N is for Not u'Nuthurrr One!

Oh yeah! Winging its way to me just before I went off to work yesterday . . . no, it had been there for a while, but I was ill the day before, and a bit slow yesterday! However, I promised to post it by last night, only to realise I couldn't extract the image from a PDF, Doh! So a bit late, but, in case anyone hasn't seen it yet (it's been on John's, Stads' and PW's Blogs already!) here's notification of . . .

 

. . . the 41st year of Plastic Warrior'ing! Some of you may notice it's slipped another couple of weeks in the calendar, but if you're one of those whose spent out at Sandown Park in May (guilty as a Perp in Mega City One, m'lud), you'll now have seven or eight weeks to save-up for Twickenham's polymer-fest . . . Bargain!

 

Full details here, I'll try to post something similar closer to the even, as will Brian Carrick, I'm sure. 

 

4th July? That rings a bell? . . . Hummmm, 4th July . . . oh yeah! Battle of Klushino, upstart Russia taught a lesson by the Poles in 1610, that'll be something to commemorate! See you there!

N is for Nearly the Nativity!

It's the 20th! I don't know where that month went in such a hurry, but it did! I haven't shot any Nativity sets this year, nor have we had a chance to clear any of the unused stuff from last year, or the years before, all sitting down the bottom of Picasa at 1968! But, to prevent anything else joining them, there are still a few bits from this year to get up here, and this is Brian's Nativity finds in a store in New York.

 

The Archangel Gabriel getting busy with Satan! Two sizes.

 

The family shot, then they were off to Egypt as asylum-seeking refugee migrants!

 

OK, got it!

 

But did they pay?

 

13 pieces is a fair count, and beautifully presented in gold silk!

 

Quite a few styles, from the super realistic miniatures through to the mawkishly sentimental cartoonish baby-faced stuff, but nice that you can 'pick and mix' off the shelf, or slowly add items, year to year. Mostly resin, but it looks like some may be china? Many thanks to Brian as always, for sending these into the Blog.

N is for No Goldilocks . . .

. . . and there's four of them! This year's bears; I tried to be careful, but in the end I found there were four more waiting to be hung, next time the tree comes out. Actually I've seen a lot of bears this year, so I have been quite restrained, they are making a comeback, although the big trend this year has been mushrooms. I have seen dozens upon dozens of mushrooms, in all styles and materials, everywhere I've been. There are no mushrooms on the family tree, and I'm not about to start adding them!

 

I got this one a couple of months ago, so long ago, in fact, he got shot twice! If you remember we had a plain'ish, gold'ish bear with tartan scarf last year (or the year before?), so I thought they' balance each other, on opposite sides of the tree! Pretty sure it was Gisela Graham?

 

But the tree gets turned twice each cycle, and is actually dressed in thirds, so this makes far more sense! Or at least that's the justification . . . TK Maxx for this chap, and he's a proper blown-glass, a bit on the larger side.

 

Then I found these smaller ones from Decoris in the Haskins garden centre near Forest Lodge, and couldn't leave them on the hook, although I guess, as a respectable couple, they will have to be hung close-together!

That's the Bears, this year! And I forgot the drummer we've already seen, so that's another five!

N is for November's Sandown Park - Wild West, Animals and Odds

Winding-up the Sandown purchases from a month ago now, and it's mostly animals, and the Wild West, with a few odds & sods, cartoon, TV-Movie stuff and the like, to look at this time.

 

I have two beliefs about this set (which was a gift from John Begg, I think), one is that it's from the same series as the #445 Mobile Task Force, and Space Explorer sets issued by Gordy, Woolbro and others, this being one 'sock' instead of two, and a generic issue with no branding-overprint. The other is that we were bought a set each from Webb's the Newsagent, in Hartley Wintney, by Mum, one wet weekend, in the holidays!

 

There was a two-sock Fort Cheyenne under the 445-code, but that had a version of the fort, and different figures/horses, so this may be a lookie-likey , and leaves the first belief questionable for now, the second belief is 100%, I well-remember the colour samples, and trying to wiggle the horses hooves into the carpet fibres to keep them standing up!

 

I bought a second pirate set from the same chap as last time, and it's already been opened and shot for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so a couple of months after the last one, and there are already two folders ready for next year!

 

A  mix of HK smallies, including several sub-piracies of the 2nd version knights, in red, I'd had a few yellow ones but I think these are new, usually you find both the Giant originals and the copies in silver or black. They probably belong on the horses to the right, but this is how they came!

 

Someone tried to 'mend' a broken tail, by rolling a scrap of faux-suede up, very tight, setting it alight, and stuffing it up the horse's jacksie! Given how common these are, and how many would come in even a small 6d set, that was a hell of an effort! Probably a 'favourite' horse? Kids are a bit like that, you can have fifteen white horses in the bag, but if one's slightly grey and becomes your favourite, you'll move Heaven & Earth to keep in going!

A rather tatty 2nd generation copy of one of the Hong Kong dogs we looked at in a couple of round-up posts a year or two ago, and the smallest King Kong in the world! Certainly the smallest I've seen, who wasn't moulded into a resin Empire State Building keepsake!

 

Probably a 1d-1¢, gum-ball capsule prize or Christmas cracker novelty, it really is tiny, less than 20mm! In all other respects it's the same as all other HK gorillas; soft polyethylene, with a basic MADE IN HONG KONG mark.

 

A sample of broken Cherilea dinosaurs, which Adrian gave me from his bits box. Useful nevertheless, against colour variations, or even to combine with others into dodgy Dr. Moreau subjects at a later date? I mean they are so rare these days, due entirely to their brittleness, that some are better than none, and they will be added to a bigger sample with some better ones we have seen here, previously, at Small Scale World.

 

Two Britains copies, a rather nice Hong Kong Herakd clone, from Hong Kong! And a damaged sub-scale rendition of the war-dancing Swoppet, also from the colony of intellectual property crime!

 

Kinder, all 1980's, I think. If you were to 'age' Kinder like comic-fans age their stuff, these would be 'silver age'! The head and hat, is from a slightly different set to the complete figure, I think, while the fire-appliance with two mini plug-in firefighters was late 80's, and I actually kept a few of the tractors at the time, so there's a tub of these to add-to, or cannibalise from, to make whole examples.

 

Damaged guard from Cherilea's executioner set, another Invicta dinosaur, a couple of Esci Americans and a partial pig, in the style of the Xandria key-rings, but all 'ethylene, and probably from another source?

 

Four 'funnimals', and all probbaly Holly rather than Lik Be, certainly the llama-like and squirel-thing come in a set with the known Holly guitar-turtle, while the cow was issued by Mail-Order outfit Colonial Studios, with a set of otherwise realistic (Briatins copies) farm animals.

 

This is just marked Hong Kong, but is not a bad rendition of Disney's Pluto, and holds-up against the Marx, Heimo, and early-Schleich stuff of the 1970's, a lump of stable-PVC, I guess the ring is the remnants of a key-chain?

 

More of the cartoon mini-animals often credited to Kinder, but which predate Kinder by a decade or two, and were issued as carded 'families', as gum-ball machine prizes and through other such novelty avenues. Kinder would issue similar 'hard plastics' in the 1980's, but usually larger models.

 

UK Cereal premiums, haveing other outlets elsewhere, here they were all cereal, with two jig-toys, three of the Aristocat figures and a Brian the Snail from the Magic Roundabout, and while we now know Brian could have been a Wavyline promotional, I think in this shade of blue, he might be a European ice-cream premium.

 

I think we might have the Little Baby Jesus (or Moses?) in red here, a rather tatty Marx Snow White (from Swansea?) and a lovely survivor of Japanese blow-moulded lightness, in the probable 'styrene copy of an earlier celluloid Santa Claus.

N is for November's Sandown Park - Erasers

And not just any old erasers, but that the bulk of them are probably Diener Industries, one way or another, the other factor being that they are also French premiums, but may, due to petroleum, also be British! I picked these up a few at a time, every time I passed the chap's stall, and wish now I'd hoovered up the last few, but they were mostly duplicates, I think!

 

These are probably not Diener, as they are proper eraser-rubber, but I thought they'd go very well with the Lik Be (that's LB of course!) and Holly anthropomorphic musicians, in a future comparison post / battle of the animal bands! They are also pencil-tops.

 

These are all clearly marked Diener Ind., with a '(C)' mark, and are a mix of generics, Disney, cute and a Fontanini clown-sculpt knock-off, along with an Easter basket of bunnies! And they may well belong to several sets, or even some of the sets below, as explained as we go.

 

These are unmarked, but are manufactured in the same smudgy silicon-rubber of all Diener's 'erasers', which were always shit erasers, as they just smudged pencil around the page, leaving everything looking awful! Again, they could be from more than one set, but the paint ties them into the premiums below. The red kitten is a slightly different sculpt to the yellow one in the previous shots - head moved to ease undercuts?

I can't work out if this is supposed to be some kind of anthropomorphic Viking, or a French TV character? Nor is it clear if it's damaged, poorly fettled or had a charm/key-ring loop removed?

 

These two, both Disney, are marked Esso and Disney Prod., and were a set of premiums, given away with Esso fuels, defiantly issued in France, the complete sets are to be found in the pages of Jean Piffret's book Figurines Publicities, but, as I think I've mentioned before, we had some when we were kids, not from this set, but from the set of woodland (or other) animals, some of which are in the upper shots.

 

Indeed, the slightly Beatrix Potter'esque pricklepin in the same flesh pink as the odd figure above, is one of the items on my nostalgia wants list, as it was in my pencil case until I was far too old to have affection for such things! And the three little pigs would also go with the other musical mammals!

 

While these are just marked (C) Walt Disney Prod., but you can see where the Esso has been obliterated on the tool, so there was probably a commercial issue too, at some point.

 

Therefore, I think a couple of the sets annotated by Piffret, as French, were issued here, also with Esso, at some point around the late 1960's or early 1970's, possibly without the paint highlights of the French and more commercial Diener issues. There were more sets issued as premiums in France, though?

 

Four other, non-Diener, non-Esso types, with, from the left a grotesque facemask pencil top, this was probably from the era of cereal-premium totem-pole funny-faces and the semi-flat African mask charm type premiums. Next is a vampire, or Dracula type, in his casket, and just waking-up, by the look of it!

The footballer is bigger that the Hong Kong painted ones, issued as either key-rings or pencil-tops, but may have been the inspiration for them, and he is a pencil top too! While the 'finger fright' rubber-jiggler just came with them to make a round-number! The first three being, again, 'proper' eraser-rubber.

N is for November's Sandown Park - Military

More of the odds and sods from the last BP show, at Sandown Park, and it's the military stuff, which wasn't numerous, but had a few interesting items to look at, including one which might surprise you, by my excitement of it!

 

There's a fair bit of brittleness, in the contents of this set, figures and weapons, so at some point, I'll probably de-card it, and save the PVC stuff for spares and scan the card, it's not like the figures are particularly rare, while a full scan of the generic card would be a useful addition to the archive.

 

Two 'Began-Beton's', probably from Plastic Toys Inc.? And one of the small Monogram/Revell copies, along with my first Lido original, I have lots of the Hong Kong copies, but the quality of this original shines through, so very pleased to have found him, rummaging through Gareth's tray.

 

Tourist keepsake for sure, poured-resin, and not the world's best sculpt, but it is a Horse Guard, whom I prefer to the Lifeguards, around 80/90mm, and one assumes not that old, but not current, as I've recently been checking-out the shops round the theatre district for something else, and haven't seen anything close to this chap.

 

Two hollow-cast nurses, and I thought the one on the right might be Crescent, but someone said they are both Britains, early on the left and later on the right, sort of Crimean War and WWI eras?

 

Crescent.

 

Skybirds.

 

Fantasyland? Or the better originals (check tag)?

 

Odds & Sods.

 

John Begg gave me a tray of small-scale. lead shrapnel, which has a few useful bits in, and which, in time, will get sorted into the rest, the Skybirds pilot is particularly nice, as they gave them several paint schemes, both military and civilian, While Crescent used many colours/shades, over the years.

 

In the last shot, the larger-scale, colonial artilleryman, and mid-19th century red-coat, standing firing, are both complete and will join the cards I display this odd, flat stuff on, while the others will probably go in the 'Don't know what to do with them, but can't chuck them' tub!

N is for Nerfing Necrophiles!

Had a brilliant eMail from our roving reporter in New York last night, an enhanced shot of the Scully & Scully Christmas tree has been added to the bottom of that post, and he sent us these;

 

And, because they are Lanard Toys, they may well come to the UK, specifically Smyths, who carried their (Lanard's) sci-fi set for some years. Indeed, this may already be here, I had a disappointing visit to Smyths the other day, but I wasn't necessarily looking properly in the Nerf Gun section, so I'll head back there and have a look? Ideal xmas prezzie too! Many thanks to Brian for finding these.