G is for Group of Galactic Gewgaws!

In addition to the stuff we've seen, there were few other sci-fi/spacey things acquired at the recent Sandown Park toy fair, and we're looking at them now!

 

Just a bit of fun! There was an astronaut too, but he was too silly, this at least has the saving grace of being an alien, and they might actually look silly . . . except, Fermi says they probably don't exist! Rocket USA  'Big Key', made in "Chy'nah, very-very bad, biggly bad!".

 

TV related, so they ended-up here (see Power Rangers below!), and probably my favourite cartoon as a kid, having Tom sliced into twenty sheets by a ham-prep' machine, only to pop-back whole a second later, priceless, when you are six! These are from the '92 movie, rather than the more recent one.

 

I had a feeling I'd already got one of these, when I found two on a stall, but grabbed the better one anyway, and in point of fact I'd actually blogged a previous purchase, over a decade ago;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2014/10/r-is-for-rocketry.html

 

And, it's a minter, so this one can be fired at some future date, in the interests of science, and original video-copy production!

Five Days Later - Fuck me, it's getting boring now Bushy! It took him both over ten years, AND five days to find!

 

On Etsy now;

 

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/4472409517/vintage-lionel-porter-chemical-rocket?

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2026/06/seltzer-science-using-chemicals-found.html - How sad, how tragic, what a pathetic little man he's presenting as, what a twat?. The answer to his question ("I never had anything like this. You?"), is, of course - yes, I got one ten years ago, and grabbed another the other day, and you know it!

 

Nice carded set which ID's one of the sets which were still needing ID'ing,

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2020/09/mmpr-is-for-mighty-morphin-power-rangers.html

 

Kidz Biz (double-zed, edgy, urban!), they are the ones also issued in capsule key-rings, and the cards are also tieing-in some of the accessories which were confusing me, re. the Micro Machine sets!

 

On the left a larger skeletal monster/alien type (imp/devil?) of unknown origin, on the right a figure sold as MUSCLE but which is part of the Franco-Italian knock-off line, Cosmix, doing smaller-scale copies of figures from Panosh and Mattel, well covered here;

 

https://www.littleweirdos.net/2016/04/cosmix-french-muscle-ninja-mites.html

 

Altogether, an odd assortment, we'll have to see what turns up at Twickenham, in two weeks time?

B is for Big Bag

Just a quickie, another 'lucky bag' type thing, in the same vein as the two cornucopias we saw a while back (Christmas?), and with very similar contents of little use to military figure minded peeps such as yourselves, but, we buy this shit so you don't have to!

 

Courtesy of Hunter Price International, under the Toymania branding, I think I got this in The Works, it was back last August, but I think I've since seen it elsewhere as well? Asda carry Toymania, as do a couple of the Sub-Poundland discount stores.

 

Contents include a quite good sample of 18 standard novelties or party gifts, including light-up cars, bouncy-balls, a shaped slinky, maracas clackers/clappers, blow-ball balancer, 'helicopter', spinning tops, a couple of stretchies, a balancing bird, a disc 'baseball' firer, and two weird bookmark things? Clearly designed to keep two smaller people happy, without fighting over who has what.

 

The stretchy unicorn has a hole in its arse and can pass through itself?

 

Two-colour stretchy smiley.

 

The weird bookmark things? They seem to utilise memory-metal, to roll up or unroll, but why? I think I'm missing something in my old age; both space-themed, they would make useful bookmarks, but I suspect they have another function?

 

It's funny, but memory-metal, is a bit like 3D printing, apart from one or two esoteric medical applications, both technologies have been used primarily to make toys, novelties and other short-life, ephemeral crap! While I don't think Nano Carbon or Buckminster Fullerine have even had a decent application yet, beyond research and being talked about as the next big things . . . it's almost like we are running out of ideas, even as we keep having them, if you know what I mean, ceasing to strive for excellence and sliding back to an anti-democratic, belligerent, less enlightened 19th century mindset! 

 

The launcher of the 'helicopter' disc, they had a period of being 'UFO's didn't they?

 

That't it, might keep younger kids happy for an hour or so!

A is for A Bit of Fun!

Picked these up the other day, an end of line I'd missed in The Range, I saw them and thought "Well, I'd better 'av some a'that", and took them home with me!

 

A stack of Robot highlighters! The pad-reservoir is only about a centimetre long, so they won't last, and will dry-out quite quickly, even without use, but it's six more Robots, and it's funny, whether it's white-buttons, erasers, Christmas baubles stretchies, or other novelties; Robots always seem to join the collection in multiples!

 

The upper shot is colour true, after which, my new, hideously expensive Canon camera started to misbehave and is currently shooting in the 'cold' spectrum of white, and I'm having to recolour in Picasa?

 

While I was there I noticed they had the dig-for-space-stuff balls, seen here a while ago, back in stock, and having satisfied myself they did ONLY have the two designs/combo's (Jupiter/Shuttle and Earth/Astronaut), gabbed another of the latter and dug the astronaut out.

 

Colour is a bit shot on this one too, but you can see, A) it's a darn-sight messier than the plain gypsum-plaster ones, as the (presumably) powder paint used to colour the mix and decorate the outer ball is all powerful!

 

B) there are a bunch of buried 'jewels' which aren't even mentioned in the packaging blurb, and C), the astronaut is larger than I was expecting, at around 28/30mm, and a softish polyethylene, who cleaned-up but had slight staining, which will need bleach - it's all water-based colour.

 

So six Robots and another spaceman in the collection, sorry the images are a bit shit.

M is for Medieval Plunder

Back last May, I shot back over to Basingstoke House to shoot a few things I didn't shoot when I was there previously (2014, published here 2017 - ACW Tag), and I thought I'd check out the gift shop at the same time - here's m'plunder!

 

Poured resin suit-of-armour pen/biro, he'll get the same treatment as that regency lady a few years ago, and be cut flat and based, one day! While the medieval princess is from Papo, and actually a Queen!

 

Modern Westair, they've pretty-much phased-out the old Peltro sculpts now, and issue their own figures in a softer whitemetal, I grabbed Willy Wavelance and Queen Bess, and what I thought was one of the others, in poor light, only to find it was a duplicate playwright! But from the card we can see I'm looking for a Damien Lewis and Sir Francis of the Duck Pond!

 

A fun little activity sheet for the kids gives me two card flats, for that side-bar. You obviously bend the lances after cutting and glueing, and charge them at each other, down the tilts!

F is for Follow-up - Fantastic Flying Fancies!

So, as promised, I fired-off the recently found (and seen here) Tom Smith novelty artifact, the 'Surprise Space Rocket' at our Christmas Breakfast (more of a brunch) meet, and we can now look at the contents and finish studying this delightful example of how Austerity Britain cheered itself up in the 1950's! Actually, probably the 1960's!

 

This has a video of the launch in the middle, but also has all the images from both posts as an accompanying slide show, and I didn't know whether to put it at the start or the end, but the whole point of the thing (post and event) is to see what happens, so it should go first!

 

So, the contents were a bit disappointing, in that I had hoped they might be space-related, astronauts, spacemen, little UFO's or something, but actually they were pretty standard budget-end novelties, classics in fact, with two whistles, one a novelty face, a 'magic' fortune-telling fish, plastic 'tangram' puzzle and small red balloon. In fact, it's all a bit red!

 

Not a game - see video - there was also a very simple card rocket kit to cut out, and glue, the only real nod to the theme of the container, I will scan and print it, laminate it to some stiff card, and make up the duplicate, as a future follow-up, to this follow-up!

 

The six pieces are one-sided (colour/print-wise) as I may be able to build it on a card tube or wooden dowel of the correct diameter, and reinforce the landing legs with tooth-picks or coffee stirrers?

 

The party hats were the bulk of the 'shot', being the sort you see in old TV sitcoms, soaps or drama's from the 1960's or early 1970's, so it may not be the 1950's item I thought it might be?

 

Much taller than modern Christmas Cracker hats, and manufactured in crepe-paper, they have tissue frills around their tops in the same pinky-orange paper as their restricting-for-packing, paper 'vest' wraps, and one is decorated.

 

The decoration is more Easter-themed, with rabbits, bears and little flowery things (it looks like), than Christmassy, but of the same mawkishly sentimental style as wrapping papers of the era, I can still, well remember. So these 'poppers' were clearly aimed at the birthday and other celebratory market, to take up some of the slack of the quiet period between Christmas cracker seasons!

 

Construction was a loosely overlapped card tube, held together with the decorated rocket paper, with chip-board discs sandwiching the spring, and lighter fibreboard or hardboard discs holding the toys in another sandwich above the hats. A gap of about 10-mil, helps the spring generate acceleration, before the contents meet the lid.

 

Turns out the top just slides out, and I'm hoping to carefully feed this back behind the outer wrapper, eventually. For now, I've folded it down to preserve the folds and prevent the loss of the hardboard piece!

 

You will notice from the video, the toys go one way and the hats another, one suspects that if the quite substantial, bed-spring type wire-helix, hadn't been in compression for 50 or 60-years, everything would have flown further! There was no pyrotechnics though, I thought there may be a snap, as with crackers, but nothing of the sort!

F is for Festive Finger Friends!

Getting very close to the sharpest point of what's acceptable on the blog, or within the collection, but, it IS Christmas, they ARE Figural, and it's a bit of fun in a darkening world!

 

I picked up a load of stuff from Peter Evans the other day, but it was owed quite a bit on the shekels-front, so it'll mostly be filtered away into the archive/collection, against future use as 'my stuff', rather than being labelled as contribution, however, there were several items which Peter had obviously grabbed or saved for me, so he'll get credit for them, and this is another of them!

 

Festive Finger Puppets!

(Gem Imports, Barnsley) 

 

Certainly a figural sub-genre or category, and not the first time we've found room for finger-puppets here, they are - again - ideal Christmas stocking-fillers for younger kids, and it's a non-electronic form of imagination stretching, to make up and act out stories in a theatrical fashion. And, it's the second time Peter has found a Gem Imports thing, so many thanks to him, for finding this!

E is for Eye Candy - Sort Of!

I think we've seen this before, in passing, but I took it apart and cleaned it of a lifetime's kitchen grime, a while ago and seem to have taken far too many photographs, which need to be out of Picasa and on the Wibbly Wobbly Way!

 

 

Obviously you need a kettle with the right kind/diameter of spout, and when the water starts to boil, the inner sliding component moves and the bird starts whistling! Before modern automatic cut-offs (which work the same way - pressure, try getting one to work if you haven't closed the lid properly, it'll boil dry!), this was an ingenious solution, to a minor problem!

B is for Big Blue Bellend!

But no Tech-bro' Origin! It's funny, an hour ago I was being sandblasted by warm, horizontal rain, every time I got out of the wagon, and I had to hold the door with both hands to stop it being ripped-back against its hinges, now it's as still out there, as the hour before the heat-death of the universe! How do you get warm rain in December? Oh, that's right, the end of the world, which nobody can be arsed to prevent!

 

I couldn't resist this, at November's Sandown Park show, which, it turned-out, was being sold by 'Ferryman', better known from another Blog, it was he who talked me into than gilded guppy-bus last show, and when we realised who we were, we had a quick chat, and I bought a little machine as well, which will be in the more conventional plunder posts in a few days, but I couldn't resist this, to add to my two German ones!

 

It looks like a giant firework! This is actually my second, I'd forgotten I already had one branded to Lyvia, which, from the artwork, is a slightly later issue. Although it looks like that one may be sunlight discoloured while this one is more of a minter.

 

Unlike the German corporate promotional's, with their simple slots, this one has a fancy mechanism for firing the coins into the domed head of the rocket, from whence they will fall down the shaft. The only trouble is that I don't know the combination, and while with only two discs it should only be 100 possibles, they are very stiff, and it could take hours to crack!

J is for Jurassic Busy Book

A return to Phidal, there's been a big restocking in TKMaxx for Christmas, and while most of them are sets we've seen already, or sets I'm not interested in, this seems to be new, except it's dated 2022, but isn't the one we looked at here, which was dated 2021 anyway! Although with the same 'Phidal' bases, they will go together well.

 

 Cover.

 

Contents.

 

Tyrannosaurus Rex - Giganotosaurus 

Velociraptor - Atrociraptor (best dinosaur name ever!)

 

Allosaurus - Dilophosaurus

Dimetrodon - Parasaurolophus

Therizinosaurus - Pyroraptor 

All from the other side.

Two of these play-mat scenes (top right and bottom left) might make useful background sheets for future photography, but due to the polymer lamination of these sheets, it'll require careful ironing at low temperatures to get all the folds out, but I have hung on to them for now.