S is for Season's Shelfie Summery

Recently shot shelfies, nothing exceptional, just a few things shot over the spring/summer, which either missed other shelfie posts, or have only been taken recently, and typically after a couple of weeks of behaving itself, Blogger just unloaded them in reverse-order, so the less interesting ones are at the end now!

 

Shot in Poundland about a week ago, as with all similar shots, it's against future ID's, although they look familiar, and are probably under several brands already going back a decade or so, here 'Gear Box' with a Maisto/Jada style 'die-cast' cartouche!

 

I don't think I've had the Peppa Pig 'Busy Book' from Phidal here yet, but knowing these Tattle Tales are only half a set or less, I wasn't about to start now. Interestingly, I think this was in Morrisons, up at Elvetham Heath, near the DVD's!

 

The Works, thematic Lucky Bags, I did get a test purchase, which will get a post, but it was disappointing, as these things always are these days, human progress disappeared in a miasma of disinterest and rip-offery, years ago!

 

Currently, or still (I shot this in April) in B&M, and again, it's to ID insects in mixed lots years form now, and not something which came home with me, although, it's nice to see old favourites like fake poo, whoopee-cushions and snapping-gum are still of interest to modern kids!

 

Also April, TKMaxx, and it's a bunch of hares and rabbits (arbitrary ear-length!) in ceramic, got shot in passing, and should have been in one of the Easter posts, really!

 

The rest, all figurals, were shot with the cats we saw the other day, all in TKMaxx, all in the catering section, with bag-clips, bag-ties, tea-diffusers, a banana-tree and a fun potato-peeler!

T is for Two - Full Size Christmas Crackers

Just a quickie, it's been a funny-old day, today!

We're looking at two complete sets today, both shot a few years ago, and both obtained for pennies, or I couldn't justify the philistinism of destroying them, although both are from the tail-end of the 1970's or - more probably - the 1980's, and both are budget types, so not exactly rare or valuable.

 

This one is a total generic with no identifying features or information. the photo-art on the box makes it recent in the history of crackers, but not ultra-modern, so the 70's seems likely, and there are 12 crackers in crepe-paper with metallic 'collars' - I'm sure all these things have their own piece of specific lingo within cracker-making circles!

Clockwise from top left we have a hair-clip, micro vanity-case/doll's accessory, motorcycle, cocktail ornamental-monkey, relief-flat spider, magnifying-glass key, elephant charm, moustache, two-part ring, fake fingertip, flat car (after a French original) and a baby's/doll's rattle.

 

Contents tick most of the boxes, there's no obvious puzzles or games? The cocktail-glass monkey was originally a design credited to Nosco in the 'States, but early plastics firms over here carried similar products - this one though will be Hong Kong.

The other set, equally cheap types, but in all-stiffer paper, and very 1980's is credited to a Napier Industries, who claim to be manufacturing over here, but using part-foreign pieces, we should get them on a boat to Rwanda!

Clockwise again - ballbearing dexterity game, hair-clip and trick rubber-pencil, Ultraman pencil-top, water squirter, magic maths puzzle, novelty curling-fish, metal puzzle, moustache, motorbike, rubber-spider and elephant charm.

 

Contents again ticking most of the boxes, but with the puzzles and magic tricks, which were missing in the previous set, note also, the motorcycle is a different design, I have bags of both, as with the elephant, but like the similar cats and Scottie-dogs there are many variants of them! Also we get a bi-coloured crown, but in the same easy-rip tissue paper!

 

Some of the LRG collectors get a bit excised over the Ultraman pencil-tops, not realising there were tens of thousands of them in British/Commonwealth crackers, and that they are ephemeral cheepies really!

Both boxes have a 'cut-out-and-keep' (or 'use') feature, for enhanced value-for-money, in a number of place-mat nameplates, which could equally be used as parcel gift-tags.

T is for Two - Mini Crackers

Way back when, Crackers tended to be limited to the actual dinner, you all had one and shared the hats and prizes if one person 'won' two ends, you then read the joke and wore the hat. Extravagant families might have a second pull before the pudding course, but there was the undeniable guilt of redundant hats?

 

In order to get round the unwritten limits on cracker engagement, some wag in cracker-central came up with the mini-cracker, which lived in the tree as a 'decoration' and cried silently 'pull me, pull me' for the entirety of the tree-up period. Pester-power (spoilt whining) did the rest!

Here we see generic and Sainsbury's branded versions of the same common mini-crackers, I'm really after another (1960's) set, which comes up regularly, but always goes for silly money, so clearly other people know what they are looking for, in the meantime these later ones (1980-2000's?) which flourished under several guises, are often going for no money, and these are from a few years ago (left) and this year, a charity lot (right).

 

You can tell they are the same from the little bells and Christmas trees glued to them, which didn't change for over a decade and can be found on the larger crackers, presumably from the same source/origin, too, whatever the design of the crackers themselves, which - with these minis - is always a variation of the metallic 'Christmas colours'.

 

But it's the contents which interest me and hopefully some of you, and here, mercifully, the rings have tied them together as closely as the glued tags! Only seven left in the first - generic - box, a full complement of eight in the newer, charity set.

 

Of note; another micro-racing car for my long-term project, the diminutive copy of a Layla type railway figurine, and it solves the question of the different bases on some of the copies, I thought we'd looked at more of the Hong Kong ones than we did in the linked post, but there are some (the above . . . golfer?) with better bases, but poorer sculpting than the Hong Kong bagged sets you could get in model railways retailers back in the day. Obviously, these crackers are one of the sources of them.

While the Sainsbury's-branded set is also interesting for having four items at normal cracker size (fake finger, moustache, ring and fly), and four mini-versions of what would normally be bigger - rocking bear, whistle, charm and the relief-flat crab. favourite here is the microscopic warship, we had a bunch of these in soft, silver polyethylene when we were kids, and I've found a couple over the years along with a red one, but this bright green one is the first polystyrene one I've found.

W is for Whacky Walkers

No wall required, but Winter's coming and no mistake! These, like the jumpers, are a growing collection, or sub-collection I wouldn't have given houseroom to, in my small-scale only days, and couldn't have imagined a few years ago, but after robots and ceremonials, it was only a matter of time before Halloween (or Christmas) entered the ledger!

 

Welp, they were like 79p ladies and gentlemen, so under the 'we buy this shit, so you don't have to' rule, I managed to find the shekels for the eyeball as I knew we had another in the pile, and then went back for the pumpkin!

 

They both came from Home Bargains and I think there may have been a different eye, or a purple pumpkin (which seemed daft?), I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I left one on the rack? Green eye maybe?

 

The other eyeball was in one of Jon Attwood's boxes (and I have a feeling another one came in a few years ago, possibly from Chris?), and we looked at a set of them from Amscan, here, many full-moons ago, via New York!

Then, the other day, I found two end-of-line walkers in the local garden centre while looking for Christmas Decorations! Now these two ARE walkers in the common sense of others we've seen here, the pumpkin and eyeball are actually hoppers, like the original 'ACME' cartoon (and real) teeth, often used to chew-up Tom the cat's tail, or similar!

F is for From Nutcrackers to Christmas Crackers

So there was I, on one of the hottest days of July, if not the whole summer, pulling twenty-four Christmas crackers with myself, as you do . . . n't! The final hours of Poundworld Plus brought with them a Brucey-Bonus for the novelty-tat arm of the collection!

I'd already had some smaller 'tree' ones, when these were reduced from 50p a box to 25p per box, which - if you recall the other posts at the time (June/July) - was further reduced at the till by whatever had been sent to the computer by head-office or the Official Receivers that morning - suffice to say I got silver back from my grubby quid!

Bog-standard fare - die-cut, stiff-card construction, simple CAD design in positive and negative silver/white colour-ways, six per pack gave me the aforementioned 24-crackers to deal with, and I wasn't waiting 'till now!

First disappointment was no Matchbox knock-off soldiers! Each box had one micro-plane, one hair tie, one 'tiddlywink' frog and one very thin, styrene ring, with two from a top, a spinner or a fake nail. Most of the things in the 'Image for illustration purposes only' picture are of better quality than those actually included but isn't that always the way!

The 'tree' crackers; I don't seem to have photographed the contents, if I find them in the increasing chaos of the 'bringing together' before Xmas I'll try to, but memory serves they were as crap as the bigger ones and relatively similar. Except they were only four per tray, and two of them - per set - had the [same] card-puzzle (like Kinder's) or bookmark, leaving me with only a few bits of polymer shite!

I didn't get the fortune-telling fish, the trumpet or the magic calculator! Both sets were imported by ITP, with the tree-crackers further known to have been manufactured by [PT] Cermai Makmur of Indonesia, so you might find these in KMart . . . now! It's all-right - I buy this shit so you don't have to!

B is for Bogus Body Bits

From the joke dept. Fake lips, lost teeth, eye patches, nails through figers, even - at larger sizes - arrows through heads! Kids love these, adults pretend to be taken in, expressing levels of suprise that do them credit since they've been expecting the trick since it flew from the cracker a houre or two ago!

Hillbilly teeth and vampire fangs join the solo dentoids (spell-check says; you made that word up), 'witches fingers' and moustaches were another favourite, the clips too small for adults - who were nonetheless made to try them!

We actually had that cat-mask (in black) as kids, it hung around for years, each time it appeared it was missing another whisker!