D is for Dinorasers - 3 of 3

The third part of this quick round-up/catch-up, is basically a comparison of older and newer sets, but the newer sets have a couple of extra tricks up their sleeves!

We start with a set which is basically a China-marked green set of the old Diener-rasers (geddit!) or the Total premiums from the 1970's, with a cheaper sub-piracy in blue (with a key-ring/charm loop), in the middle, which have come in recently, and that's it for a minute!

 

I also bought this bulk lot on a clearance price, and they are imported by an old favourite, David Halsall (now HTI). Each pack has one flat/block silhouette dinosaur and one semi-realistic erasersaur, except the pack which has two multicoloured extrusion 'slices' - bottom right.

One of which must be near the end of the run and is totally unrecognisable as an anything, leave-alone a dinosaur! Obviously the streams of different-coloured polymer have shoved each-other out of true? The other though, is a quite clear Triceratops.

The fully round ones are also harking back to the early sets from my own childhood, but again have charm-loop/key-ring holes, which - in this material - wouldn't stand up to a day's wear & tear? There are also subtle differences between the older and newer (these will be no earlier than the mid-1980's) versions.

 

This was the sample just as it went to storage in March '22, and includes all past posted stuff and everything in these three and the Iwako post, but not the stuff in last Thursday's post, which is the most recent stuff to come in.

 

And you can judge for yourself how size differs between the sets, erasers have a small-hand rule and don't vary much (beyond that huge blue lump, in the centre, from Flying Tiger, I think?). But there were those sets of little micro-mini's which were everywhere a few years ago!

D is for Dinorasers - 2 of 3

The second part, which is really of two pairs, or a T is for Four! Looking at the full sculpt/more realistic ones first, as a carry-over from part one, then a pair of 'flats' although 'slabs' is a better description!

Loving these anonymous types; two obvious dinosaurs and two, clearly Kaiju monsters! These are large for Erasersaurs, about the same size as the Strawberry ones, but I'll sort the sizes out in the final part.

 

While after the Taiwanese set in the last post, we are off to South Korea to find the Popcorn Fancy factory these left, however long-ago! They have a lot of surface detailing, but it's a bit odd, and was either early CAD-CAM machining, or the masters were 3D-printed when that tech' was, itself, still new, as the texture consists of lots of little rod-like structures, arranged in what appear to be similar to Fibonacci 'spreads'?

Flats, in that they are flat! Waterslide transfers applied to shaped cartouches? Blobs? Clouds! Barely figural, but look below, at least these are trimmed to a vaguely figural-shape! And we've got a couple of mammals, but as the oldest sets of Dinorasers have Woolly Mammoths in their line-up - that's practically tradition!

 

And yeah! These are just blocks with dinosaurs on them, but once you have established a 'side collection', completist'ism clicks-in, and any dinosaur eraser is a good eraser. It's the same with robots and spacemen, where 'flats' and blocks now feature!

D is for Dinorasers - 1 of 3

Clearing an old folder which was going to be one overview, but in the end it sort of made sense to break it up into three parts, so that's what I've done, and this is the first of those parts!

 

These are imported by Strawberry Design & Marketing, I don't know if they are the same as the more commonly encountered Strawberry Group (Saffron Walden, CB postcode), but CO9 is a Colchester postcode, so the suspicion is the same firm moved to larger (or smaller) premises?

 

These are quite large and well detailed for Erasersaus, so they may have been moulded from tools usually used for actual carpet-play dinosaur models? And - as far as I could tell - there were only the four sculpts, in all four colours.

Modern'ish erasers, which I think we've seen before in other branding's (the Asda and Paperchase set), here is the Chinese (?) parent - Shangxin? And new colours, arguably more realistic, the red one excepted!

These are older, and more mono-horned dino's, who would normally have pairs!  A little smaller that the previous set, and simpler, but still some nice surface detailing, no brand but claimed for Taiwan, which is less usual?

 

Very simple and taken from the 'rubber jiggler' set I've sung the nostalgia-praise of here, in the past, as my favourite childhood set, I think this was an eBay shot from years ago, and looking at it, they may be the smudgy silicon-rubber which makes for crap erasers!

These are credited to Rex London who we've previously seen here importing unpowered (or hand-powered!) gliders, so a consistent novelty importer then! Smaller than all the above, but really nice sculpts. More to come!

I is for Indomitable Gauls . . . Still Holding-out!

A funny one this, I have the better known pastel-shade ones from Ola, Americana et al, which were issued on a one-random premium per product item basis over here, but we are actually going to look at the slightly larger knock-off clones seen elsewhere, because that's how the cookie crumbled!

Bi-lingual packaging for export, and they do turn up here, I've now known two dealers have a quantity of these, each time the same contents in every bag of a stock-carton, but different contends in the two lots.

This was the first lot, and I shot them ages ago meaning to do something with the smaller ones when they turned-up, but forgetting to do so when I did quickly sort some of the premiums last summer ('21). Note the header-card states '10' characters, but you get twelve items, however, one of them is a stone!

Close-ups, there are two Asterix models, one standing (bottom left) and one charging into action (top, 2nd from right), the premiums blogs only showed the former when they were covering the sets ten or twelve years ago, but I'm pretty sure I have them both in the smaller colours, and it seems there were various issues of different line-ups. This is all Gauls or Romans with one Egyptian (top right) I think?

The other dealers sets (I again bought 2) are part new, part duplicates, and again the count is twelve, not ten, with a duplicate menhir stone but no Obelix to carry it! We also get the chiefs shield, but only one bearer, and the missing bearer isn't in the others set I've found so-far, so there must be at least a third and fourth packing for the full 36?

I had a few of the older ones here from a Sandown purchase which may have been in the previous 'H is for . . . ' on the subject, if not it's still in the queue! You can see the older set are slightly smaller, but the clones are good, with most of the fine detail carried-over, although the menhir (Fascinating read) is a completely new sculpt with a flat bottom so it can stand in monolithic majesty after delivery!

The size difference hasn't affected the shield-carriers much and a non-matching pair (Euro-premium on the right) seem to hold it level, for the smaller Dogmatix to occupy the chief's position!

Getafix (by far the best of the anglicised names, and better than the original Panoramix in my opinion!) gets a little collar, set into the caldron bubbles, to hold his stirrer, which seems a little excessive to me! These seem to be the same figures also issued in Peru, whether the tool stopped on the way to Taiwan, or is slowly working it's way back here I don’t know!

Funny; I have a shed load of these loose, all the same blue, all the same 17 sculpts, and offered a load to a chap who was making/painting an army of them on Facebook, free, gratis, nothing asked in return, his choice and I would have swallowed the postage but he managed to turn them down with a brusqueness verging on downright rudeness! Obviously he'd taken sides in other matters, and managed not to be insultingly rude (we've ever met and I've never harmed him), while managing to be rude enough! His loss!

T is for Teeny-Tiny Taiwanese Trucks, Tanks and Tippers!

I picked these up a few weeks ago, as a cheapie on that there evilBay, I don't know anything about them, and the only clue is a small, uneven 'TAIWAN' on the underside of each vehicle/a single component.

I suspect they are [earlyish?] examples of what the Japanese call Gashepon, or vending-machine toys, but - obviously - Taiwanese in origin, and as we will see, very much 'box scale' and simplified, but charming for that. They are also quite idiosyncratic, so we'll start with the easy one!

It's basically a 6x6 Pinzguaer high mobility all-terrain vehicle/artillery tractor, or similar militarised 'mini-van' type vehicle, and comes in at around the 1:90th mark, which would make it an additional asset to a Roco or Roscopf army! It's even in a similar olive-drab colour, and consists of five parts; three clip-in wheels and two body-halves.

The Gepard-decorated box actually contains a late-mark (1A5?) Leopard MBT with a pair of carpet wheels for perambulation. As the build-instructions are for the same, I don't know why they went with a Gepard SPAAG for the artwork? But I did say the set was idiosyncratic!

An idiosyncrasy which continues with this pair, where each has the other's exploded construction view on the back of the box! The heavy ore-truck was lacking a pair of wheels, but they are the same mouldings as the 'Pinzgauer' so I nicked a pair of them for the shots, while the bulldozer will need tracks made-up, which I will do one day from old inner-tube and cyclist's rubber cement.

The final two are a really rather good jeep (basic wheels mind!) and what is best described as a simplified Stridsvagn 103 'S-Tank', but it could just as easily be an attempt at a Scorpion CVRT! It comes from the box with a Tiger I as artwork! You can see the underside is the same as the Leopard's.

The whole line-up, with the dump-truck retaining the spare wheels! The boxes shout 1970's at you, but at least two of the vehicles depicted are screaming 1990's, so your guess is as good as mine as to when/where these first appeared, and I suspect - from the limited number of duplicated parts - there are more to the full range.

M is for Merry Festive Eraser Flats

This post morphed out of nowhere, I found two of them among Mum's things the other day, and was putting them in an H is For... folder of similar finds, when I remembered I had something along the same lines in the forthcoming Dinoraser follow-up/update folder, so I threw them together for a quick festive offering!

The Erasersaurs, I don't know if he's a known character (U.S. TV?) or a generic cartoony thing, maybe tied-in to someone's Christmas card line? But he looks friendly enough and Christmas fun is clearly the name of the game, a bit mawkish for me in the normal course of events, but now there's a Dinoraser 'zone' they had to go in there!

These Halsall imported erasers must have been a long-forgotten stocking present, and I suspect they were being held until Mum found something similar for the other boy, she was always scrupulously fair in the packing of the stocking, or I should say - ensured Santa was scrupulously fair!

They have reacted with either and/or both the inner (a kind of cling-film) and the outer packaging (a cellulose bag), and it's hard to tell if they were once rubber, or candy, but from A) the fact that Redfields still exists as one of those over-priced "end-destination leisure-facility" garden centres, and B) there's no ingredients list, I guess they were pencil-rubbers originally, but they are now rock-hard and covered in a sweat which make them look suspiciously like edible icing!

W is for Wooden Warriors

I wonder (from the colour of the trousers more than anything else) if these weren't originally intended for, or commissioned by, someone in the Danish tourist industry? However I think I bought them over here, but to be honest I can't really remember when or where they came-in to the collection, just that they probably pre-date my visits to Herne in the 2010's, and wouldn't have been an eBay purchase?

The box is marked 'Taiwan' and nothing else, while it looks like a couple of the figures have 'Foreign' on the base but they are quite tight to the card sides of their shrink-wrapped tray, so that's not clear!

The blue collars and cuffs also point to Denmark rather than Britain and while other countries retain similar bear-skin headdressed ceremonial troops, I can only think of some in white uniforms or the Danes alternate dark (winter dress?) jackets. Also the cross belts are a bit of a giveaway!

A quick comparison with the closest similar figures; on the left is a current wooden guardsman with card arms, I've seen them being sold on feebleBay as cake decorations, but more commonly they are sold by crafters as doll's house's playroom toy soldiers.

The figure to the right is the relatively common Ertzgibirge figure, who would match the Taiwanese ones if they didn't have those large plinth bases! he usually comes one or two figures per little wooden village.

Evidence!

Danish tourist souvenirs?

A is for Amorces - I Need'em for Mah'Forces!

The other (see yesterday's post) great "Take it outside before one of you blinds the other" toy was the cap-firing rocket-bomb, and while I don't have as many as I'd like; or as many as I'd like if money were no object, I have a few, and that's what we're looking at now.

The metal ones - were a common pocket-money thing; on the way home from school, pop-in to the village for milk and Chelsea-buns, receive a quick issue of pocket-money (6d) and grab a cap-bomb from Webb's the Newsagents! The commonest design was the one second from the left. I vaguely recall they came in some of the less reverent Christmas crackers as well?

The one on the far left is a modern one, sourced in Taiwan, which I grabbed with a newspaper (at the same time as-, not a freebie from the publisher!) a few years ago - Henbrandt, Play Write, someone like that?

Reading to the right, the middle one is a more ornate version of the common design (unfortunately with broken tail fins) which I suspect is earlier (1950's), while above them is an alternate head for which I have no body, so I don't know how it differed from the other two? Another variation is the little cockpit sculpted on one side (of the second one) to make it a 'plane rather than a rocket/bomb

12th May - Duh! Missed the actual bomb! Some of you will have known it as the cap-firing cargo from the Dinky Toys die-cast Junker's 87 'Stuka', dive-bomber! If you didn't recognise it . . . that's what it is, utilising the mechanism of the Britains shell . . . I had meant to say as I segued seamlessly to the next paragraph!

Second from the right is the Britains shell from the big howitzer, which uses the same low-tech, to provide a satisfying crack upon landing among the enemy lines. The final item seems to be some kind of anvil for similar ammunition; it came with a load of plastic and metal shells and bombs, but I don't know anything else about it and it could as easily be a crude milk-churn or a washing-machine component!

The plastic ones - I've only ever seen one of the ornate ones on the left so it was lucky I was there to see it and buy it, or did someone donate it? But somewhere, sometime, there were shop-stock boxes full of them, probably in three or four colors!

The blue one is a common-ish design, still around, but not so common with the brass (or more likely phospher-bronze) anvil on the nose. The yellow chap with an orange nose is South American, and clearly comes with the instruction to evacuate capsule before detonation!

The final pair are the common 'pocket-money' bombs of my childhood, they came in various sizes, and vaguely equate to WWI (blue nose) and WWII (red nose) 'standard' bomb shapes.

The carded ones - The Argentine version comes with an atmospheric card, suggesting it's about to land next to the 'Spacex' equipment in the crater (strangely - or; ironically - the old sci-fi landing system is now being employed by Musk's reusable launch-vehicles!), while to its right a card with both common designs in two sizes.

In the right hand image three littlies in a small header-carded bag; they're not 'triple-shot', but rather a trio (or triplet!) of single-shots; pedantry - I know!

They sit next to a very different beast - if you really want to "have an eye out", a good way to go about it is with a projectile of high-impact polyethylene, fired under a jet of air-pressure!

It's basically a hand-held pop-gun in the shape of a rocket-bomb! A wooden piston is pulled-back and thrust forward, forcing the red-end to fly off, at speed, with a pop-sound! I have a couple of khaki-plastic nose-cones in one of the 'odds bags', similar but not quite the same, which may be off an 'army' version of this toy.

This one is a bit of a mystery - clearly it's styled in a rocket-bomb fashion, but the firing pin is at the 'blunt' back and has no spring, plate or anvil, while the hole in the blue plastic cap suggests that this was somehow fired from a larger object (space gun?).

The paper cap being placed between the flat-end of the pin and the hole in the cap, fired by a trigger-pin in the missing object, through the hole? At the same time it was - presumably - shot-off, as a rocket, to land quietly? Anyone recognise it?

Ammo - The early ones were the 'Standard' caps as mentioned on the carded set above, pretty-much predating my childhood, there were still a few around, but with the coming of realistic feed-mechanisms in the die-cast output of people like the UK's Lone Star or Crescent , Rendondo 'pam-pam's from Spain and Italy's Edison the caps were placed on reels, and you had to carefully tare one off to place it in an older weapon, or single-shot toy such as these rockets/bombs.

By the 1980's it was mostly the plastic caps either in daisy-wheels as above or in strips as here, both of which are still around, although they could be used with some of the older bombs, by placing them over the tips of the firing-pins, the pin needing to be of a gauge which fitted tightly-enough to hold the cap in 'flight'!

You can also stack the paper ones for a bigger bang, but even as kids we quickly learnt that too many and they cushioned each-other and failed to go off (or flew, unburnt, out the side like confetti), while more than three tended to do damage to the more delicate bits (the two posts between nose and neck of the head-piece), ruining your new toy!

This post shows one of the other cap-bombs in the collection, I think there may be a couple of others with that one, but I haven't got round to combining them with the garage lot (this post) yet, so - another visit in a year or two? It also shows a Hong Kong version of yesterday's rocket launchers.

DY is for Dah Yang

Not often we have bone fide Taiwanese stuff on the Blog, I'm sure some slips by under the 'generic' label as Hong Kong/China, but Taiwan (whatever Beijing thinks) is quite a different place, and these are a lot of fun!

Equally - not often we have ray guns on the Blog, but it has happened before, although I won't know until I publish whether I tagged them as such? Also - do you think the gun is based on the artwork (nicked from a comic, annual or pulp paperback), rather than the artwork reflecting the toy? It's all a bit Dan Dare or Buck Rogers!

Dah Yang; new to me. The gun has a double mechanism of cap-firing and dart-firing and looks to be more modern that the card-art would suggest? This is a 'proper' ray-gun, with the dish-thing that makes it really lethal, the stacked-disc ones are all show and no firepower, I read it in Ray-guns & Ammo Monthly!

They make handguns too! Not only does this one have stacked-discs, but it's got the in-line tube/ring things too; Ray-guns & Ammo Monthly has very little good to say about them! But it's a repeater, and in enclosed spaces?

Just imagine; if only we could get every teacher, shopkeeper and bus driver to have their own - legally held - ray-gun, how safe the world would be?

M is for Minty'mals

Editing the Land Rover reminded me I was going to post these two, and as the 'Rover post was a bit sparse, I thought I'd chuck these up here as a sort of 'Bonus Post'!

I think these are from Dave Scrivener's collection, in a roundabout way, purely from where I found them and the reason I bought them is simply - they are near mint. An oft misused word, and the paint isn't perfect on the Ant Eater, but these Cherilea animals are notorious for shedding their paint if you so much as look at them wrong, so to find these in such condition is a definite feather in one's cap - and; (Vichy!) that's not me being big-headed, that's me stating a fact and proving it by sharing them with everyone else!

The Otter, as this is smaller than the one I'm more used to seeing I'm guessing (not assuming!) it's from the hollow-cast sculpt, and would be therefore; the earlier, the more common one is much Larger, but I don't know for sure.

Again this is smaller than others I've seen, as a matter of fact this is the first time I've seen either of them in this size. Possibly not the best rendition of a South American ant-eater; it looks more like a hyena with a long nose and very furry tail!

Who remembers David Attenborough standing next to one (anteater, not hyena) and saying something along the lines of "the reason I can stand so close to this animal is that is eye-sight is not very good and it's nearly deaf, so as long as I stay down-wind of it, I can get very close" at which point; as if on cue, the animal turned and peered at the cameraman (clearly up-wind) and flicked it's tongue like a snake, as if to say "...but I can smell you!"

Monday 27th - Looks like they are actually Hillco? Cherilea did a larger Otter, but it must have been a scaled-up piracy or after they obtained Hill's intellectual property?

Because the above is a bit brief, I've tacked this on as an afterthought. Does anyone know why this particular PVC model elephant, marked 'MADE IN TAIWAN' is so blinking common? I think I have a few other animals with a Taiwan-mark somewhere in storage (one of this, one of that), but I've picked up six of these without trying in the last few years, and have a bag-full in the storage unit.

Literally every mixed junk-lot of animals and/or small-scale stuff you see on feebleBay seems to have one, every rummage tray at shows, every animal bag in charity-shops, it's as if there's a secret never-ending supply of them somewhere.

It's not Corgi (nor Dinky or Matchbox), yet at some point was issued somewhere in large numbers. I wondered if it was the Arco pair until we blogged that a year ago, I'm now wondering if it was a popular board-game - long since forgotten - some Tarzan or Daktari-related TV Tie-in? If anyone knows I'd be interested.

And it's perfect for smaller Asian (or the mythical Atlas Mountain) war elephants in 1:76th scale!

D is for Disneykins

We looked at the Marx Disneykins not that long ago within the context of the European bubble-gum premiums taken from the Heimo moulds and one day I'll post more of the lose and individual boxed ones, but having been busy with other stuff today I thought I'd chuck this up as one of the old 'lazy posts'...

I think the date is 1971 (MCMLXXI?) which makes it quite a late set and interestingly states that it is made in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Among others I have the resistance fighters with both markings, but had always assumed the mould had moved mid-production, this set would seem to be suggesting that there were several sets of moulds?

Not the complete set of Disneykins, but the main - and therefore; most popular - characters in a hard styrene plastic.