T is for Two, But We’ve Already Looked at One! Capri Games . . .

It wasn't until I was looking for the folder for the earlier game's images that I [was] remembered I already had an 'Ariel' on the desktop, except, I'd miss-titled a Capri folder . . . doh! My desktop is shocking; it has 34 spaces left of a possible 126, I really must do something about it, there's stuff from Theo, Adrian, Chris and Brain, while Jason sent a load of Highlander stuff ages ago!

At the risk of repeating myself, this year will be a bitty-one and the keel of the good ship Small Scale World won't be even until at least this time next year, and stuff will pile-up, but in the meantime I'll post what I can, and here's that other Ariel Capri Game!

I always sort of knew this existed and found it on feebleBay once or twice, but never got around to purchasing it, however a few months ago I saw one going cheap and popped my cash in the pot to 'tick the box' as far as the collection is concerned and with a pitiful image count on this post, no more than tick a box here!

The reason I believed in its existence before I know of it for sure is because I found the red arm-up guy (top left-hand corner) in the alleyway next to my old house in North Camp, a bit smashed-up. In fact, he looked more like a saluting Nazi from some unknown WHW set, but I realised he must be some kind of sportsman, probably from a board game!

There are a set of hurdles with and without penalty forfeits attached to their cards and a high jump in card, and the mechanism is collecting points by attempting various track & field events, aided or hindered by dice, cards and tables. The 'high-jump' chap (bottom pose) looks like posh-guy from Scooby-doo! That's it; 12 35mm figures of sportsmen in three poses and four colours!

The box also contained a Brucie-bonus, a flat which seems to be from a mine-related or fairground board game? Klondike Pete, golden nugget, haunted mine, ghost train . . . something like that! Also these thick flats need a new name, they aren't strictly flats or semi-flats, nor are they the hollow or smooth-backed relief flats . . . coin flats, fat-flats? Token flats! Whatever; it's another figure on the Blog!

A is for Athletes - Vintage Plastic Olympians

Don't blame the Thumb; in the end I just ended-up having a slow-one, last week!

We looked at these briefly and with a dodgy image - if I recall correctly - way back at the start of the blog, and at the time I didn't have many of the larger ones, a situation which has now changed so we'll look at the larger ones now, and re-inspect the smallies another time.

These are my largest sample but not the first (which were the Pepsi-Cola premiums), indeed, while they may be among the first of about eight/ten Hong Kong piracy sets, which come in various sizes from these 50/54mm figures through to 25mm capsule/Christmas cracker types, they may equally be one of the later sets in this 50/54mm sizing, being thinner (and newer-looking - because they were mint!) of my three samples.

There are ten poses in the original set and I think it's fair to say most of the copy-sets will run to all ten, but clearly don't always come in sets of ten, so until you find all ten with matching marks, you can't say so for definite - so I 'aint!

Marked MADE IN HONG KONG with a number-code equating to a cavity mark which will probably be No.1440-to-1449 in an oblong inset panel, making them far easier to differentiate than the next two lots!

All the sets - in all sizes - run with an Olympic-ring/five-ring trope as a base, the gimmick being that the rings are arranged differently depending on the pose, to ensure they stand-up!

The card, which as well as an interesting, almost political, choice of flags along the bottom boarder, has three sports which aren't represented by the figure-poses in the set, and one of which isn't even an Olympic sport - motorcycling! Oh - and the women (two poses) don't get a look-in!

These are the next most common type (as found by me; it's not a scientific fact!), and I would be tempted to say they are nicer than the previous lot, but I think that's just becase the first lot were mint and a bit shiny, while these are played-with and have the detail picked-out with the patina of age? An eighth pose is found with the weightlifter.

A neat but slightly larger MADE IN HONG KONG placed in various shapes of recessed 'cartouche' panel, some of which are far larger than they need to be, The footballers cartouche manages to break the edge at two points which might have weakened another poses base, but actually the two weak-points are joined above by the players foot, so there's no likelihood of the base breaking-across, which is clever, if unnecessary?

I also have these two, he (ninth pose - boxer) has a thick base like the other sets, hers is much thinner, they are from two production-runs I think; she is a wishy-washy polyethylene, he's more 1980's Hing Fat type polymer! And they both have a heavier countenance, which might suggest they are the oldest and first?

They both have a now larger MADE IN and a smaller HONG KONG, and comparing the diver with the previous lot, it looks like they will all (when found) have the same ovoid recesses for the mark.

The pair in the middle are the bagged-set (I didn't un-bag it; it was falling-apart when I found it!), with examples of the second set (far left) and third lot; far right. The missing pose in this post is the sports/target-shooter in baseball cap, who I may have in another tub - as my only Pepsi original?

At gunpoint and allowed only one choice - I'd say - from the top; 3rd, 1st and second versions, but there's no accounting for that order, beyond hunch?

M is for Melbourne's 'Margarine' Men

Another rushed post, but it rather suits the subject, a small sample doesn't call for collages or anything, yet this one is interesting enough to run to four images, so a half-reasonable use of your Sunday browse!

I only have five of the athletes, two each of the discus thrower and basketball chap and one hockey player, as you can see the baseball player seems to have been seconded from the Harlem Globetrotters!

It's funny; when I was a kid they were almost mythical, and every kid knew about them, yet while they are still going (as far as I know) and doing the exhibition tours, the internet has somehow diluted their fame in a billion shots of pets and selfies (and toy soldiers!) and they don't carry the press they used-to, which is a bit sad.

It's the same image, but the lower shot (I did squeeze a collage or two in!) has the shadow setting pushed right-up to get the detail showing. While my sample of the athletes is small, the flag-bearer's are not so hard to come by . . .

. . . with my having picked-up ten over the years, my guess (and it's only a guess) is that the athletes were the premium set for Dobbelmann (Dutch Tobacanist), while the flag-bearer's may have been handed out by an airline or shipping line as a memento of the games, or something else of significance? But - and it's not scientific - they seem to have been issued two-to-one over the athletes?

The large hollow base and variation in figure hights make a sizeing problematical with such a small sample, but around 30mm? I didn't measure them - exactly, and they've been put away!

Each marked Melbourne on one side and having the five rings on the other side of the base, the Melbourne Olympics were in 1956 and the style of European margarine premiums is clear to see in these, although they are more fully-round than demi-ronde! They were also issued for the Helsinki games of '52 or marked Dobbelmann and come in various colours, I may have some more somewhere, but that'll do for now!

H is for How They Come In - One Day in July . . . 2014!

Another day's purchases, this from a trip to Basingrad in July 2014, and we've had articles here on most of it, but I'm clearing Picasa with these posts you know!

The Noch bar set and the Model Scene came from the Church Street model shop, the skydivers and the pencil/eraser/sharpener set both came from The Works I think, not sure about the Team GB Olympic clearance thing (the now defunct 99p Stores?), while the blind-bag dino's and Hobbit stuff was also The Works I suspect.

The Bart Simpson was a blind-bag from WHSmith's or someone similar - it may have been reduced in Tesco, but it was a while ago!

Can't remember if we looked at these here, or another pair, also I think these and the dino's may have been bought in another Works a week earlier and just hung-around to end-up in the same collective shot?

Much covered elsewhere, so I won't bore you with the minutiae, there were differences between the first and second series' plastic colours I seem to recall, and these are 2nd series I think?

The naming of the parts! This has been sat in Picasa waiting for god-knows-what post, but I thought the way the bare runner was arranged in the blister made it ideal for labelling-up, if only to illustrate the difference between the 'Sprue' (missing in most kits/figure packs) and the 'Runners' which a lot of people refer-to as sprue, and a few idiots lesser mortals [I must stop insulting everyone] call sprew, sproo or spru!

Some kits, in the past, have had sprue left on; early Aurora, Pyro and Revell-Monogram type model-kits often included them while some of the late-production, unpainted Starlux 40mm in the 'figure set' boxes were packed with the sprue intact, in both cases (old kits and later figures) the sprue had a tendency to damage the box/box-art over time by wearing a hole/working through the card.

The reason the actual sprue ends-up cone-shaped is because it stretches as it's pulled away from the still-hot injector head during the removal of the runners/product from the mould-tool.

P is for Pride - The Lion

Another piece of tat I found on clearance a couple of few years ago, this is the Olympic team's mascot (as opposed to those awful abominations that represented London2012), whether it was just for those Olympics (hence a 2014 clearance) or is still the mascot I don't know, and I don't need to know - if they changed mascot for Rio, it'll turn-up as clearance tat in about 18 months time!

He certainly seems to have been designed by the same person who did the Olympic mascots, but because he's an actual lion-thing, rather than the WTF-things of London2012, he looks OK, a bit Art Deco - stylistically - but eminently more bearable than the other two!

The thing is - let's be honest - these mascots are now designed first-and-foremost to be worn as a foam-suit by some poor sweating, dehydrated, jobbing-actor who can barely see where he/she's going, while taking muttered instructions from someone with a clipboard and an earpiece!

R is for Reichssportfeldstraße...

...where some very smart houses used to sit in greenified splendor. A strange juxtaposition being Eva Braun's house sitting next to the Brigade Padre's! Indeed a quirk not lost on the Padre who pointed it out to me.

Still, in 1936 I'm sure the wide boulevard street that runs from the Heer Straße  (the western end of the main arterial route through Berlin that becomes Unter den Linden and eventually runs under the Brandenburg Gate) up to the Olympic Stadium, with its broad pavements (side-walks) and expansive central median (now used for the typically 'Berlin' herring-bone parking) would have been lined with little kiosks selling tourist trinkets and memorabilia of the 1936 Olympic Games.

Others stands would have been selling 'Bratties mitt pommes-frits und mayo'...but that's another story!

Straight from the workshops of Bavaria or the Black Forest or anywhere else that had a tradition of wooden toy/plaything production now usually erroneously titled 'Erzgebirge' came this little charmer. An SA Oompa Band in full cry, approximately 25mm, with only the boots painted or stained black.

This was just the sort of little inexpensive item you could carry away on the day, send back to relatives elsewhere or abroad and which with the odd glueing over the years and the acquisition of a fine layer of nicotine has lasted to this day.

S is for Sportsmen set

This is a 'bitty' post, in order to compare the various types/issues I had to spread them all out on the floor, which produced a fuzzy image, so I then took two closer pictures and 'stitched' them, gaining a bit of detail but losing the card! So if you are a fastidious packaging collector, click on the upper photo, if you're more interested in the figures - click on the lower one.

The Originals (shooter, bottom left) were produced as premiums all over the world, and various other sets either influenced the premium set, or were based on it. There are at least ten poses running through the various issues, from left to right (footballer ended up in two files? I'm tired!);
Shooting Competitor
Gymnast/Diver
Fencer
Swimmer/Diver
Discus Thrower
Runner
Javelin
Footballer
Weightlifter
Boxer

Underneath the HK figures are some influencing/based on them, the aforementioned shooter is marked 'Drink Pepsi Cola' in the under-base cavity, but I've seen others. Then, below the Diver/Swimmer we see from left to right; what I think is a Marx UK Swimmer, then the Linde/Jean/Manurba premium then the US Marx 60mm Swimmer and as a bit of a laugh, the old man from the Ideal/Mattel/Hasbro Mouse Trap board game!

Markings and size are the reason for the 7 ranks, and are as follows;
Top row - 54mm, marked 'MADE IN HONG KONG' in similar cavity to Pepsicorp figure.
2nd row - 40mm, Olympic rings base unmarked, with chads.
3rd row - 35mm, solid base with raised lines and 'MADE IN HONG KONG'
4th row - 35mm, chad base with 'H.K'
5th row - 30mm, solid base with uneven 'HONG KONG'
6th row - 30mm, chads with 'HONG' and 'KONG' on separate un-chadded discs
7th row - 28mm, chadded, unmarked.

[For those who don't follow tight elections (or should that be stitch-ups!), chads are the little holes left by punches!]