Bits in salmon-pink are later additions, notes or further information supplied by others.
Bits in Khaki-green are 'work-in-progress' listings and anyone is welcome to add missing details, whether single items or whole chunks.
All photographs are 6.5 (old Fuji), 8.3 (Samsung) or 16 (new Nikon) Mpx, and most will blow up to greater than screen size if you hover on them and click. However I've noticed some of the older images aren't enlarging, this is probably a Blogger/Picasa/date/traffic/auto-archive thing?
If you think you can add some information, or identify any of the 'unknowns', please use the comment feature rather than emailing me.
Bold; denotes 'real-world' product titles or nomenclature - sometimes!
Please report any dead links, and suggest any links you think should/could be added.
Note I have now found out how to switch-off the slide-show thingy, so just clicking on the photographs will open them on a whole page where most will then enlarge further with another click - if the cursor is in a 'plus' sign.
This doesn't seem to work for some of the older posts, this is a Blogger/Internet coding change thing I can do nothing about, one day I'll update or replace the more important ones but that's years away.
While waiting for an ok to join the RPG Bloggers network, I became a bit
frustrated.
So, here is a current blogroll of 1000+ English Language RPG blogs, an...
... and with strange aeons even death may die.
I'm not dead, just working on something else. That "something else" should
be released before the end of the...
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.
One of the best things in these mixed lots, whether from shows, charity shops, car-boot sales, or donations are the parachute toys, simply because there have been so many (many more that ever jumped out of a real aeroplane), copied endlessly, and found in all sorts of places, gum-ball machines, Christmas crackers, Lucky Bags and rack toy trees, and from quite expensive to ephemerally dirt-cheap, I'll probably never track them all down, but the more that come in, the closer to the whole story, we get!
I can't remember if this was the Rosebud, or Fairchild moulding, but apart from the marking in the parachute cavity on his back, they seem to be the same tool anyway, but one of the earlier toy paratroopers (there were no parachute toys before the war, as there were very few parachutists!), from the 1950's, and a much copied pose, whose section is probably ready to go up on the Parachute Toys page.
Shot with a hollow-based Airfix German clone, and a heat-distortion Afrika Corps'man, who will be a useful addition to that page on the Airfix Blog in the fullness of time, he needs a wall of the correct height to be leaning on with his elbow, as his back's bent forward!
The latest iteration of the Airfix piracy figures, with a few non-Airfix sculpts,
that, to be fair, are crude enough to fit in well, with the much
copied, umteenth-generation Haldane Place clones. The crinkly cellophane bag, with generic graphics is a common current trope, not so
much Poundland, but many of the independent or small-chain discount stores, straight out of China!
One of the modern cloth-bag 'chute, troopers, there are quite a few, and they already have a section on the Parachute Page, so it's a question of colour/size comparisons with the odd lose one like this. As always - a quick thank you to Peter for saving these.
Probably had that title before, but I think a few duplicates have slipped through over the years now!
♪♫♪♪♫ It was forty years ago, today . . . ♪♫♪♪♫ * We were confined to barracks and light duties, due to reports coming out of the - then - Soviet Republic of Ukraine (Ukrainian SSR), about some shenanigans in a place called Chernobyl. As it happened the radio-active plume spent several days curling round to the South East, South, and then West of Berlin and dumping its shite on other people, we got it around the 4th May, by which time we'd all stopped taking precautions, and got a full dose of whatever was on offer . . . low levels of caesium I think? I mention it only because there's lots about it in the media at the
moment, and I keep thinking "I know, I was there!", when I wasn't,
really! And, we was robbed . . . if it had been strontium, we all would have become super-soldiers, huh?
*No we didn't, nobody knew anything about it until the evening of the 28th, when the Soviets deigned to admit what was going on! So we probably got our frowny, concerned pep-talks around the 29th!
We have family in Penrith and their sheep were still being tested and rejected years later. They didn't get a major blast, but the plume did hit in early May, and hung around for a bit, so I guess, rather like the rainstorms which occasionally flash-flood Aldershot or Guildford when they meet the Hog's Back and decide not to slip over, the plume hit the hills there and deposited a lot of caesium on the grass?
It's why I'm not a fan of nuclear power. Wind, solar and wave, yep, bring it on, but nuclear . . . Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Windscale . . . when it goes wrong, it's serious, it costs billions, and it affects millions, for several generations, and that's without the growing problem of what to do with the waste.
I was quite busy yesterday, I added some follow-up stuff to the parachute page;
I also added a lot more to the WWII Japanese page, and blurbed it up, I'd rather forgotten how many of the posts over there still need text, and the Japanese was one of them!
And I'm not going to escape with a text-only post am I? So here's some 'seen elsewhere' stuff, involving mixed lots - proper eye candy!
This was a bag of bits Peter Evan thrust at me at a London show in Camden I think, they may have got a subsequent breakdown post nearer the time (2023), but there's fun stuff to spot.
I seem to recall this was an evilBay lot (2022) which I won, but which Chris Smith had brought to my attention, as it had a couple of the German premium bandsmen (bottom right) and some small scale copies of the Manurba Wild West swivel-waist figures, also done as premiums or wundertüten, in solid form?
These were the February 2023 purchases, and some is still in the queue (the Buzz Lightyear movie stuff and the Fortnite keyrings), some has been blogged (dinosaurs and jig-puzzles), and some went straight-on to storage, however, Peter just included the farm animal set in his latest donation, so I should get that up soon, or maybe RTM, it's not that far away now. It's the one with the cows head on, the others were amphibians, dinosaurs and wild animals.
This was my 2021 attempt at an arty set-up! The book is the family recipe book and seems to date back to the 1840's or thereabouts? We've seen most of the figures in individual, donation or show-report posts, but yeah . . . It's all about the composition, innit!
While this was my attempt at 'concrete poetry', while at Kingston University back in '93/94, I was quite pleased with it, it has a certain rhythm or metre, and refers to its own shape, which is the main point of the exercise, or it was how it was given to us, as an over-the-weekend exersise!
And finally, how fucking cool is this? And it's approximately 1:32;
Garden war gaming never looked so good!
"Godamn, I love the smell of solenoids in the morning!"
As far as I know, Blue Box never gave these a title or name, so we don't know if they were resistance, revolutionaries, militia or for that matter, even French! But they are pretty unique, and having never been produced in the 50mm, a bit of a grail for some small-scale collectors, despite being a tad big at 28/30mm.
I'm really only using this as an excuse for a News, Views . . . as I have finally started updating the Parachute page, with shooting-sets added a few months ago, Imperial Poopa-Troopa's and similar cartoonish ones, a few weeks later, the Trojan Red Devil and others tonight, and a subsection of the Airfix clones. I've also added a lot of images throughout, and tweaked a few things, but there are still about nine-sections to do! And I think I need to spell-check it properly!
I suspect BT has failed completely (or
blocked me, without informing me, for being a complaining git), so this and the
previous won't get up 'till Monday, but it will - at least - be in time for
RTM, with the other stuff which should have published over the weekend being
filtered into the normal output!
As you can see I got on in-time, but the six posts which were supposed to publish Sat-Sun., have been held so that's rather it for RTM, now, but there's always more to come here!
All these are contributions from
(alphabetically) Brain Berke, Chris Smith. Peter Evans and Theo van der
Weerden, and while the rest have gone on the other page, the section for
'poopatroopers' hasn't been edited or uploaded yet, so it can go here!
These are from Imperial, via Brian Berke over 'The Pond' and while they (Imperial) were responsible for the
original Poopa-Troopers, these are
slightly different, however, they are not the clones we've seen in BJ, Jaru
and Kandy Toys colours in the last
few years, they are if anything closer to the Imperial originals.
Also they are only a small part of a larger
set of summer garden/beach stuff, although that bat could be used to get some
height on the sky divers!
These four on the other hand have published
to update the relevant sections of the Parachute figures page. That's
got novelty paratroopers up before the end of RTM, and we'll be on to other
things as the Autumn gets a grip, looks like we're in for a hard'ish Winter!
The next portion has gone up, it's gone atthe bottom of the page as it's mostly new-production, and I might put
all the more novelty stuff down the bottom.
Except - of course - they are all 'novelties'
on that page!
I've added the Airfix rip-offs to the Paratrooper page,
I got an attack of verbal diarrhea after the last, additional image, but it's
all grist to the mill, and may have some useful ideas for newer collectors?
The third part has been held-over as I
ended-up with a load of stuff to add to the second part, which was uploaded the
other day, so I've just added to that as an early update.
Kicked-off by some images from Brian, I
added a few screen-caps of current offers and shots from the recent Toy Fair
2020 in London.
As the pressure - and material - for the
firefighter page is building-up, I'm 'encouraged' by circumstance to clear the
parachute-deck, so the first post in the quick-build of that page, over the
next few weeks/months, has gone live here, or above.
The idea is to build the basic page in
eight or nine chunks in the near future, each chunk going at the top of the
page, pushing the already-published stuff one block down the page
each time, so today's post is the newest stuff, design wise, and the oldest
will end-up near the top, but actually novelties will probably go first . . .
I'll see how it pans-out!
For those not used to Blogger, the below 'index' allows you to find similar posts by their content, just click on the label (word) that best suits you search needs. I have tried to label by
- Country of origin of toy - Country represented by toy - Maker - Material - Scale/Size/Ratio - Era represented by toy - Whether subject is civil/military - Other 'themes' Etc...
Re-annotating the index is an ongoing project, in the meantime to save on space (there is a limit on the number of characters and the number of labels) I have started using abbreviations, which are as follows:
All other abbreviations are part of the recognised name of a company or organisation.
The hiarachy of the listing pushes non-standard letters to the end of the section so Märklin (with an umlaut) is the last 'M' &etc...the Cyrillic lettered brands are at the end of the whole list.
