About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.
Showing posts with label MUSCLE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MUSCLE. Show all posts

Friday, May 8, 2026

L is for Loose Lots - Sandown - Sci-Fi & Fantasy

There's still a couple of Sandown related things in the queue, but they may join the many folders down the bottom (of Picasa!) which date back to up to fifteen years ago, it will get posted one day . . . it will! In the meantime, here's the sci-fi and fantasy element of my busy scurrying and ferreting, back in February!
 


Gareth found these and brought them to my attention, he managed to get another, 14th pose, but I've already got a reasonable sample of these, and we have seen them here before, painted, and as unpainted late production, including whacky plastic colours (fluorescent pink, green and oranges), as well as visits to bagged and loose Thunderbird additions to the range, in soft rubber and polystyrene, so I've probably got the missing pose?
 
Ovni (UFO) from Comansi, I don't know if these are factory painted, or home-paints, the seller and Gareth thought the latter, and when painted, they tend to have brown bases, so these are probably not 'official'. But, they were sold under various guises, as well as the UFO moniker, and the late Thunderbirds sets, they came as Battle of the Planets and as The Invaders TV series tie-ins, so they may have ended up looking like this at one point - the seller had quite a few, all in the same condition.
 
The fact that some faces are painted, others not, is also odd, a home-painter would do them all the same, a team of out-painter's wouldn't be so fussy? The real interest, to me, is in the plastic colours underneath, mid-green and metallic blue, which I think are earlier than my previous samples, making the whole sample, a better representation of Comansi's output.
 
A few minutes after publishing - In fact I think there's more than twenty poses in total, with the six Thunderbirds characters, maybe closer to thirty, we've seen a girl, a chap holding a space rifle parallel to the ground, a zombie/Frankenstein's Monster type, I think there's another kneeling one I don't have, a guy waving a space rifle, a guy holding an equipment box (which gives us 20/26), so when I've got my four or more samples together, we'll have a proper looks at them despite having had several 'proper' looks at them already! Doh!
 
Game playing pieces I suspect, and in the style of all that MB Games' stuff licensed from the Nottingham Mafia (Battle Masters, Hero Quest, Space Crusade, Space Hulk et al), but I'm in the dark as to which game these are from, and it's only the bases of the blue figures which are leading me in the GW direction? 
 
A blow-moulded astron . . . sorry, cosmonaut from the former Soviet Union, and while I'm not posting Russian stuff at the moment, this can be lost in amongst the other stuff. Not believed to be a parachute toy, but more of an infant's garden/beach/bath toy thing, a big chunk for tiny hands.
 
 "Wrestlers sah! Millions of 'em!"
 
Mattel's M.U.S.C.L.E., always nice to add a few more to the tub, especially these - mostly - coloured ones, when I first started finding these, they were usually the flesh-coloured chaps, and early web-pages would suggest the colours were rarer, but I think they were just later, so came to market later, and therefore come onto the secondary market later, too, they seem to turn-up quite often these days, but a nice sample, with a pocket monster to the fore.
 
The sublime and the ridiculous! Cherilea and Matchbox, although I'm being unfair, the Matchbox K-2002 Flight Hunter was a reasonable effort as the long-night of the long-knives in the toy industry of the early 1980's, bit deep. While I got the elusive space-slug, because he was affordable, due to his short-shot foot, I doubt he misses it!
 
Don't forget it's the London Toy Soldier Show tomorrow;
 

Thursday, February 22, 2024

E is for Eye-Candy - Best of the Rest

After I'd done the first two posts/shots (posts below this one) I had a sort-out, and this is the rest of the odd's and stand-alone's, here at the moment, and an eclectic bunch they are too, but mostly bigger than the previous 'mini' Bots.

The large red one, to the left, is a huge blow-moulded, thick-walled, hollow PVC lump, possibly Japanese rather than Hong Kong, and probably 1970's, but unmarked, with plug-in PVC arms and ariels/helmet-guns. The other one, to the right, is one of the Arco-Mattel bendies, with plug-in 'ethylene weapons and a Hong Kong sticker on one foot. The other red one, between them, is unmarked apart from a 'C1' on one foot, and probably quite modern?

Four eraser-types (x2 silver, orange and yellow) which may have missed previous posts on the subject are front centre, while the right hand green one is another M.U.S.C.L.E. (also Mattel), giving us a scaler with the previous post's image. The other green one is actually more of an action-figure, in polystyrene, with a self-tapping screw in his back holding all the moving parts together.

The other articulated droid also has a screw in his back and moving components, and is a Manta Force Karnoid from Bluebird Toys, some - probably not this one - via Tomy.  While the yellow individual on the far left is more humanoid, but his head is all 'mecha', so if it's not a robot, it's an android of some kind. The best reason AI will have for keeping some of us alive, is to provide them with headless, locomotive bodies!
 
As a Brucey-bonus, and apart from the green one above, the only other 'styrene ones I have here at the moment, these are modern, marked China and obviously come in different colour-schemes, I don't know how many sculpts there are, but they are more like the previous 'minis' in size.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

E is for Eye-Candy - Rubber Suits

Just a quickie, having a sort the other night and photographed all the minor-sample, droid-mecha-auto-tranformer-battle suit, small bots which have come in over the last few months, these are all soft, PVC-like or eraser-rubber, technically - mixed elastomers!

The three larger erasers we've seen before here, while the two taller blue ones are interesting for being my First marked 'Korea'. The sucker-bot is about half the size of the Lik Be (LB, because it can't realistically be anything else) ones, and the checked-chap in pale blue is a M.U.S.C.L.E from Mattel via-Japan, and the small blue one with the big exposed brain is another Japanese Kaiju type mini.
 
The rest (green, silver, orange and sucker) are Hong Kong's finest, with the green one being an apparent conversion, from the straight pantographing of a parachute toy licensed from He Man, I think, by removing the shroud-line hooks.
 
Added within the hour; the sucker-bot has a full set of M.K. and T-in-a-circle marks for Mei Kee, (also and since around 2016/17 credited to one of two Tai Hing's on Moonbase, I can't remember why) and is actually about 2/3rds of the size of the LB ones, not 1/2 as I said above - I'm shit at judging by eye!
 
There's loads of this mini-stuff in the stash, and one day I'll try to make more sense of it all!

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

T is for Top-up

Another of today's quicker posts, a top-up for-/addition to- the Yolanda tag!

These two came in with a mixed lot a few weeks ago and with one appearing to be Dracula; into the Halloween folder they went! The other seems to be some sort of club-footed Mr. Toad . . . "Poop-poop" . . . with a bionic/android arm - he's from the Toxic Crusader line, covered by Soupie (over on his MXD Blog back in 2012!) and is called Psycho

An equally brief comparison shot with their close relatives, a Monster Wrestler In My Pocket (MWIMP) on the left and one of many Millions of Uscles on the right, also showing that they are smaller than the Super Monsters from Yolanda we've looked at previously.