D is for Donations - Peter - Animals

The sorting of the animals is going to be one of the bigger tasks, one day, the hobby is probably bigger than Toy Soldiers, certainly, it supports several vigorous forums, and there are as many makers, if not more, while mine are rather in an anonymised heap within the bigger stash, but they keep coming in, and here's some more!

 

A nice cat, which looks like it might be an accessory from a non-animal set of some kind, the lizard is from the little small-scale, rack-toy play sets from Toy Major/Ackerman, while the bear is both a bit crude and a bit unusual!

 

A whole sub-genre are this smallish scale, softish vinyl sets from toobs, tubs or bags, which are sort of 35/40mm compatible, but really 'bag-scale' or unit scale, and while some are marked, other's easy to ID, many sets are to be found on FeeBay-Amazon-Alibaba, as generics or under obviously phantom brands. These seem to go together, but a couple of them are questionable. Nice, different, cactus!

 

Two generic rack toys, over-stickered to Toys As Fun, which I could have saved for Rack Toy Month, but I think there's plenty for then, and this is the next size up, again, a bit unit-scale (elephant undersized, pig oversized), but mid-sized animals are coming out as 54mm-compatible, which is useful for dioramas and vignettes . . . big cat stalking a patrol, that kind of thing!

 

A couple of proper antiques, I love these! The pressed-wood farmer seems to match the common girl feeding chickens we've seen here before, in point of fact, she or her chickens, turn up so often she must have been from a popular set, for several years, but this chap I've not seen before. Although the blue paint has suffered badly, the other colours remain in sufficient quantity to give a good idea of what he looked like new!

 

While the horse in tin-plate might be a cigarette premium, while we, here in the UK, had cards and silks, as giveaways, some brands on the continent had tin-plate flats, prior to replacing them with the numerous plastic flats used as premiums with other products too. You fold the base out, after the item has been slid out of the packet of cigarettes.

 

From a more recent pick-up in London is another Toy Major lizard (used as a dragon/monster/dinosaur in both the cavemen and medieval sets), two tree frogs and a very daft-looking sauropod!

 

Some larger animals, I think a couple were Triple-A marked, and the green pony is from the Tupperware interactive building blocks, we looked at here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2017/11/g-is-for-great-grey-green-greasy.html

 

Where they were used as, removable, playable rattles, in opaque blocks, unlike the transparent ones from Airfix and others.

 

A large lump of dense vinyl, makes a rather nice Hippo', and these are starting to grow as a side collection, purely by accident, and we did look at a load in a lazy post a while ago!

 

This is from PMS, and I ummed-and-arrred over whether or not to open it, in the end I though I had to, or I wouldn't know what I was dealing with, and was quite suprised to find a gold mokey!

 

I don't know wheather it's a 'chase' figure, or if the whole range is finished in a similar fashion, nor do I know how many there are as there;s no flyer/leaflette . . . probably a £1-shop thing, and therefore stripped to the minimum on unit-price!

 

Another group of - probably - related small vinyls - wild!

 

And another - domestic!

 

Mentioned the other day I think, and seen with a few others a while back, oh yeah, it was the post on mixed shots, a week or so ago. Anyway, here's the farm one, courtesy of Peter, and these sets annoy me, nice animals in a vague scale, so why add huge dogs and ginormous poultry! They haven't even got the excuse of box-scale, because there's plenty of room occupied by the plastic end-filler!? I know, it's a cost thing!

 

Again, many thanks to Peter for all these, they're not just grist to the mill, but also 'bricks in the wall', gaps filled in the archive.

I is for It's Another One!

Peter Evans sent us a football set! No, not another take on the large set we've looked at about five times now, or more, and no, not the smaller version, which, as a complete set, remain elusive, but a wholly new set, with some of the elements of the other two!

 

 

How he found them, in a generic shipping bag, of the crinkly, cellulose-something variety! Two goals, cupping (or 'netting'! I'll get me coat!) the players, as they do in the bags of the larger set.

 

 

Three-a-side, with a referee, smaller than the other two sets, around 40mm, with new poses, but the same hard polystyrene material, and separate green-plastic bases, although loose with these, glued-on in the case of the previously seen sets.

Detail on the figures is poor, but it just shows - if you look around, there's still lots of this stuff out there, I know cake decorations or novelty figures aren't everyone's cup of tea, and they certainly aren't 'toy' or 'model' soldiers, but it's out there!

There are two cups, so, in these politically-correct times -  both players can win!

 

A bit of a rushed post - thanks to Peter for the set!

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.

A is for Animated Animals in Amniotic Afterbirth!

I may be over-egging it slightly, but it's still a rather odd thing for anyone to think might make a toy, even a toy for older kids, as one presumes these were aimed at? They literally come in a rubber amniotic sack!

 

Made of stretchy-rubber, probably a silicon, and various colours, designed to produce a sort of limited-colour rainbow effect, with the 'smoked' bicolour eggs, which are a hard propylene, or flexible hybrid-styrene, the amniotic sack IS what constitutes the afterbirth, isn't it, I'm not making this shit up?

 

These were a charity-shop purchase back in 2018, who have been sitting in Picasa while I tried to find an angle on them, but I'm not sure if I have, really? Anyway, we're going to run through them quickly as a box-ticker!

 

There are two parallel lines, one more Dinosaur recognisable, the other more Monster'ish, and both had five models in the first tranche, although I don't know if there was a second wave, and they were issued by Canadian Mega Brands (of Mega Bloks), and may have been designed to enhance that companies little Lego-like 'minis', which at the time (2006) included fantasy stuff, and - if memory serves - rather overblown Vikings.

 

Plasma Dinosaurs

 

The two Dino'types, a steggi' and a tricerah', they are well-made and decorated for what they are - pocket-money'ish, plug-together fantasy toys. Made of a dense but softish PVC substitute, and dry-brush weathered over a two-colour, basic scheme.

 

They plug together from seven parts, remarkably like the Blue Box Gormiti we saw here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2014/03/n-is-for-new-finds-pt4-sci-fi-and.html

 

And may well be manufactured in one of the Tai Sang plants, for Mega, who knows, they are certainly the same material, as well as having the same plug-in construction?

 

An eighth part takes the two dinosaurs off to the realms of pure fantasy, being sets of wings which plug-onto the back, at the shoulder joint area. But to get the wings you have to have the full-on dragon-monsters too!

 

Plasma Dragons

 

Construction of the two monsters is similar, and if you studied the scanned ephemera on the way down the post, you'll see the idea is to collect all ten, and then twin them; one each, dino'monster, with it's dedicated full-fantasy monster, to create even larger monsters, through mix-and-match of the various parts!

They all came with a collecting card too, and I'm sure if I dug deeper, I'd find there's more to them, I have a tin of Orks (Tolkien not Kremlin) somewhere (their own tin, illustrated like the paperwork here), from Mega Bloks, which are far more adult-oriented toy figures, than even the current Lego stuff, yet they are similar age (20-odd years old, or thereabouts), and there may have been gaming elements or rules, to, or between the two lines, in an attempt to muscle-in on the Nottingham Mafia's action, but I don't know?

T is for The Last of the Balls!

For now! Somewhere I have a tub of conventional Bouncy-, Super-, rubber-, Jet-balls, which include a marked Wham-O original, so they will need a box tick, one day, but for now, as a prop to the solid inclusion-balls, here are a few other novelty balls out there now, or recently.

There is a useful thread on the STS animal-collectors forum, which adds a distinctly European flavour to the stuff posted here in the last few days, and both more brands, and a couple of originators, vis-à-vis sculpts, or even product-mouldings;

 

https://sts-forum.forumieren.de/t25502-does-anyone-collect-animal-bouncy-balls?highlight=balls

 

You will probably need to sign-up, but it's well worth it. As an addendum to what's been said/shown there, the above, from a recent Bullyland catalogue shows, not only a range of teeny-tiny animals, but some of them in key-ring balls! I suspect the balls might be liquid filled, with the vignette free-floating?

 

As these babes are! Bought in the small-chain Bargain Buys, a few years ago now (2021), and they are more squishy than bouncy, filled with an inert liquid filling (probably a mix of glycerine, water and a small amount of bleach - to prevent mould/fogging), along with the figure and a pinch of glitter.

 

Something in it, has, nevertheless, reacted with one of the two purple misses, to cover her in a calcium-like deposit? Note also, the arse-injected ball-bearings, utilised to keep their heads up, in a liquid of similar density/specific gravity!

 

I'm not sure if these are liquid-filled, or solids, and the shading on the two at the back (green and orange) would suggest the latter, but I have a feeling that might be part of a bicoloured case, with free-floating contents? Find Hope are probably an Ali Baba or Amazon type phantom brand (image downloaded/obtained in 2005); there's nothing else on the Internet about them!

 

Back to Ravensden for an quick overview of the other stuff out there, and we've seen similar stuff in Show Reports from Deluxebase, Funrise, HGL, House of Marbles, HTI, Huggables, Kandytoys, Keycraft, Kidzone, Playwrite, PMS, Tobar and similar, and if we haven't, it's because they are still in the queue!

 

Ooshies, cushies, squishies, squeezies, executive stress-relief balls, the solid inclusion balls we've been looking at here, recently, funny face balls, odd-bouncing egg-balls, liquid-filled (the eyes are particularly disturbing!) and 'tactile' balls are all out there, I don't collect them, it's the inclusion-balls which brought the subject of novelty balls to the blog!

 

Which brings us to the end of this box-ticking exercise, but I think it's going to lead into another mini-season of Capsule Toys, as it's a few years since we did an overview of the non-Kinder stuff, with help from Brian B, and there's a load more in the queue now, including more images from New York.

 

And, yes, I know, I should be finishing the HO railway figure overview, from two years (three Christmases) ago, and which also has stuff from Brian, Jon Attwood and Chris in it, about ten folders, sat there waiting, and which should make about 12-posts, and an intro-page, and I know I should be doing, getting, finishing, finding . . . the reason you don't get endless eBay scrapings here, like you do at Bushy's, is because when I say there's a thousand posts in the queue, there's a thousand posts in the queue, or, at least, a thousand folders!

 

Take that image above, for instance, downloaded in 2005? I didn't have a computer in 2005! But I did have a dongle (524MB's!), I downloaded stuff to, on/from other peoples computers, so I may have found that image, browsing the coin-operated Internet terminals at Heathrow or Gatwick (one pound for five-minutes if I recall correctly?), while waiting for a client's delayed flight, or someone like John Begg or Paul Morehead might have found it, and emailed it to me, because I was known for the small-scale stuff?

 

We'll get there in the end! Afterbirth eggs next! No, seriously! But, machine-gun follow-up, first!

M is for More Balls - Bouncy Balls!

A bit of an image dump today, as we roll-up, on the balls! The first tranche are quite low-res, but illustrate a few points about how this stuff reaches the stores, while the others just show what's out there, often in the few remaining, smaller, independent Toy Shops, often in smarter towns (Farnham!) or the up-market or 'nice'  areas of larger conurbations. These are also exactly the kind of novelty you'll find in Gift Shops and Garden Centres.

 

I can't remember the company's name, but this was an online, trade catalogue for one of the Chinese factories, I think they might have been called Superball, rather unimaginatively, but here we have Wild Animals on the left, Farm/Domestic on the right.

 

Guinea Pigs & Otters!

 

Panda's and Dinosaurs, and, not those carried by Keycraft Global.

 

On the left Fishes, with a few cetaceans and penguins mixed in, on the right the set which Henbrandt obviously carried all those years ago, with plain, 'slush' and iceberg balls, and a crab?

 

While these last two are larger mixes, with fish predominating in the first set, and turtles/crabs (bottom feaders, shore/beach dwellers?) the second, but with cetaceans, sharks, fish and the odd polar animal mixed in. The point being that you (Henbrandt, Keycraft, Playwrite, Ravensden . . . whoever) go to the Chinese manufacture, and get a tailored selection, which suits the needs of your perceived customer base, budget or forecast trends.

 

The Playwrite (WH Corneilius - WHC/Success) catalogue from a similar time (2006), showing that they were carrying animal faces and insects, in addition to the more obvious stuff, as seen above. This, and the next two images, should enlarge properly.

 

Ravensden catalogue from the same era (2010's/20-teens), also has a full range of subjects, including some familiar looking ones, either from the recent, previous posts, or from the trade images above. And between them all, there must be a couple-of-hundred of these incredibly small sculpts, most of which are quite well done, and nicely decorated, down to species/subspecies identification, in some cases.

It's worth noting most of the above are either clear/tinted-transparent balls, or the bi-coloured, half-opaque ones, there are few of the background discs which were a feature of most of the Henbrandt imports. There are a few more in the last post of this series.