M is for May Visit - TV, Fantasy and Sci-Fi

So, to the last of the plunder I picked-up in May, and it's all the less than realistic or historical stuff, with a little bit of everything!

 

Another Weetos cereal premium, I seem - over the last few years - to have gone from waiting for the full set in any colour to how many do I have in all colours?! A knock-off MPC and a rocket which might be a missile from a big-box set?

 

Four Phidal 'Busy Book' superheroes, or villains, I already have the second from the left, but without the freezy-fronds, and it was the Archer which kicked that particular odyssey off, back in 2017!

 

Christmas cracker angel, I have quite the orchestra now! Unicorn's were Unique or The Works I think? A Battle Beast sans weapons, often the way, but I do have spares bags of odd action-figure sized accessories, so there will be a mating-up session one day. And a Gem putti/Eros/Cupid cake decoration.

 

Those generic superheroes again, I did find their post the other day, with help from Brian we'd ID'd them one side of The Pond at least as both 'Aircraft Warrior' (JPW I think), or Warrior Super Fighters (as a generic), but - in both cases - sans these little companion figures (here missing the blue one),

 

A vinyl-rubber modern Santa, and an older styrene one, the latter sold as a cake decoration, the newer, probably as part of an eraser set? Soon be Christmas . . . again!

 

Elves or children? Obviously from a board game, and they seem to be moving on tippy-toe, and shushing, with their finger, so maybe they are night-caps, and it's a bedtime game?

 

I thought this was one of the Gormity figures from Ideal we saw, in some shelfies a year or two ago, but they were gunmetal and different poses, so he's still a mystery, and a chunky one!

 

Ben 10 on the left, prbably the green one too, and maybe the chap with a red shirt, I think the last one is Star Wars? While the gezzer in the middle looks like a Disney Princess type knock-off, some kind of price or suitor?

 

Two Mighty Morphin's, Micro Machine on the left, unknown mini on the right.

 

Two of the Hing Fat 'Galaxy Cowboys'. 

 

A mixed lot, with a rack-toy Ninja, Iwako eraser bear, Toy Story's 'Combat Carl' from Phidal, slightly damaged, poured-resin ceremonial bear (needs it's pole-crown replaced), a Munch Bunch banana, and what is, I think, Jess the cat from Postman Pat?

 

UFO with little Aliens, I actually saw these in the store on a more recent visit to Peter, and I can't, for the life of me, recall if they were drowning in slime, or surrounded with candies, but it was one or 'tother? Green or purple, and they are in that stiff but softish synthetic rubber/PVC replacement elastomer, while the saucer is a bog-standard 'styrene. Note they have charm-loops but no chains.

 

Many thanks as always to Peter for most of these, I got the Phidal's and the game pieces from the Toy project I think, he found everything else.

P is for Polymer Plunder Package - Everything Else!

Sadly, all good things come to an end, and this is what didn't end-up in the other folders for whatever reason! Mostly because they were mixed shots, although a fair bit of the TV/Movie stuff ended up here rather than in the sci-fi post, but, well, it's another post!

 

A Phidal dome-headed 'Mysterio' (one of the things I hate about Marvel/DC is that many of the heroes and villains are named by five-year-olds, like 1950's cleaning products, shine'o, cleanrite, rinsit, floorbrite!), a pair of Fortnite figures, the one on the left is a stamper, the one on the right might be from a key-ring, hard to tell.

 

The Archer is The Archer/Clinton Barton/Hawkeye from Marvel? The other three still have question marks, Mobile Man ?. . . Or Cellphone Man!

 

The surface of the previous shot wasn't level and I could only get two of them to stand-up by turning them round! So here they are leaning against the backdrop the tight way round! I think the chap on the left is probably a 'solid' from Kinder, they have many of these hard plastic figures, a subcategory to the dedicated collectors, and this may be a specific character, or part of a set I'm unfamiliar with, and I could try looking him up, or not worry, if you know, you already know, I'll have a session in the future ID'ing all sorts when I label them up!

 

While the red guy might be a stamper or a keyring, or another source altogether, there is a lot of this Fortnite stuff in the queue, both Peter Evans and me have located a fair bit, and it was mostly shot some time ago!

 

An Anime/Manga schoolgirl keyring, the closest match I can find are free images, but named characters with green uniforms do exist, however with green, black or red bows? Her interest here, to us, is in the over-moulding of the different colours of vinyl. She's a relief flat - which should be 2½D, shouldn't it; not quite 2D, not quite 3D!

 

Somehow escaped the military post, becase it was mixed combat and historical, I guess! A cake decoration figure, seen before here, a copy of Airfix AWI, scaled-up, two dark green versions of figures more usually seen in dung/khaki, a Marx 50mm Training Centre figure, and a premium flat ascribed to Bonnie Bilt in the 'States, a Timpo copy who might be Polish, or a BR Moulds piece, and finally a US 'comic flat' also AWI.

 

Disney bits, including two princesses, one of which may be a knock-off, a large LotR Elven archer (presumably Legolas?) from McDonald's, who apparently came without a bow, even though he's clearly firing a bow, due to 'health & safety'? The martial-arts chap on the end will be from Mulan or something similar, I haven't followed the recent releases, just become aware of them through social media or Phidal!

 

The guy on the left here is probably a driver from an omnibus/tram/streetcar model kit, someone like Pyro maybe or a smaller maker, Palmer? Someone like that? Although he's also quite Parker'esque! The heavy chunk of ersatz PVC on the right is from Harry Potter, and is a statue which came to life at one point I think, again, I haven't read or seen any HP stuff, but did get Steven Fry's excellent reading of the first book, one Easter on the Radio, years ago!

 

The small scale here consists mostly of Galoob, from pretty-much all their lines, but there's a Mattel or two in there too (Action Man or Batman villain with pistol, and the firefighter), and a Bluebird Snow White sitting on her own, while a Zizzle Cap'n Jack stalks her!

 

Kinder bits, to go in the Kinder bits zone! I think that monkey may be another from the set which included my CAD-monkey mascot! The helmet is a soft polyethylene knock-off of Lego, while I'm not sure about the large lady, but she's certainly Kinder-like enough for the shot!

 

Also Kinder, but mostly mucked-about with.

They'll go in the future project zone!

 

And bringing us to a close on these posts, the 'Halloween' shot! The two ghosts are also Kinder I think, or one of these sets we looked at a year or two ago, the spotted mushroom is a Go-Go Crazy Bone I think, not so sure on the blue (robo-elephant?) thing, while two earlier novelty flats, probably from 1970's (or earlier) Christmas crackers, finish it all off.

As always, very many thanks to Chris Smith for finding, saving and sending all this stuff to the Blog. It's not just that we get all these posts out of each parcel, with something for everyone and lots to ID, but that in the future, there will be more in specific subject posts, a better picture of everything or anything, and I am very grateful to all those who save or send stuff to/for the Blog/Archive/Collection, especially where, like the probably broken cat flat above, it might otherwise go in the bin, a first sample is a first sample, whatever the condition, so, thank-you very much Chris.

G is for Groping in the Garage!

Nothing exciting, I was pulling stuff out of the garage earlier in the year and found the multi-drawer cabinets I keep all the odds and sods in, by which I mean sewing, boot-polishing, kitchen, plumbing and hardware stuff, but there happen to be six drawers of mostly Micro Machines (in a minute) and a couple with keys and key-rings, which we will look at another day.

Spaceships, mostly Galoob Star Wars stuff, but some Aliens, Star Trek and Soma found their way in as well! AFV's also contain some knock-offs (Kenner Microverse etc.) and I think here I have most of them but one day will consult the Micro Machine Meusuem to identify my gaps and then find them on evilBay (none of them are rare) so I can do complete lines-ups for year/wave, when I do the A-Z entries.

Helicopters, not many, a feature of the hobby refelceted in the few newsprint images I could find to paste on the drawer-front, although the same was true for the spaceships! Civil cars, trucks and buses, the motorcycles - being closer to 20/25mm - were in their own box in the main collection, as were the ATV's, speeder bikes &etc. The lid of the really useful box limited the opening of the drawers!

Ships and 'planes, quite a few planes, not so many ships, but they didn't make many and I think they are all there? There's about three versions of the ICBM-sub, and a rather natty bright-green mini-submersible (visible).

The drawers need work; when I glued the little cuttings on, so I knew which drawer was which, the PVA/wood-glue dried invisible, but time (20+ years) and storage have not been kind to my efforts! The cuttings came from Collector's Gazette back when it was newsprint.

That's it, just . . . an image-clear of stuff to come, sometime!

MMPR is for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

I know so little about the Power Rangers I thought I'd Google it to see if there was anything I should know and "Oh boy!" what a can of worms I dug-up! Homophobia, exploitation of non-unionised actors, racism, a US TV-show using stock-footage of three other Japanese shows crashed together with A-Team like footage shot on the backlots and in the valleys round LA (funny how the 'City of Angels' has so much filth and darkness attached to it), umpteen companies and or marketers involved, several license and character switches/arguments and, yes; it should have been 'morphing' with a 'g'. . . 'cos they morph into Power Rangers!

Anyhoos; the real reason for my Googling - what each colour means/represents and/or whether they have specific names - turned up that there were various people in each colour and one chap had three colours, so we can ignore the whole sorry mess and just look at an overview of the [non-action-] figures out there . . .

My sample in its entirety (actually that's not strictly true, there may be some more, somewhere else?), bottom row are all 20mm oddities, which I assume are from gum-ball/capsule machines, top row will be looked at last in this post and we're about to look at the larger ones but the lone yellow chap in a Ranger'esque bodysuit (far right middle row) is, I think, from a Mega Bloks set - they clip into the gap between four studs?

These were probably also capsule 'prizes' although whether they all came originally in a key-ring casket or not, I don't know. I suspect that - in common with a lot of this stuff - they had as many marketing iterations as could be thought-up for them, in various parts of the world, by various wholesalers!

Full-on 54mm Power Rangers, I need to find a pink one, and a lose blue one would be useful for the full set, produced for Kellogg's Frosties by Crocco (who also supplied other stuff to the rival Weetabix I think?), there is a glow-in-the-dark white one to find as well; the usual likelihood of finding a green one or a white one are unlikely, both are the unloved Power Rangers in Toyland, so it's refreshing to see Crocco doing one of them!

Galoob Micromachines, except, not MM size, closer to Action Fleet/Battle Squads, but without the action figure element. Red's trike is a trike, but Blue and Black both get sidecar combinations which can be converted into plain motorcycles for a bit of variety! I'm missing a blue with both hands up - like Yellow (below).

Black (who was African American!), and the two girls; Yellow (Asian - Red was a Native American!) and pink (her parents probably vote Trump!). Black was the last of the original line-up to leave (citing racism), upon which a member of the production crew suggested he'd never got on with the rest of the cast & crew - despite lasting longest?

Read the whole thing on Wikipedia, it's everything that's wrong with capital, marketing, pop-culture and licensing!

Putty Patrollers -  yeah, well; whatever was happening behind the cameras, it WAS aimed at kids! These are the bad guys. Galoob never got round to green or white Power Rangers.

If anyone can help with ID's on the smallies, that would be appreciated, they may be like Kinder, with little simplified vehicles, but with 7,000+ results for 'Power Rangers Figures' on evilBay I wasn't going to hang-around and try to find out!

S is for Soma's Star Rider Space City

Picked this up a few weeks back going unloved and un-bid, on that there evilBay, a month or so ago, I had no idea it existed and was looking for something-else entirely when I found it. Not really a rack-toy in the traditional sense, but I bet that when it was originally retailed it would have been half the price of a Bluebird Mighty Max or Polly Pocket set, and a quarter of the price of a similar Galoob Star Wars toy?

Folding-up to very small (6"x4¼x1¾-deep - 150x100x44mm), there's enough play-value to keep any kid happy in a caravan on a wet week in Rhyl! These days - of course - it'll either be too-hot to play in a caravan without cooking yourself, or so wet there's a danger the caravan will float away!

Fully unfolded; the gun-tower has shades of 'Hoth', the rest is - dare I suggest - more Flash Gordon than Coruscant! It comes with four of the diminutive little HO-figures I think I've shown before (we'll look at them again in a second) and a small truck the seller (alkim96) kindly added to the lot before sending, but which hadn't been in the sales shots.

And this is it, I think it's based on one of the ex-Giogi/for-Kinder mini fire engines, dated to 1997 (the Soma set) that's quite possible, but only as a vague copy; the Kinder ones were clip-together while this is screwed, following the Micro-Machine principle.

"Plastic smalls" as those with little finesse refer to them! I think we have looked at these before, and I think I've only added the four new ones, all duplicates, this is one of each from my sample, spacemen in grey and 'pilots' in green, each numbered on the base from 1 (on the left, purple and orange) to 12 on the far right.

My whole sample, most of them came mint with their aircraft and or 'spaceships' all of which went to charity about 20-odd years ago, found in generic packaging (I think) in Woolworth's it was only the little Soma on the base, and I think I'm right in saying the fighters came with one figure, the spaceships with two, hence the imbalance.

Also I don't know why I'm missing grey-5, as I should have all of them? You can also see there are some minor colour variations within each sub-tranche, but schemes stay true. Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to show you all of them, but they are not a high priority, with only two found in addition to the new four, over the years.

I have joked (at length) on the assorted panoply of weapons, clothing, equipment and headdresses so won't bore you with all that again, you can see what an eclectic mix of 1990's 'straight-to-video' post-apocalyptic B-movie extras they are! And they make an excellent set of extra bounty-hunters for Galoob's Star Wars Micro-Machines!

S is for Smart Toys

In the recent parcel from Chris Smith was another one of the 25mm versions of these (he sent most of the others previously), and I'd just seen the Smart Toys box tucked-away in the garage, so I dug it out and shot my small sample for a box-ticker, as I think I mentioned them when doing the PVC round-ups last  . . . October?

I encountered them in the mid/late-1990's as HO-gauge compatible sets of civilian farm and construction vehicles, or Micro-machine clones, both with HO figures of the 18/20mm bracket. These are some of the military sets in the two sizes I found them.

Plant, with some of the civilian figures, there is a definite parallel with the contiguous production of New Ray at the time, and there may be some cross-fertilisation, but I suspect just 'copying' for the same market/price-points?

A couple of tractors from the farm range and a blister of aggregate piles, clearly aimed at the model railway layout people, what you would do with that many identical piles is anyone's guess, but the sculpting is so crude and lumpy they could double for potato's or sugar-beet on a farm . . . with a bit of paint!

Every military set in the 20mm range came with a tent bearing a red-cross on one end, so they will be a feature of mixed lots till the dusk of time!

In the meantime the marked figures in a 28/30mm bracket have started turning-up in loose lots, and I've found a few of the vehicles (to look at, not buy) on feebleBay; an odd mix of late Cold-War stuff in approximately 1:72nd scale - German Unimog, French-looking tanker-lorry (ex-civilian?) that kind of thing, I haven't found heavy AFV's yet?

Both samples are of limited pose-range, and one suspects that as a pocket-money/rack-toy line, they weren't expected to gather in 'collected' numbers, but rather to be more impulse/pester-power purchases at checkouts or in corner shops (where I was picking them up back at the time? And rather nicely showing how a smaller size allows for a larger campaign!

The smaller figures are definitely aimed at Galoob Micro Machines customers, the larger ones are not so close to either size of the 'believed to be' Pioneer we looked at last time, so more stand-alone? Obviously the MG fits in a vehicle mount, but is super-glued to the operator's hands!

D is for Droid-hunting on Dewbacks!

As I had the Dewback rider out for the Speeder shots the other day I took a few more to add to some carded-product shots which have been in Picasa for about eight years, the pink sheet I shot them on, is the back cover of the Johillco hollow-cast reprint catalogue, which may be pertinent!

Galoob's larger-scale line of Action Fleet sets had these little Battle Packs with incredibly complicated packaging, I think the point was that by the time you'd fought you way into them you thought you'd got more for your money (they weren't cheap first time round) than a few figures and a small accessory, but who knows!

On his correct mount, he still looks more like a drum-major than a dino-rider! A dewback is a sort of giant tadpole with quadruped perambulation from giant chicken feet, and it's never made clear if they are called dewbacks because they drink or filter dew from the sand in the mornings like grazing cows, or have slimy backs like tadpoles!

The set comes with two bounty hunters from The Empire Strikes Back and the sneak-thief Greedo from Star Wars/A New Hope, who gets his! The Action Fleet figures are really mini 'action figures' with two points of articulation - at the hips and shoulders.

This re-issue from 2002 came with the escape pod the two comedy-droids occupied for their trip to the salubrious planet of Tatooine, I have a lose one, but it's in with the other ships and vehicles, so can wait! Obviously pushing the new name of episode one/IV; was that when the fifth or sixth film came out? Or the first DVD issue? It's all so long, long ago and far, far away now!

Other sand troopers from the MicroMachines line on the left and Action Fleet on the right, with an alternate Boba Fett also an Action Fleet figure, between them. The diminutive dewback rider (on an even more diminutive dewback - scale-wise!) has a proper lance for poking recalcitrant dinosaurs and restores you faith in the imagination behind the story-line! Note also - he has a striped black & white shoulder-board?

Another forced-perspective shot; lost in a sea of pink!

F is for Follow-up - Action Fleet Speeder Bikes

I was wrong to suggest I didn't think they'd never done the Imperial pilot/trooper for the speeder bikes, and further, it seems I need two figures and some - possibly - paler brown Speeder Bikes.

On the back of my Hasbro (2002) Dewback carded set, there is an illustration for a set I don't have, which clearly shows an Imperial pilot and someone; who one assumes is Luke Skywalker, but he doesn't seem to have the black-gloved hand of the other set?

The set I was remembering (earlier Galoob branding), and of which I do have the loose figures too; they are Leia and Luke and come with seemingly darker-brown machines than shown in the previous image, which are the ones we looked at yesterday. The trouble is the previous image is publicity material, and may not reflect what was issued, or even that anything of the sort was issued at all?