four crackers per hand, as they pack the usually 10's or 12's, the chance of duplication is almost zero.

Where you do get duplication of contents, it's usually a 24 or more-crackers box, and then you find a different design/colour of insect, thimble, ring or whatever, there’s still an almost zero likelihood of a full duplication?

Proper insects

There WAS, often, duplication of hats and jokes, but that would be explained by the hats having a smaller variance, usually only five or six colours, sometime with different crown-cuts sometimes not. Bi-coloured crowns reduce full-duplication slightly?

 

While the jokes tend to be on sheets, and each packing-girl would need a bag, box, tote or stillage of cut jokes to grab one of, randomly, with each toy and crown, so A) she could, herself, put the same joke in two of her crackers, consecutively, and B) include the same joke, at the same time as one of her near neighbours, or anyone else on the line, which would be the same thing on a larger box of 18 or 24 crackers?

 

 Lobster and tick on evilBay

 

It's not that I lose sleep over this stuff (plenty of more important things to lose sleep over these days!), but I do like to know, or have an idea how it all works, because it's clever, isn't it?

Different sculpts

Probably newer, possibly a rubberised elastomer?

 

The ingenuity we show, and practice in ensuring there are no novelty/toy duplications in boxes of 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 24 or 32 budget Christmas crackers, is clearly wasted on us if we can't sort out fair pay, fair taxation or the state of the State of Palestine/Israel?

 On the beach!

 

This is what's here, in the TBS (to be sorted) boxes, the black spider is clearly from another set, as is the smaller crab in a fetching mauve! The red spider seems to be an injector-head purge, or colour-changeover figure, rather than sunlight damage?

Upsidedown!

 

And while the two 'stags' are from the same source (as each other and the above set), the red spider is apparently a sub-piracy by another maker. Like Airfix 'army men', parachute toys or Britains farm/zoo animals, there was a lot of copying of copies, of copies going on in the former Crown Colony! Although not the same level of variance as you find with the cat, Scottie-dog or elephant charms.

B is for Bag o'Bugs!

Apart from the bag of 80 rings, which we saw in the 'round-up' post in the early hours, the only other 'rack toy' I found this year was a large bag of mixed bugs, critters and skeletons, from Amscan in Tesco, so lets look at it!

 

You get a lot for your £2.50, sixty items, which have clearly been bought-in from more than one source, as they are different plastics and there are alturnate designs of bat, spider and skeleton, but it'll be fun for those who get one.

 

One of each above and the piles of polyethylene to the lower left and PVC-substitute to the lower right. Black predominates (easier to lose?), but there's a good smattering of 'seasonal' coloures - I get the orange (pumpkins), but the green and purple are more arbitary, yet very traditional?

 

In addition, you get some white skeletons and a sextuplet of glow-in-the-dark bats!

The fly design is another variation of the 'new design' simplified ones we looked at a few years ago (no seperate clear wings), when for one or two years only nearly everyone had a go at this kind of set! Likewise, the centipede, while the rat and bat are pretty generic types, both based on their predecessors, if not actually from older tools? I forgot to do a close-up of the black bat, he's a semi flat and a bit naff!

 

While of course - those of you who have followed the blog for a while will know - I'm calling the bottom left image three girls have a picnic! The smaller black spider seems to be the design, or one of the designs you find sewn into Halloween costumes, or attached to hanging sheets of cobweb or micro fairy-lights.

The skeletons, from at least two sources I suspect, if not three, but all equipped with hanger holes, for hanging them around the house or patio/garden, so they can hang-about, hung!

 

While the rat and the glow-bat both have small holes which are too narrow to be for pencil-topping, yet too wide to be mould-release pin-marks, and as I'm not happy about the speed with which some in the hobby excuse/assume all holes in bases/undersides are for release-pins, the explanation here, is to be found on the blog, where we saw a green bat, attached to the very sucker types I used to hang the skeletons in the previous shot.

 

So these two are sucker novelties being repurposed as party 'scatter' or playthings, and it's probably the reason for a lot of these 'half-sized' pencil-top holes, which have featured before. I kept a few, one or two of each, and the rest went to the Blue Cross shop to help fund pet help.

 

That link also contains my example of the finger-puppet monster (I'd forgotten it got blogged!) , and it is different to the pair Chris Smith sent to the blog (I thought it was) but is the same colour, so that's three now, the next quest is how many were there altogether?

 

A few minutes later . . . that cowman/bull thing, also in that post, is the same as the Devil-Santa Theo sent to the blog, the Frankenstein's Monster and skeleton Chris sent on seperate occasions and the skeleton I already had, and which I had posed in a coffin one Halloween, so there are five of them about the place now, sans a couple of legs and an arm I think! All waiting to be reunited into one horror-tub! If you scroll the Halloween tag in a spare moment, you will find them all. Or wait a year or two, and I'll blog them all together, with any others that come in!

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.

F is for Follow-up -Poundworld-Plus Insects

Well . . . I bought them . . . it's funny, a few years ago I never would have bothered with this stuff, and - indeed - have been studiously  not buying the other set since the store opened back in the spring (or was it last year? I can't remember when I first Blogged their stuff?), but after the plethora of insects came together in one day last year (or the year before!) and with the Halloween tat piling-up this year, it's almost like why wouldn't I? And when you follow the traffic-stats per-post; it's funny what people actually want.

Buying the other set the other day obviously triggered a re-stock message back at head office as there were a whole bunch more when I was in the other night, and sure enough the other six of the "12 to collect" are on the other card, so 'two to collect' really!

No spiders in this sample, but we get two longer coffin/ground beetle types, three more hedge/garden beetles (the yellow one is very chafer-like) and a roach-alike.

They still look better dead! Gas! Gas! Gas!

Countdown to Halloween - Lift Off! - As Waitrose Glows in the Dark

Well, I got them, the funny thing is my subconscious had convinced me they were two-quid, actually I'd walked-away, last week, at one-fifty, I'm a real tight-arse! But when I took them to the till they were £2 the pair, with no reduced tickets on the rail?

Glow-in-the-dark or fluorescent spiders and cockroaches, apart from the higher advertised price, they are the same as all the others we've looked at in the 'Countdown to Halloween' posts this year, and it's almost as if all the retailers have got together to market a similar range, probably because their buyers got on the blower to their shipping agents, middle-men or manufacturers and said "What's so-and-so [insert name of rival here] carrying next October . . . really? Then we'll have ten-hundred gross of some too!" because that's probably, exactly what happened!

The spiders seem to be the same mouldings as the orange ones from Sainsbury's (who didn't have cockroaches) and Waitrose also seemed to be carrying the same little rings as Tiger, neither of which I've invested in on your behalf, as they are both poorer (in quality) than . . . and copies of - the Poundland one's we looked at on day-one, which were poor enough!

So concludes the 'Countdown to Halloween' [no it doesn't, more came in after I'd finalised the 'spreadsheet!], there's more to come through the day, today, thought and we'll see what turns-up in a year's time; anything small and novelty/figural should appear here at Small Scale World, then?

Countdown to Halloween - 1 - Asda (Walmart); Look Familiar!

Slightly more interesting than they appear at first glance, these two packs from Asda are to the casual observer the same flies and cockroaches we've already seen this week, but as we know from the comparison of the flies, they aren't quite the same, and at a quid-each, were worth a punt!

I saw very similar stuff in Waitrose on Friday (20th), but being Waitrose, they weren't cheap, I may go back for them in the week, in which case they will appear tomorrow (this is all being done ten days or so before you read it) for comparison with the other sets, but they are literally twice as much** as all their competitors - or more.

Waitrose - where wealthy idiots with more money than sense and status-complexes go to shop with logoed bags-for-life that will help identify them as 'for the gallows' come the revolution!

Fly and 'roach bags, quid-each, nice mix of colours, the green isn't fluorescent, but after the orange rule, comes the 'use puke-green if you haven't got glow in the dark' and the 'purple is like a Vampire's cloak-lining' rules of Halloween colouring!

The clear ones aren't so clear - Halloween colouring rule-wise - maybe you hide them in your mate's Guinness and laugh like drains as he chokes on a rubber cockroach! Like the red food-colouring trick but with more immediate and very real medical consequences!

We have already looked at the fly in comparison with the other two similar sculpts, so it's the turn of the cockroach today. The Asda one is clearly better with full definition of the wing-overlap but nothing else notable as to clues to origins, what's amusing is that as the Poundworld/Sainsbury's centipedes mirror errors, so too has the bent antenna been diligently reproduced.

Accepting that the Asda 'roach is the superior and the Sainsbury's centipede is the poorer the order of copying would seem to be Asda → Poundworld-Poundworld Plus → Sainsbury's, but I still suspect better donors; yet to be turned-up and probably common/available a few years ago?

** They weren't, I did!