R is for Retro Moon Man

If you have a theme - stick to it! This is actually the last one in the queue for now, but that's not to say I won't find another in the next few weeks, or certainly over the next few months. We're back to Legami, with another retro/deform/NASA astronaut, and this one is a pencil sharpener, with a shavings-collecting back-pack/life-support unit!

 

 

  

He also has one of those movement-triggered LED lights, hidden behind his opaque visor, so when you pick him up or shake/move him, he lights up, like some near-critical loon, about to go nuclear!

F is for Follow-up - Wild West Plunder

A couple of things in the archive pertaining to this morning's post;

 

On the subject of pencil sharpeners, I caught this on feeBay last year sometime, very 1950's, so quite a quick cloning! The die-cast mazac/zamak tourist trinket, a copy of Britains Herald's campfire chap in full war bonnet, probably came from Hong Kong, and the headdress looks sharp-enough to open a finger while you're honing your pencil - these days you'd get a recall notice from 'Health & Safety!

 

From 2023, is this colour-sample of the Torgano archer, not really clear if it's a boy or a girl, and all of them missing their bow, I don't know if they were always a short-shot, or if they just snapped off? Below them is a yellow chap, who looks to be a Tyrolean in lederhosen, along with four of the Lucky Bag pod-foot Indians and, bottom left, an unknown flat of similar ilk, but on a more standard base.

T is for Two - The Works

I popped into The Works the other day and found a couple of bits which might be of some interest, to some people, reading the Blog, so a quick T is for Two... presented itself as the obvious, despite it being more than two of any measure, the 'two' being sharpeners and erasers!

 

Stubby little moon-rocket pencil sharpeners, not terribly realistic, as is, but a coat of paint could render them useful cargo containers in some space-station/space base diorama, and, like a lot of space-based stationary . . . A bit of fun!

 

We may have seen all these before, but the larger Dinosaurs may be new to the Blog, or new in these small 'back to school' containers, but I got them and shot them, because the Blog is a bit of a gaping maw which requires constant feeding!

F is for Follow-ups - Various, Old & New

A few follow-ups which have been accruing over the last few years, and an eclectic mix of bits enhancing older posts and a couple of more recent ones.

 

 

A couple more KUM pencil sharpeners, these being a small pistol, and a revolver with a drum magazine! We looked at KUM, with more relevance to the Blog's interests here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/search/label/KUM

 

While this is an advert for pre-printed bookplates, with an emphasis on Sci-Fi / Fantasy, there's also a more traditional, even 'monkish' design. Found on the Internet and credited to David O. Knuttunen, it's the back cover ad from IF (not Galaxy), October 1966, and enhances this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/04/b-is-for-bookplates-1-overview.html

 

BEM - Bug Eyed Monster, an acronym which has faded from favour!  

 

Meanwhile as a backup to the recent posts on Holly, Lik Be (LB) and the 'Gygax' monsters, on the left here is the copy of the Monster Manual, which I was using along with the later lever-arch file.

 

The other two, which came in at roughly the same time, are a fascinating book on the Tommy Gun rival to Action Man, made by Pedigree Toys, and it's surprising how much Tommy Gun stuff my brother and I had, thinking it was Palitoy-Hasbro, because most of our stuff tended to come from the Church fêtes and Jumble Sales of Heckfield and the surrounding environs, or the local tip (dump)!

 

While the other book is a useful history of Marx, an updated volume, I still don't have Vol.I in any version . . . it will turn-up, everything does! 

 

The Mechanoid bits in the smaller inset, came in a while back, and the two ladders are the real treasure, as none of mine had them, now two will be completed, and the radar disc will finish the green one, while a near complete one came-in recently, with nice turquoise legs - also needing a ladder!

 

Looking at them, I think I may have a couple more spares in the 'unknown ladder' drawer of my old multi-drawer cabinet! So when it all comes together I should have three complete, another one with two-each different coloured legs and the gold-accessories one still needing a ladder, along with a few bits - that's a fleet!

 

 

A couple of rather poor images of a set of the Marx copies, and a generic set of the same copies of Cherilea astronauts/spacemen, I actually managed to buy the foot-pump set, twice from the same seller, because I'd forgotten I'd bought the first one (generics from Italy), so we will look at them properly another day, but all three above adding to this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2024/03/e-is-for-expelling-few-myths.html

 

While this will add a bit to this post from two years ago

 

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

 

He's a Humpty I shot at Sandown Park this weekend just gone, is a lead-solid from Sacul, and has had the base repaired/replaced.

L is for Legami

Mentioned twice recently, and both products make a reprise in this post, the Italian (Milan-based) Legami is a new name in stationary, or new to me at least, and as a follow-up to the previous post, continuing with the theme of pencil tops and etcetera!

 

Pencil Tops - We've seen the Panda here at Small Scale World

 

Foam Unicorns!

Definitely a theme at the moment! I'll have to look out for the [scented? really?] eraser, and the light-up pencil-sharpener, although both are cartooney, it doesn't stop us buying them/shooting them so you don't have to! There's also a spaceman on the three-colour highlighter, with an ariel on his helmet, like the Stingray crew!

 

Clingers and moulded finials

 

Looks to be the same as the ones I found in WHSmith, a few years ago now, during the height of the Iwako (and clones) moment - although they are still everywhere; I think the initial flood has retreated from the doorstep! So could they have been re-badged Legami all along?

 

All the above shot at the 2025 Spring Fair at the NEC in February.

T is for Third-Party Theory?

Following on from the previous post this one is of interest, if only for further muddying the waters of Hong Kong's contribution to toy production in the 1960's and '70's, and illustrates how impossible it is to ever fully know the whole history of that former colonies activities, and therefore proof of an eternal hole in the history of toys . . . or novelties!

 

A quick reminder of the latest recruit to the stash, courtesy of Chris Smith, and I'm only reproducing it as - not collaged - it's easier to see that the polystyrene figure has been glued to a polystyrene sheet, so effectively it had to be cut out, or rather I suspect it was broken out, deliberately or in an accident is a moot point, but an accident would have more likely broken him off at the skate.

 

I suspect he was glued to something, probably with his lady friend, which would have looked like this . . . 

. . . pair of ne'er-do-well's from Toytown! These are more often encountered as stand-alone figurines, but were, I think, sold as cake decorations, but I'm not sure, and they are one of three sets of Noddy characters I know of in 'our scales', the other two being the smaller set of polystyrene figures from Marx and the Kellogg's from Crescent polyethylene cereal premiums.

 

You sometimes find these described as Marx too, and they may be, I don't know what licence relationship Swansea had with the Estate of Enid Blyton, but it would have been a Marx UK 'thing'. This set has about eight or ten characters, while the smaller one may extend to ten or twelve (we've seen one or two here, but there's better samples of both in the collection, against a future post or two). I've also seen them credited to Codeg I think?

But here they have been glued to a Happy Birthday decorated plastic plinth, and by whom and where may never be known. However, they are almost certainly a third party, buying-in the figures and the plinths, and marrying them together, with added paper stickers, to create more attractive pieces, which looks more substantial, and can therefore be priced at a higher rate than the cost of the components, when sold separately!

These were on feeBay a couple of years ago, and seem to suggest that the third party, or one of them (?), might have been based in the UK, because the Tom figure is clearly the Gemodels original in soft polyethylene, but if Culpitt were behind these novelty decorations, they could have sent UK produce to Hong Kong to have the work done, again - we'll probably never know?

But here we have artificial foliage, UK and HK figures in two polymers, and a wire/brush-fir in a wooden barrel, all added to the same plinths and given paper labels, one Birthday themed, the other a Christmas piece, neither requiring any creativity on the part of the cake-maker, just plonk the vignette on the icing!

And then I found these, adding to the chapter on KT, with an all-Irish line-up of novelties, where, again, the right-hand Leprechaun has been glued to a thermometer! On a similar base to the above, and obviously from the tourist trade, I have no idea whether these were from the Republic or Ulster, if one, I'd favour the former, but I dare say they were seen/available for purchase on both sides of the boarder?

 

Now firstly, we have two new sculpts to add to the KT listings, which have already enjoyed a bunch of these plinthed ones, mushrooms, a smaller astronaut and the larger Diddyman, but secondly, we can see the Leprechauns here are based with smaller, chunkier bases matching their stature, while the Irish Dancer has the finer steps to her base of the other figurines in the oeuvre?

 

And, in adding a thermometer to the already found pen-holder and pencil sharpeners, it means we may well be looking for sand-timers, letter racks, money-boxes, jewellery stands/music boxes and so on. And it may be that KT were behind the larger copy of their beefeater, even if not named on the HCF set?

 

I've also added the KT tag to a couple of the earlier 'unknown' figure posts, and in doing so, you can see how help from Chris Smith, Brian Wagstaff and Adrian Little has been invaluable in revealing the KT story, with links on the KT posts revealing Brian Berke helped with the old hollow-cast cowboys who also became pencil sharpeners! Many thanks to all of them.

F is for Follow-up's - Various Recent Things

Running over a few additional details, info or images of a few bits we've seen here in the last few weeks, no particular order or sense to it, just things I fancied doing extra/more/follow-up shots of!

The sports pencil top Chris sent, alongside one I had here of a boxer, we both think we've seen a football one, and it would be interesting to find out what others there were, as a set they probably went to at lest four sculpts?

 

The Hong Kong-marked KT figures I have here, about half of them went to storage a while ago, including the pen-stand thing which started the whole odyssey, so one day we'll look at them all together, as there are probably pencil-sharper and stand-alone versions of all of them, along with other novelties for some of them . . . I haven't found a sand-timer yet, but I'd happily put a tenner on one being found.

 

And the pencil sharpener version of the guardsman with its replacement figure. Luckily the old one just popped-off, but I had to do some careful knife-cleaning of one of the foot-studs on the replacement, who had a lump of his old stand still attached as that bubbly-glue patch stuff!

 

Also, while the damaged figure popped-off, he did leave one locating-stud rattling around inside, which I caught by well-glueing the hole with liquid-poly, and shaking it around, upside-down, until it sopped rattling, meaning it had got stuck to the glue . . . something to confuse future archaeologists!

 

That green Tatra figure from Chris, next to the two most common colours, although, these days, you see more and more of the red and blue too, but you can see just how green he is, under the gold-residue?

 

Following on from something in the comments, these are the athletes which have come-in over the last 18-months or so, we looked at them originally as mostly small scale here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-post.html

And revisited them more recently here, to look at the larger scale;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-is-for-athletes-vintage-plastic.html

so with this sort of quantity being added every year or so, when we return to them properly we should have a better idea about which sets/types had which poses, and are therefore, in the two or three seperate 'families' of piracy?

Remember I said I had another Morph, well here's Chris's donation, standing on himself! Too cool for art school! And the brown colour which Morph was made in (his later mate Chas was a neutral beige-gray), is the same brown everyone's Plasticine went after it had all been mixed together in the toy-box!

Plasticine Flash Mob!

 

Oh yes, TJF had such fun correcting my 'brain freeze' when I said they were from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, when they were from some Disney knock-off, but they were also from a different-again board game, and having found the four copies a while ago, I now have a slightly damaged Lost in Space original, also Remco, in yellow, with the missing figure, and 3 more board-game pieces to find we will return to these!

 

Left to right;

 

4x Homecast resin/3D-printed (?) copies of Remco - Lost in Space figures

1x Remco - Lost in Space original

1x Remco - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

M is for Merry Mass of Malleable Model Mayhem! 8 - Transport

There was a lot of interesting traffic in Chris Smith's recent donation to the Blog, and in this penultimate post on the parcel's contents, that's what we're looking at, right now, as soon as I've loaded the photo's!

Mostly mini-cars, with four Kinder types at the bottom, a Blue Box Jaguar and a funny little kiddy-thing which might have carried a water-based paint pastille in a little tray (?), also Kinder, while the one at the top may be a cereal premium of some age?

 

Four of those educational supplies vehicles, one taxi and three racing cars, along with a soft polyethylene - probably Christmas Cracker - copy of the premium cars in brown, with a maroon original next to it, and another of the lesser version Formula One cars in front.

Below is a bicycle which I fear failed a battle against the mores of Postie! But they are clean cuts, and it'll go back together easily enough as it's polystyrene, although the cross handle-bar is missing. It's big too, occupying, probably. the same area as the three 'beetle' cars, so sort of 60mm compatible, and no sign of a base, so, roof-rack load from a Hong Kong big-box jobbie?

A Pair of modernish rack-toy fighters and a rubber-catapult glider, it's a long term goal to take them all outside and test them, as there are a few now, including the Hornby Battle Space one!

 

Marked W.Germany, this will be KUM, ooh-err missus! Still going, and nearly 100 years old (the firm, not the sharpener), and there's another in the queue. It's in need of new propellers, and is missing it's front/cockpit, which is detachable to empty the scrapings . . . sharpenings? Shavings. Planeings! And very unusual.

 

 

Two rack toy 'planes, sans cockpits and propellers, but useful spares against not having the type in/or the colour, if you know what I mean and plug-ins can be moved about for photo-seshes! The deck-plane is from Airfix's HMS Victorious I think, and should be a Sea Vixen, it'll be on Scalemates or Britmodeller I'm sure. The Concord was a Christmas cracker novelty, with a bomb and a rack-toy which looks like a Cessna A-37 Dragonfly, workhorse of the Vietnam war?

 

 

The orange gun is one of those things I keep forgetting, If I recall correctly, it's a smaller copy of an American piece from the dime-stor era, should be German (DOM Plastik?, but might be a sobre type thing, the attribution is in the archive, and may be on the Blog - somewhere?! While the little wooden one is probbaly homemade, but the red-ends have half a look of commercial 'meant' about them, so I don't know, it might be an erzgebirge Christmas tree-hanger?

Horse-drawn equipment includes my favourite, a Christmas cracker cart, body orientation corrected in the lower shot, a small wagon (mine cart?) from a play-set of some kind and a Blue Box canopy from the small scale copy of Crescent's Wild West pioneer wagon.

Military matters include the Hong Kong (and Speedwell) tank, a blue box motorcycle whos seen better days, but is polystyrene,, so modifiable, and off to the spares, a mini Humber truck and a wooden wheel which must be off something like out childhood staff-car, but it looks unplayed with, so must have been lost quite soon?

 

To their right are a bunch of the micro-vehicles which used to fill a blister in early rack-toys, as seen here passim, the blue one however is the cracker version with better wheels - a future post, there are three varients of A/C, two of the gun, only the one 'amphi-carrier'!

And finally - this lovely little thing from Hungary, it will have been from those mixed-content kiosk bags as we saw here a while ago from Vorsas Games, in fact something quite similar was illustrated on the header? Half-T34, half Jagdpanther, all cool!

A lovely thing to find in a parcel of free-stuff, from Chris and I thank him for it all, we will finish off with the Wild West in a day or two, but then the posting rate may drop off for a while, I pick up my new uniform tomorrow, then I'm off out, on the road for my sins!

M is for Merry Mass of Malleable Model Mayhem! 3 - Ceremonial & Historicals

Part-the-third, of the plastic plunder posts from Chris Smith's most recent parcel, brings us to the ceremonial and historical section, Royal Fail or Parcelfarce did their worst with these, as you can see from the first image in the sequence!

To be fair to Postie, I suspect there wasn't much in the bag when it left East Anglia, and was being sent as a sample of . . . Malleable Mouldings? But, yeah, it arrived as so much dust and two legs!

 

Funnily enough, the first Malleable horse I got (still somewhere in the pile) was found in the car-park at SAS, off the old A4, or at least, embedded in the gravel/puddle at the bottom of the steel fire-escape! It was/is missing both back legs and a base, and while I've handled several of Adrian's over the years, and posibly shot them for the blog, I have yet to find a decent mounted figure by Malleable! It'll happen!

Initially thought to be Italian, these are 30mm polystyrene Hungarian Imperial, or 'Royal' Guards, and - obviously - the same colour scheme as those 30mm plug-together 'swoppets' both Chris and Peter Evans have donated to the blog in the past. Lovely little things!

 

While the British 'Royal Guards' of the Household Division include two nice Hong Kong copies of Crescent (seen here yesterday), but in a Hilco style! next to them, the chap with the herb-green base is a real treat, he's the Reamsa copy of herald, and I think he might have been Reamsa No.1?

 

I personally love the eraser guardsman in purple, he's that silicon rubber which really just smudges pencil, but they were 'novelties' first and erasers second, always, I feel? The key-ring guardsman seems to go with some of the Highland pipers, one of the Welsh ladies and probably the fisherman we saw the other day, while the KT is damaged and the Rocco guardsmen need glue!

 

Cake decorations and premiums, we've seen the AWI before, and the French Dragoon (?) is from that set of premiums which used to have one name but now have several in two sizes, with base differences and Kinder joining the mix!

 

A Crescent lead, and Blue Box sailors (Merten copies) signal a Hong Kong copy of Airfix trumpeter to deal with some French interloper (HaT Industries) while a rather legless Lord Flashheart courtesy of Skybirds, recovers from a night on the juice, in the Mess!

 

In discussion, we think maybe Brazilian for this horse, although he could equally be Argentine? Missing a rider who may send it to the Wild West section, I posted it here, as this post only had six images!

And Postie again! But they were all missing their tails already, so just samples, and while I don't know what colours of this Rocco guardsman I have, if I need a white sample, I'll have one, once I've glued a couple of heads back on!

 

Many thanks to Chris as always for all these, and even the broken stuff has its place, as place-fillers!

------------------------------------------

Added a few minutes later - I'd dropped some of the images in the Khaki soldier section!

 

It was looking at the damaged KT above and realising "Where are the other two?" that had me off looking in the other folders! Superb thing to get in the post without warning - two more boxed KT pencil sharpeners, and different boxing, both generic and serving the tourist trade, but aren't they lovely - I've already sorted the guardsman (forthcoming post) with a fully rifled replacement, so he's now a minter!

 

We saw him the other day, but he belonged here all along - the Blue Box Napoleon, which, with another figure in this parcel, get us closer to a complete pose-count, but we're still only half-way on the painted/chromed sets! Thanks again to Chris.