B is for Bagged, Boxed and Blister-Carded!

Now, there's a title I should have, could have, aught to've thought of years ago, having decided to stubbornly stick with the 'A is for . . . ' trope. Especially when I could have dropped it the first month, after we got to zed, or the next month after we'd gone back up to ay? But, whatever, we've had it now!

 

February's Sandown resulted in lots of nice things being added to the pile, and these are all those - we haven't seen yet - which came/come with their packaging, there not being enough stuff for thematic posts, I'm finding other ways to run-off shots from the main folder!

 

This was an amazing find, on the nostalgia front, not because you can't probably find them regularly on feebleBay, but because I hadn't thought to look, having forgotten this for several decades, but this was my Brother's piggy-bank, when we were kids. I had the hard polystyrene 'pillar-box', with three black bands, numbered as a combination lock (which I have seen, but not while I was buying), from Hong Kong, while my brother had this, also from Hong Kong, imported by CODEG Productions (Cowan de Groot)

 

It's not exactly the same, as his was yellow plastic under the flocking, which came off quite soon, ears first! So our Rupert was plain yellow for years, probably until we moved house in 1980, while this one is actually red polythene, so at least two production runs for this.

 

We loved Rupert, and had quite a few annuals from the Church fête, it was all a bit Edwardian, prep-school and jolly hockey-sticks, but kids don't mind, same with the Enid Blyton stuff, prejudices are passed-on by grown-ups, kids just like reading that other kids are having adventures in a pirate cave with a pet mouse in their pocket, or - in Rupert's case - chasing a Bramble Imp with an Elephant in a suit!

 

Purchased purely for the card sample, we looked at the figure set a while ago, as I have them all loose, but at that time I only knew about the five or ten set cards, now we have pairs, for really poor kids!

 

Close-ups; Slinger (below) and Stinger!

 

Box-ticking, I now have complete sets of Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, and most, if not all the Wild West, but I only had one nurse from this set, maybe another figure? Although, looking at the card-reverse, I still haven't found the firefighters!

 

Unusually (especially when you consider there are ten firefighter sculpts), there are only six poses in this set, with four duplicate pairs and two 'uniques' for the ten-count?

 

Contemporaneous with all those magnetic novelties, was this, Falbala the Fakir, from Fairylite, who could be cut in half, yet remain whole, I say 'could', because his - probably - phenolic-based polymer has warped, and he actually falls apart rather easily and stays together only with delicate intervention!

 

When new, you would prise his two body-halves apart, enough to get the sword in, then, upon slicing downward, would push a locking key out of the way. There are three of the slightly curved keys on a revolving wheel (think the Coat of Arms [legs] of the Isle of Man), so as the sword pushed one out of the way, another would come round and lock in behind it, so the Fakir stayed together as the sword went right through him!

  

From the 'Empire Made', I'm guessing this was a Swansea-operation corner of the 'Kins universe, if it was the US arm of Marx behind it, it would usually be 'Made in British . . . Hong Kong, Crown Colony' and/or etc. The seller had several, some with two Fairykins, some with common window-box accessories like the dog-house, but I thought the semi-flat guardsman was a bit different, and needed to be in the master collection!

  

More Humpties here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/05/e-is-for-eggcellent-effigies.html 

 

100% sure this is Airfix, no pattern number, and no banner-logo, but in every other way mirroring other known examples of early Airifx novelties, plastic colours match the animal flat/building block/baby bricks, and the micro-aircraft I've also called as Airfix, while the card is very similar to the one the animal flats came on, and I bet those 'planes came from similar cards? I will add more imagery of it to the Airfix Blog, in a day or two.

 

Finally, a cereal premium Hulk, mint in 'food-hygienic' pack! Called 'Desktop Buddies' and issued in 2003 by various Nestle properties, including Golden Nuggets, it's actually a relief sculpt with a hollow back, but a packaging sample is always useful!

H is for Happy Easter . . .

  . . . although I'm not sure what's supposed to be so 'happy' about the crucifixion of a human being? 

 

There's a number of reason why I haven't posted recently, and I'm not going to list them all here, but really, what is there to be happy about? America is being run by a potty-mouthed, narcissistic, inveterate, constant liar and megalomaniac, who seems, along with his friends Putin and Netanyahu, to be determined to destroy the world economy, the world order and international rule of law, maintained since 1945, sometimes at great cost, for what? So he can rename everything after himself?

 

Starmer, along with the King, are proving to be a pair of gutless fuckwits, and while they seem to be starting to stand-up for themselves, Europe hasn't preformed much better. Easter has become another money-fest with most supermarkets only closed today, and otherwise observing none of the Bank Holidays, and with an October storm in March, the weather is clearly as fucked as a Messiah with nails through his hands and feet.

 

Sighs . . . anyways, here's some Easter stuff, both new and from the archive, with a better post later today.

 

Scanned in '22, I don't know if these where from then, or earlier, it was a major scanning session with several hundred bits of ephemera scanned, most of which is still in the long queue! But, card flats, to join the card-flat zone! I don't know if the names change from box/batch to box/batch, and they are obviously renditions of the Lindt chocolate bunnies, from the back of a Lindt egg box.

 

One of my fondest memories of Easter was hunting the Lindt foil-wrapped, mini-eggs; in the garden if the weather was nice; in the house if Christ's tears prevented outdoor activities.

 

Mum would buy them from the big glass jar in Richard's newsagents in Hartley Wintney, and she would have the staff ensure there were equal quantities of each colour (maybe she just ate the spares?!), which I remember as two shades of gold, a pastel green and blue, a heliotrope-purple, a mauve, and a red which was closer to pinkish-crimson/maroon.

 

Anyway, there was a big divvy-up at the end, between my brother and I, and if the two piles weren't balanced, we'd have to go off again and find the missing ones! I don't think you can even get them any more, it's all unwrapped, licence-related eggs, in plastic bags now, and getting very expensive in the last few years, for a number of reasons, not the least being the chocolate-loving, 8-billion souls.

 

Somehow missed when I did the chocolate bunny season back in '24, this was the Kinder effort, I thought it might have a 'maxi' egg, but it's a bog-standard sized capsule, with what appears to be a lamb in a blanket, but it's not 100% clear, and the toy's 'aint what they used to be!

 

Staying with the edible theme, I actually ate these weeks ago! Branded to World of Sweets, I think they were in B&M, but I honestly can't remember, they might have been in The Range? Anyway, they were a sort of generic tutti-fruity flavour, and are 'Spring', not Easter, is that Trump's hated 'woke', or just canny marketing, from money-grubbing, middle-class executives, no better than Trump himself?

 

Some actual Toys! These WERE in The Range, a couple of weeks ago, and remind me of an old Christmas stocking gift we got one year, which were egg-shaped vehicles, with fat 'racing slick' tyres, like the Marx fire engine we saw here, but as animals, so, more like the Pelican marker pens we saw here, given that one was a grey mouse and the other a pink rabbit, if memory serves? I occasionally look for them on eBay, but haven't found them yet!

 

These are a selection of sort of monster/alien types, using the same craft foam you can buy in sheets, applied to basic blown-plastic eggs, Not sure what the plastic type is, but it seems very thin, so some ethylene hybrid probably?

 

And, as I said at the top, something better, which you might have anticipated, latter today! Bah! Humbug!

L is for Local Loot - 1 of 2

Managed a quick pass through the charity shops at the end of January, and succeeded in grabbing a few things, among which were a couple of real oddities.

 

A bag if bits, a bag of animals and a large squidgey . . . thing!

 

Starting with the squidgey thing, is it a lizard, is it a dinosaur, is it some kind of salamanda? One of those soft silicon-rubber toys filled to bursting with expanded polystyrene beads, which give it a stiff 'beanie baby' vibe, and no markings to speak of? The primordial amphibious ancestor, whose existence annoys the anti-Darwin brigade?

 

Probably a full set of ten smaller PVC-alike animals, not sure, but they are all of similar size, quality and material, and with so many of these sets out there, something we will return to one day, when I try to ascribe all, or most of them properly!

 

Three that don't seem to match the rest, and might be from one than one source?

 

The bag of bits contains some right oddities, with a bit of Kinder, some Kinder-like, a few 'army men' and other oddities. The apple with worm, might be a Pokémon, or one of those Studio Ghibli vinyls, they produce 25-figure advent calenders these days, so there's quite a few out there to find.

 

These are both mildly disturbing, the green spider has a gold, polypropylene key hidden in a slotted pouch in its belly, while the eight-legged chrysalis type thing, seems to be designed to contain a larger solid? Both are a soft rubberised polymer/elastomer of some kind, and may be connected to some of the other odd things in the previous image, such as the pink crab, or strange yellow baby?

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.

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 Medieval Plunder

Back last May, I shot back over to Basingstoke House to shoot a few things I didn't shoot when I was there previously (2014, published here 2017 - ACW Tag), and I thought I'd check out the gift shop at the same time - here's m'plunder!

 

Poured resin suit-of-armour pen/biro, he'll get the same treatment as that regency lady a few years ago, and be cut flat and based, one day! While the medieval princess is from Papo, and actually a Queen!

 

Modern Westair, they've pretty-much phased-out the old Peltro sculpts now, and issue their own figures in a softer whitemetal, I grabbed Willy Wavelance and Queen Bess, and what I thought was one of the others, in poor light, only to find it was a duplicate playwright! But from the card we can see I'm looking for a Damien Lewis and Sir Francis of the Duck Pond!

 

A fun little activity sheet for the kids gives me two card flats, for that side-bar. You obviously bend the lances after cutting and glueing, and charge them at each other, down the tilts!

H is for Hippopotami

Strangely, the second most visited post ever, on the blog, with over 7000 direct hits, is the lazy-post on Rhinoceri I shot the same day I shot the first of these images, and while I suspect bots have more to do with that record traffic than humans, it is true that the Model Animal collecting fraternity is much healthier and more numerous than the Toy Soldier brotherhood, so the odd animal post doesn't hurt!

 

No order or specific narrative, just a bunch of Hippopotamuses, with a few notes, another lazy post! I was, at the time (2020) combining the attic stuff with the storage stuff, which I had dug-out of the garage, looking for something else! And it went something like this;

 

Probably the storage lot, but could be from the attic?

 

Probably the attic lot, but could be from storage!

 

Combined; I then remembered there were some Britians ones in a box of Britains farm and zoo somewhere . . .

 

Which also gave-up another Charbens and a late blue-polymer Timpo, requiring a slight reorganisation, with the China-vinyl types to the left, Britains copies (Blue Box, Redbox and Holly etc.), scaled down, next, with two Charbens, a small cracker type 'ivorene' and three more origianl Hong Kong's in front, down the middle, then the common Hong Kong, in four or five sizes (Arco, New Maries, RAE, etc.), with Britains and Timpo to the right.

 

At some point this little chap arrived, 'China'; I think, he has stuff on his belly, but I didn't note it at the time! Not Safari, K&M/WR, Schleich or Papo, as far as I can tell, but seemingly quite up-market? Yowies maybe . . . also in the queue, several posts!

 

A few were elsewhere, like the two brandings of big-blue eraser, Tiger Stores and Royle Kids, several more China/HK types to the right, the brownish-gray one seems to be a version of the Toy Major sculpt, while the other two are older HK 'ethylene's. The silver one, who's hollow, and a paired Hippo/Elephant to the left, complete that additions-shot!

 

That pair raise an interesting point, as they clearly go together; same plastic type and colour, same paint, but are marked differently, which is something you need to look out for with all sorting/attributing of Hong Kong stuff, the stamps used are two, one 'MADE IN' and the other 'HONG KONG', with the engineer stamping them above/below each other on the Hippo's belly, but in a vague line along the Elephant's spine.

 

These were also in storage, and while the Topps were in the 'minor makes' zone, they have since been added to with a few more, there are 24 in the set; Baby Animals, the other bag is from the unknown zone, and were kept together, as their marks are wholly inverted! The Foal and Camel being Tai Sang (Blue Box/Redbox) knock-offs.

 

The one in the bag, seeming to be the donor for the cruder, flat inside-legged hollowed-out copy in silver, from the unknowns, not that he/she/it's particularly 'known' either, it isn't!

 

Seen before in a plunder or donation post? I think this one's Marx, but probably from an animal transport or circus truck of some kind, and maybe from back in the tin-plate vehicle days, although the animal is actually two polystyrene halves, glued together.

 

These were taken from the old fridge before it went to storage, on the left poured-resin, on the right routed wood and both magnetic decorative items.

 

A dark grey Britians baby and a pair of Hong Kong jobbies, taken in 2022, they may have been in one of the big donations from Jon Attwood, so many thanks to him.

 

That's it for this casual stroll, there are lots of named ones in with their other animals, and all the mini tub/tube/toob and pocket-money stuff is elsewhere, the vinyl minis, and the small-scale, flats and novelties are all missing, while a few more have probably come in over the last 3½ years, but hopefully, there will be a Hippopotamus page one day, with all of them!