U is for Up the Smoke!

Except it's been smokeless for most of my life, people under 40 have no idea what fog was like once, I remember going to pick our pet rabbit up, from the pet-rabbit people in Rotherwick, a journey which would normally have taken maybe 20-minutes, round trip, but which took over an hour, because Mum had to drive at ten miles an hour, in the hope that if she caught-up with someone going 9-mph, she wouldn't hit them! Fog-lights became visible at about 20-yards!

 

Anyway, I was up to London the other day, and as is customary, had a look, first with PW's roving reporter; Peter Evans, then, on my own, while returning to Waterloo, for items of use! And these were the things which came back to Ash Road Towers, or not!

 

This was the 'or not', £7.99 is too much for such a piece of rack toy shite, so it stayed on the peg (keeping it warm!), hopefully one of the Bocheng Jin tanks will turn-up in a mixed lot in a few years, and I can see if the red flash-eliminator is easily removable? Daft soldier may also reappear at some point!

 

Timeless pocket-money, rubber-jiggler, 'finger fright' shite! A set of six from House of Marbles, I think we've seen theirs before, but these seem to be new and better colours than those seen previously (Waterstones?), I particularly liked the metallic gold one!

 

Imported by Thomas Benacci, I thought these 40mm figures would prove to be poured PE-resin, but they are, in fact, PVC, so well within the scope of the core project! And I think we've seen the policeman already in a mixed lot or show report, so they don't take long to filter down!

 

And I'd bought these earlier than the others, but they got shot last, so yah-boo-sucks to them! Four quid's more like it, and I thought the painting of a couple (Spinosaur and Sauropod) were better than the common offering. Unbranded, but it's a rack toy!

K is for Keycraft - Keycraft (Global)

In an act of supreme laziness and lack of imagination, I have titled the last three posts according to how they were differentiated in Picasa! These were shot at the Birmingham Spring Fair in 2023, so two years ago, I didn't go last year, too much to do down here, in fact I didn't go to either show last year, and the plan, going forward is to do London one year, and Birmingham the other, and alternate between the two?

 

Dinosaurs! Yes, these are the ones we've looked at recently, twice. I found - looking for something else - that we looked at a handful a while ago, so A) I may have duplicates, well . . . I have! And B) I might try to get the remaining few poses.

 

'Rubber Jiggler' giant Insects!

 

I haven't seen these in shops yet, but they will be out there somewhere, and at 12 per pack, on the small side. We've seen similar paint-your-own stuff and glow-in-the-dark ones, but not these specific sets? However, the lack of windows and the shallowness of the cartons means they may be rather featureless flats, or even flat 'shapes', like glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars?

 

Large farm animals, I think the pale horse looks familiar and may have come into the stash with a mixed lot, I don't search for this over-sized stuff out, but it does slowly come in. Note, both horses are noticeably well-endowed in the procreation-equipment department!

 

I asked if I could get these on the floor to photograph them against a neutral background, purely to ID the animals, and I think they have since all come into the pile? Pretty sure a pair of those calves with their 'world cow' style black-patches, were in a mixed 'H is for...' post, likewise the rather fluffy lambs (or a t least one), and rather pastel piggies look familiar. . . so they will all be sorted-out at the other end and labelled-up Keycraft!

 

They either had quite a small stall, or not much which attracted my interest two years ago, although I was also in a hurry, that year? I seem to have caught the pocket-money toy display stand as being a large safari Land Rover / 4x4!

 

Link - https://keycraftglobal.com/

W is for Wildlife at The Works

I haven't visited The Works much in the last couple of years, what with everything else that's been happening, but I managed a visit the other day and came away with five inexpensive rack-toys which may interest you, especially if you're looking for Christmas stocking-filler ideas that may help nurture the next generation of 'plastic warriors'.

 

 

Three 'standards'; Dinosaurs, Zoo and Sea Life, no Farm, strangely, nor Insects or Reptiles (the other common subjects in these cases), or Birds, but as a Brucey Bonus the fourth set - in different graphics - is Unicorns . . . of course!

 

The first three are pretty self-explanatory and seem to be new models in the 'mini' oeuvre (we may have seen the dinosaurs elsewhere?), while the Unicorns are rather simplistic sculpts, and poorly bagged, so need to be examined to ensure a decent colour spread with both (yeah! Only two) poses, but all good fun for kids.

They also have, unrelated to the previous quartet, a carded set of rubber-jiggler finger-puppet dinosaurs (which have their own page in preparation), but nice to see such traditional fayre available at this time of year. All five in The Works now, ten-quid, the lot!

F is for Frog . . . Man!

This weirdness joined the stash a few weeks ago, and on one level I wish it hadn't, it's a kilo or more of cold clammy stretch-rubber I just don't need, but on another level it's actually a quite interesting find, despite being a pretty hideous thing!

 

This is how I saw him, and thought, "Oh, a rubber jiggler man-frog thing, better have that?", even though it was a pit pricy at a fiver. However, when I picked the parcel up from the Old House, the box was so heavy I thought Peter or Chris had sent me something without telling me (they both have, sent lovely things, in the last ten days!), but took it home and unwrapped it.

It WAS a rubber jiggler, and it WAS that stretchy, silicon-rubber, clammy stuff which gets covered in pet hairs, dust and some sticky substrate/exudate, so this shot is 'after cleaning', but the bugger was huge, and I should have guessed-so from the knicker-elastic used in place of the thin black elastic thread, the giant spiders and King Kong's of my youth used to get!

See! Mahoosive lump of rubber! But, marked AAA and dated 1968, the year AAA are believed to have been set up. Previously known for their animals, a lot subcontracted to other brands, I think this is the first/earliest [part-] human figure I've seen by them, and from the colours of both polymer and paint, we can probably assume, with some safety, that they are responsible for a lot of the similar rubber-jigglers found in gum-ball capsule machines, including some of the Lik Be (LB) copies, such as those we saw here.

 

Indeed, that A-mark (link post) may be a Tripple-A variant, they are known to have used single A's as well as triples, but it doesn't explain the 'S' and other letter (?) on my LB robot/aliens? So, on one level it is what it is, a piece of ephemeral shite from the 1960's, but on another, a useful connector of other parts in the whole-story, either though the clues, or the more empirical bits!

The elastic is perished and will need replacing, which will entail stretching the new stuff to maximum, to match the non-elastic remain's measurements, then cutting, and glueing to the end of the old one, so it can be pulled through a hidden bar of rubber or tunnel set into the rubber jiggler.

J is for Jumping Jazzberry Jaguar

I picked-up a nice mixed lot of jumpers a while ago, I think we've seen several now already, but there's a couple of 'jiggler' type monsters still to come, in the meantime and as a continuation of one of the side-collections, there was this Pink Panther.

Not a lot to add to the pictures, but you want to try and get three lines out of it to keep the Google-bots happy, so extra images for colour variation against different backgrounds and note he's wearing PE-kit of 'singlet & shorts' and looks happy anticipating his violent acceleration along a random trajectory with a 50/50 chance of landing on his head!

Marked-up to Hong Kong with a haloed globe and the letters HF (heliotrope feline!), I test fired him and he leapt about three feet . . . and landed on his head! Testing was in the interests of research of course, I'm a grown-up, I don't play!

This chap came in with a mixed lot at some point, I think. His natty jacket and hat also happen to match the sucker-pad on the one above, colour-wise, and I thought I might have him in the four we saw a while back, but he's new (there was one with a top-hat in that other set), and is probably from another set of four from the same source as last time.

T is for Typical!

You wait ages for an LB post and then two come along together! Further to the other day's finds; I saw some knock-off 'sucker-jigglers' going cheap and they arrived this morning, while I also scanned the Culpitt's catalogue entry for 1985.

These are similar to those sold as 'Moon Platoon' by Imperial, see image below, and are the more colourful version of the plain Hong Kong-marked ones (no logo) which I've been after for a while, so well pleased to grab them.

Taken from an Internet auction the above example has some of the more muted ones I already had, and is all robots, while the five additions are brightly-bright and has two astronauts.

I also scanned the Culpitt catalogue from 1985, the 60mm's are as I found them in North Camp's balloon/party shop (can't remember the name, but it's long-defunct anyway) back in . . . err . . . sometime between Autumn 1997 and about 2001/2? The white 'NASA' figures which should be contemporary aren't listed, but may have joined the catalogue later or been phased out already, only the robots are shown in the smaller size, only the spacemen in the larger, they all hung around for ages in bakers and cook-shop's anyway!

Listings
BV 5336 - Large Silver Spacemen
V5217 - Small Assorted Space Figures

N is for Not That Long Ago, in the Galaxy We Share . . .

. . . I scored a couple of Star Wars items, the middle of August to be exact, and having another hanging around, a small post was born . . . phffft . . . that's a different movie!

I think this must be either an unmarked McDonald's type premium (which is unusual; their stuff is usually clearly marked?), or some bootleg market-stall rack toy type thing? I don't remember it being marked anyway, but as it was not working I'd already decided to take it apart for the figure. Is that crown the Burger King logo or the new movie graphics? Kylo Ren?

A light-sabre will cut through anything! The funny thing was it started making Star Wars noises and flashing as I was taking it apart - it clearly had a loose connection somewhere - and for clues to origin I took similar equipment out of those Tiger Electronics spaceships and Speeders when I added them to the Galoob fleet a decade or more ago now?

From the same Charity shop (and the same collection?), I also got the C3PO jiggler, like a bobble-head he is articulated, but at the waist, and he jiggles like a hula-girl at the slightest movement. He's unmarked apart from a single figure '15' on the underside of the base, and while construction seems simple, it is robust, even the push-on base can't then be removed due to a sharp shoulder on the pegs.

Go Berserker! Get him while he's posing for the camera! . . .

. . . the final item in the line-up is the Stormtrooper toothbrush Peter Evans had chucked in the big bags at Plastic Warrior's show! I'm using it, not on my teeth mind; to clean dirty toys!

For some reason it is called 'Firefly' which is also another movie altogether? And is carried by Dr. Fresh in the US and Canada; Grosvenor Consumer Products here. It came with a spinning Power Rangers Biro-topper TV thing!

F is for Follow-up - V is for Value Pack

A couple of days after I'd scheduled last weekend's posts, Brian Berke sent me his findings for this season too late to add to the relevant posts. One or two of the bits he sent have already been slotted neatly (or jemmied) into posts, but as the Amscan post was on the 1st of the month, it's easier to present these as a follow-up.

Unlike the sea-life the other day, these are definitely knock-offs of Iwako designs; the donkey we saw a while ago ('Erasers' in the Tag List) and at 12 for just-short of five dollars it's pennies per unit isn't it? Cheap as chips!

I'm loving these! I mean I am ab-sur-lute-ley f****g lovin'em! Brilliant! They are like the old rubber jigglers and I'll be looking-out for them in UK shops - quality . . . real quality tat! And the colours, you've got to love the colours - that orange is gorgeous! But they're not as cheap as the donkey-rubbers.

From the top you've got a six-armed cyclopean with Piglett's ears, an even more piglike cyclops, a wacky vampire batterfrog (indeed, is one of these a realistic likeness of a Basingrad hippa'crocka'frog?) and my favourite the triclopean who is borrowing heavily from Toy Story.

Note also that the way they're packed each one comes in three of four colours - so you have to buy a second set to get the lot? Thanks Brian!

S is for Scary-Monsters and Super-Creeps

Sung in a nasal voice: "She had an horror of rooms...full of toys!"

The term 'Rubber Jigglers' tends to brings to mind small hideous finger monsters, usually made of a semi-transparent silicone- or similar-rubber in an orange, flesh or khaki shade, over-sprayed with blobs of colour, maybe with eyes dotted in, but they have a term of their own 'Finger Monsters'!

The jigglers label extending out to various other cheapie toys (confined to capsule/gum-ball machines and shop-stock boxes or cards, rather than the smaller cracker and premiums type novelty sources) made of soft, synthetic-polymer, rubberised materials, which jiggle as they are moved, played with or dangled from an elastic cord.

We looked at a bunch of the sucker-fitted ex-LP sculpt jigglers a while ago, a large ant/bug thing the other day and I'm working on a page for the finger puppets (just because I say they're hideous doesn't mean I don't collect them!), but there are also more realistic jigglers, these constitute a quick overview:

Spiders, lizards (or are they newts?), frogs (not illustrated) a frog-monster, bats, snakes, all firm favourites with the William Brown type schoolboy of any generation in the last 50 years. But; leave them in a styrene capsule too long and they'll eat it with the same power an Airfix Tiger tank's tracks had, to eat their host, in the same era!

This is an early window walker, quite a popular novelty now, they can be much larger with ball extremities to flick-over and walk down the wall. This one on the other hand moves very slowly, and has leaked an unstable fluid into it's instruction-sheet over time, yet remains as sticky as ever! It's also tiny.

Three snakes, one a modern ethylene one (small, pale blue, semi-flat/relief design), you may well find in your cracker in 11 days time, under him is a 1970's classic in stretchy jade-green rubber (the only true jiggler in this trio) and under him is a more realistic 1990's dense PVC model with a half-hearted paint-job. We saw the spiders the other day, but boy; could you get you mother/sister/aunt to scream with a well timed reveal of a jiggling spider!

B is for Bug Life

Flies in sugar-lumps, flies in fake icecubes, flies in gum-ball vending capsules, flies in er...packets of flies! The universal, timeless novelty item...

...first available in the late 1940's/early 1950's and still a firm favourite in independent toy shop's pocket-money lines today. Other bugs are made, including glow-in-the-dark ants and large rubber...er...what the heck is it? Hornetsquito?

I is for I'm calling this: "Five Girls Have a Picnic"

Clockwise from the large one: rubber hanger (elastic missing), Rubber, Rubber capsule toy, ethylene, rubber and an ethylene Cracker novelty chap in the centre...lunch!

N is for Novelty

Novelty? How would one define a novelty? Something which has not been designed as a plaything but which has play value? Something with a practical application that leaves the user feeling amused? A household or garden product with added playability?...goes off to Google...

novelty ˈnɒv(ə)lti - noun - 1a. the quality of being new, original, or unusual. "the novelty of being a married woman wore off" synonyms: originality, newness, freshness, unconventionality, unfamiliarity, unusualness, difference, imaginativeness, creativity, creativeness, innovativeness, innovation, modernity, modernness, break with tradition "they liked the novelty of our approach" antonyms: conservatism - 1b. a new or unfamiliar thing or experience.
plural noun: novelties "in 1914 air travel was still a novelty" denoting an object intended to be amusing as a result of its unusual design. modifier noun: novelty "a novelty teapot" - 2. a small and inexpensive toy or ornament. "he bought chocolate novelties to decorate the Christmas tree" synonyms: knick-knack, trinket, bauble, toy, trifle, gewgaw, gimcrack, ornament, curiosity...

...I think that covers tonight's trio of recent acquisitions!

These were £2.50 a set (that's 62.5p each!), and while branded to Hawkin's Bazaar's 'Tobar' label, where actually in a clearance book-show a hundred yards from the nearest Hawkin's! They are the same stretchy material as the Alien I tested to destruction a while ago, so I'm being careful...I intend to base them, but silicon is hard to glue, so I will try bathroom or window sealant! Baubles.

An ABS type polymer Massey-Harriser [of pencils] (geditt!), imported by Strawberry Design...also available in John Deer green, Ford/New Holland blue and 1970's Local Authority yellow. But with that bonnet (hood) shape it had to be the red one...£1.25, clearance, now. Trinket.

Previously seen in Plastic Warrior magazine and bought from fellow blogger Brian at the PW May show in Twickenham; how cool are these? I intend to find a second pair and cut the cork/plinths down until they're bases and add burning cotton-wool wicks for a bit of off-the-cuff urban house-clearance! One ex-Airfix pose, one ex-Matchbox. Knick-knacks.

LP is for Lots-more Plastic!

Another follow-up to previous posts tonight and an all-time favourite 'side-bar' or sub-collection within my wider collection has been these chaps from LB and their derivatives.

Before I was collecting all scales I scored some of the larger ones for Paul at Plastic Warrior magazine (when they could still be found in cake shops!), only to be asked to do an article for the small scale off-shoot (One Inch Warrior) and then after I Blogged them here I was asked to Blog them at the Moonbase Central Blog (the article's disappeared now, or not been tagged, but I have the images, and will redux it, here, sometime), so this is definitely a perennial we will return too!

Indeed, the boys at Moonbase have subsequently blogged some of these, pointing me in the right direction for collection expansion, as I believe I have helped them too . . . all the following have been picked-up in the last two years, most in the last two weeks!

So, first the additions to the large scale LB's and clones. The only marked original is the unpainted darker-green one, which I was looking for last time I blogged them, having unpainted red ones and believing they must have done the green ones unpainted as well. Couldn't you just take the paint off some spares? I hear you ask; well, you could, but that would defeat the object of confirming production runs!

Reviewing the old post, I notice the two smaller gunmetal clones with the deeper, unmarked, puddle-base are duplicates, but the cream and day-glow yellow ones are new to the collection. I suspect they were once day-glow all over, but time and sunlight have been unkind to them!

The little green one is the smooth-based sub-50mm version, while the larger chrome-plated one is actually larger than LB originals, and is also unmarked.

Previously Blogged over at Moonbase, theirs was an English language market one, this is . . . er .  .  . Spanish? Although emanating from Russ Berrie, the 1960's US-based toy company behind those bloody mad-haired trolls!

These two silver astronauts and their lander (along with a simple flag) seemed to replace the old armed spacemen in the smaller size and ran-on with the robots for a few years as cake decorations, in white. While there is no mark, the base is in every other respect the same as the robots.

In the snow-shaker (moon-dust shaker!) form, it's just another way of marketing the figures. Virca SPA will be the importer, and the little gold tag is reminiscent of tourist/gift shops the world over! Can a Spanish follower translate the motto on the side of the shaker (I'm assuming 'Gallarate' means gallery?), the English one was 'Galaxy Collection Water Ball'.

Moonbase's Wotan has been very good at tracking these down, especially the big grinning doozer far right (of the picture...although he looks like his politics might be "Hang'em-Flog'em" as well, like a metal magistrate!), as he (Wote') used it as his ID image for a while.

Seemingly made by two firms, the darker ones have come-in in dribs and drabs, the paler ones came in on Saturday at Sandown Park (at the same time as the shaker, but from different dealers).

The odd looking fellow (inset views) came with them, although; A) he's not got a sucker, nor any signs of having had one and B) the lot was accompanied by several other 60's/70's toys in the same material and pale brown colour (pencil tops, dinosaurs and a sea-monster), clearly from the same maker/source, not that he looked like he went with them either, so I've added him here for now as an 'Alien'!

His back has the same treatment as the backs of all those silicon-rubber spiders and bats we used to get in joke-shops, gum-machine capsules and Christmas Crackers...a sort of novelty-condom effect! They (spider and bat) were both in the same lot - along with a large silicon-rubber ant - so I think it was the remains of a salesman's samples?

An old scan from my original One Inch Warrior magazine article, that was 12/15 (?) years ago (late 1990's anyway), yet some people persist in calling them ID or IDL on-line and in auction listings...it's quite clear that it's LB with a line through it, held between the arms of a monster whose head is above the gap between the two letters, with a sun-ray effect carrying-out to make the full disc.

Indeed...the line-through may well be the monster's arms grasping/hugging the LB?

This is a CAD'ed rendition of the logo found on [some of] the darker green, olive and grey versions of the silicone-rubber robots, it could be ATS, AST, AIS....any ideas? The paler ones (and more transparent ones) only have a generic HONG KONG marking, sometimes two.

Another scan which originally appeared in black and white in 1" Warrior - this is the Russ Berrie contents in their LB / Culpitts cake decoration form, with low-lighting and no flash on a tray of door-mat beatings, after I've sieved out all the fibres and twiggy bits!

Also from the old article, a nice early/mid 1960's set, these are copies of the small-scale Triang / MPC supplied figures with unmarked flat bases, I say early/mid 1960's as the artwork is more late 1950's but the contents are later stuff. I love the two middle aircraft as they are reminiscent of the Trigan Empire's 'Atmosphere Craft' from Look & Learn magazine.

Although the MPC Golden Astronauts were the same chrome silver styrene ones as Triang, their space-base play-set contained these lesser ethylene clones...in red, white and blue.

Further Reading;

The Trigan Empire (Wikipedia)

Now known to be LB for Lik Be, tags adjusted to reflect the fact.

M is for Memories

Sorting-out in the loft and I found a box of old childhood Meccano under the eves, in among which were a few things I recognised as being both non-Meccano and from a long time ago!

Taken downstairs and duly washed, they make an intriguing pile I think?

King Kong from Hong Kong, I'm not telling him he's got a  sharpie up his arse!

A little clockwork robot I well remember getting in a Christmas stocking back around 1975, his mechanism has ceased to work, not because the springs broken but because someone (?) forced the winder until it broke its seal to the housing and now just spins uselessly! However he can still help carry a phial of Airfix paint to the recycling!

Tyrannosaurus Rex from Addar, his head needs re-glueing, I made him up and painted him (bloodied him up a bit!) during a wet holiday in Alderney many moons ago, his Raptor mate is actually in the collection somewhere and I wondered where Rex had slopped-off to!

The Morse-code signal kit from Palitoy; Action Man would settle under the Rhus tree by the extension and fire-off missives about the Cherilea-Sharna Afrika Korps half-track bivouacked by the cherry tree!