F is for Follow-up - Robot Pencil Tops

Except, these mostly have a person inside, as the originals, and are therefore 'battle suits', except that some transformers or autobots don't? I don't know, I barely follow it and haven't watched any of the movies, too loud and too reliant on CGI for me, bah-humbug! We looked at my smallish sample four-and-a-half years ago here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2021/03/u-is-for-ultrapenciltop.html

A sample which has since grown, not least with the help of Chris Smith, who not only sent that pair the other day (I think the brown one is less common), but who seems to send one or two in every parcel, and a few have come in from other sources, which is useful, as there seem to be quite a few to find altogether, either version type (soft erasers or harder pencil-top-only's), or colour, or post number.

What follows is some Internet scrapings, I've been saving, on-and-off, since 2010, which back-up a comment I made elsewhere a couple of years ago, mentioning the fact that they keep turning up in quantity.

Here's a bulk lot, branded to Treasure Chest, by Goliath-Hall Inc., but obviously imported from Hong Kong, of interest is that the whole lot are in one polymer colour, yellow, but are otherwise the same as all the others, usually sold as generics. There is a current Goliath Games, but this lot were formed in the 1950's and closed-up in 2005.

Four of the poses, possibly on the origianl pencils some issues came with, possibly Tom[y], reading at the top of the left-hand one? I'd like to find more of the green ones! I'm not sure how well this image will show, though, until I publish? It's behaving oddly in Picasa!

Another all-yellow set, no 'Masked Kamen Rider' (thank you Geofry Peeters) in this issue apparently, whether that makes him rarer, when they turn-up by the box-load is anyone's guess!

Blue'ies!

 

Blacks

 

A mix of colours, including a clearly off-white, or cream, as opposed to the snow-white seen in my previous post, It would seem that rarer colours are the two purples (deep and mauve'ish) and the brown, but that could simply be a question of what I've encountered, rather than any genuine rarity!

While this generic, counter-top lot, have been manufactured in an eraser rubber, with no paint, whether it's a good rubber, or smeary silicon I don't know, but it looks eraserble! Rider is back!

Autobots, Godaikins, Grandizer, Mazinger, Shogun Robots, or Transformers, you have to be a more dedicated fan than me, to know what you are looking at, but the toys and minis are plentiful, and fun!

D is for Did I Mention Bagshot Garden Centre?

As well as the erasersaurs, I found a few other items of Rack Toy Month'able Blogging potential, up at Longacre's vast site on the old A30, and them be these . . .

 

Dimetrodon, one of several in the 'assortment', but obviously the one to come home with me! Quite a good one too, with the dog-like countenance which the better books tend to give this particular beast! Issued by an outfit called Free & Easy of the Netherlands

 

A colour variation of the freebie I got from the Keycraft Rep', back in February, which means (with the holy-cheese and pair of mice) that I've gone from none to three of this genre in less than six months!

 

Also keycraft (same display/dispensing 'tree'), are these, the latest edition of a set we saw a few years ago, in different colours, I hope, I think there was a yellow or blue one, but two yummy-mummy/trophy-wives were standing in the way of the stand, chattering away with three brats and a pram, five minutes from closing with no awareness of the rest of the world whatsoever, so I could only grab what looked to be one of each (it was!), without worrying about colours!

 

 

I also got these - Rex London, ostensively for the Jig-Toy page, but they can go here first, and I'll re-shoot them for there, another day. I did do a bit of an update of that page back in the spring, and can't remember if I said anything at the time, but there is a load more content on that page if you haven't visited it for a while!

D is for Dinorasers

I'm sure we've had that title before, but I can't be arsed to think up something else! Not exactly a Rack Toy Month perennial, yet something we have returned to often enough, and probably during some RTM's, but it happens I've found four new (or newish?) Dinosaur eraser sets recently, and these is they . . .

 

This was the missing Iwako set, which we did eventually look at I think, but I can't remember if it was shelfies, sealed, a show-shot or the full enchilada, so I grabbed this one when I saw it a while back now (garden centre I think, early May?), so I'd know I had one!

 

We've seen the Pterodactyl, and the other four biggies in close up for sure, but this set (and another multi-animal set) also has the two smaller, single-piece Velociraptors, and a pair of Archaeopteryx (Archaeopteryx'es?) for a nine-model count.

Then, at the end of May, I found these Kiwi dinosaur pencil rubbers, and again I can't now remember where, but it was probably another garden centre, but might have been Home Bargains, the TKMaxx full-price but cheapo' off-shoot? They are straight copies of Iwako (with the exception of the green cartoony smallie, who's also a single piece moulding), but more obvious piracies for not following the colours of Iwako as other clones do, but making for a more interesting heard, when added to the existing Iwako/Hawkins ones!

 

The other day I found these in . . . yeap, a garden centre, but this time I know where! It was the big Longacres  one up at Bagshot, and they are familiar sculpts in a new packaging, this time branded to Deluxbase.

 

And one new colour - the red Spinosaur! Although the two greens are quite different too. We saw the Range/i-doodle set a while ago, but for comparison, you can see it's basically the same assortment. 'Back to school' season, can be a good time to look for these things!

T is for Two - Cosmic Correctors!

 Or: P is for Poor-old Pluto!

 

Picked these two up on Wednesday of this week, so both are fresh in the shops, and shops I regularly check for such stuff, to boot!

 

The second find is on the left, the Legami set of Solar System erasers, while about an hour earlier I'd grabbed the Scribble Pop Shop set in Home Bargains (the TKMaxx vehicle). Google's AI answer-bot tells us "Legami was founded in 2003 and has their headquarters in Bergamo, Northern Italy. They started by selling book straps to tie your books together for easier carrying, and now they have more than 4000 products across all sorts of stationery types.", which makes more sense than they're having appeared out of nowhere, as they otherwise seem to have - presence at both recent product fairs, and more items in the queue, from a garden centre!

 

Obviously, it was the Iwako-style mini-rocket ships which attracted me, not the . . . 

. . . astronaught in a nappy (diaper)! The Scribble Pop Shop; an in-house branding, also responsible for a pencil case and colouring set in the same space theme, is presumably ('obviously' once you know the history/timings) aimed at countering the Legami set, or riding its boot straps (book straps!). And they seem to have got their generic planet from whoever made Legami's Saturn? The Legami set was in Ryman's, but they are also in garden centres, venue gift-shops and Claire's I think? Poor old Pluto!

M is for More - R is for Rubbers!

I've been rather too addicted to 'Reels' since Facebook started posting them on our feeds about six-months/a year (?) ago, and one of the common themes seems to be younger Brit's and Americans comparing each other's food, language and culture, often disparagingly, or at least comically, and one of the words which keeps coming up is 'rubber' for eraser.

 

Now, I deliberately chose to use the word 'eraser', from the off, and as the Tag, back at the start of the blog, or when I first covered them, as even if you're not chasing clicks, it behoves you to at least help the search-bots, which are, in the English language, mostly American in origin or location. But yes, we use rubber in everyday lingo.

 

And the various European forms of Spanish 'goma', the French 'caoutchouc' (cow chew!) or German 'gummi', all refer to rubber, as in the latex from rubber trees, while the word erase belongs in the group of words that includes destroy, obliterate, as in to wipe out or cancel. Although the fact that in Hollywood movies, the mafia are often rubbing people out, suggests that the connection is there, and that American English has evolved away from English, and 'rubber', with the adoption of 'eraser'?

 

I'm not sure that we've learnt anything there, or prevented future giggling on dreadful teenage influencer's Tick-Tock's or Instagram's, either side of the pond, but I've got a substantial intro', without much effort! As a follow-up to the eraser's seen in the 'London loot' post yesterday, here's a few more which have come in recently.

 

These are by Rex London, who we've seen before, and I can't remember where I got them now, but it was only a few weeks ago? more Iwako knock-offs, and more marine subjects, the whale with the fountain-spurt found in yesterday's Symex set is here, but the others are a bit more toward the realistic than the cartoony?

 

We did look at some of these in a previous post too, with their little black plastic eyes, and I wonder how may of them ever actually get used as rubbers, the bulk just building as a combined weight of collected novelties on the planet's surface, with the occasional clear-out sending some to landfill?

Dinorasers! We have seen these sculpts in WHSmith packaging before, but I think we have new colours/shades in this set, which is branded to i-doodle, one of the in-house brands of The Range, for their stationary lines, suggesting a third party contract-manufacture for both lots, and further brandings likely, away from these shores!

50p in a British Heart Foundation charity shop here, fundraisers for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution), another charity, and a flat lifeboatman was the attraction! There have been quite a few lifeboatmen figurines, and other relevant items from the RNLI, over the years, and they will get a page on the A-Z's one day, as I have several flyers of their fundraising items.

As an addendum, because I also chose to set my PC to proper English, every use of eraser above, has a blue line under it asking me if I want to switch spellchecker to American-English! And yes, we use the other 'rubber' too! Although there, the nationalism switches to our 'Auld' enemy', where we also call them French Letters, and they call them English Overcoats!

D is for Dinorasers - 3 of 3

The third part of this quick round-up/catch-up, is basically a comparison of older and newer sets, but the newer sets have a couple of extra tricks up their sleeves!

We start with a set which is basically a China-marked green set of the old Diener-rasers (geddit!) or the Total premiums from the 1970's, with a cheaper sub-piracy in blue (with a key-ring/charm loop), in the middle, which have come in recently, and that's it for a minute!

 

I also bought this bulk lot on a clearance price, and they are imported by an old favourite, David Halsall (now HTI). Each pack has one flat/block silhouette dinosaur and one semi-realistic erasersaur, except the pack which has two multicoloured extrusion 'slices' - bottom right.

One of which must be near the end of the run and is totally unrecognisable as an anything, leave-alone a dinosaur! Obviously the streams of different-coloured polymer have shoved each-other out of true? The other though, is a quite clear Triceratops.

The fully round ones are also harking back to the early sets from my own childhood, but again have charm-loop/key-ring holes, which - in this material - wouldn't stand up to a day's wear & tear? There are also subtle differences between the older and newer (these will be no earlier than the mid-1980's) versions.

 

This was the sample just as it went to storage in March '22, and includes all past posted stuff and everything in these three and the Iwako post, but not the stuff in last Thursday's post, which is the most recent stuff to come in.

 

And you can judge for yourself how size differs between the sets, erasers have a small-hand rule and don't vary much (beyond that huge blue lump, in the centre, from Flying Tiger, I think?). But there were those sets of little micro-mini's which were everywhere a few years ago!

D is for Dinorasers - 2 of 3

The second part, which is really of two pairs, or a T is for Four! Looking at the full sculpt/more realistic ones first, as a carry-over from part one, then a pair of 'flats' although 'slabs' is a better description!

Loving these anonymous types; two obvious dinosaurs and two, clearly Kaiju monsters! These are large for Erasersaurs, about the same size as the Strawberry ones, but I'll sort the sizes out in the final part.

 

While after the Taiwanese set in the last post, we are off to South Korea to find the Popcorn Fancy factory these left, however long-ago! They have a lot of surface detailing, but it's a bit odd, and was either early CAD-CAM machining, or the masters were 3D-printed when that tech' was, itself, still new, as the texture consists of lots of little rod-like structures, arranged in what appear to be similar to Fibonacci 'spreads'?

Flats, in that they are flat! Waterslide transfers applied to shaped cartouches? Blobs? Clouds! Barely figural, but look below, at least these are trimmed to a vaguely figural-shape! And we've got a couple of mammals, but as the oldest sets of Dinorasers have Woolly Mammoths in their line-up - that's practically tradition!

 

And yeah! These are just blocks with dinosaurs on them, but once you have established a 'side collection', completist'ism clicks-in, and any dinosaur eraser is a good eraser. It's the same with robots and spacemen, where 'flats' and blocks now feature!

D is for Dinorasers - 1 of 3

Clearing an old folder which was going to be one overview, but in the end it sort of made sense to break it up into three parts, so that's what I've done, and this is the first of those parts!

 

These are imported by Strawberry Design & Marketing, I don't know if they are the same as the more commonly encountered Strawberry Group (Saffron Walden, CB postcode), but CO9 is a Colchester postcode, so the suspicion is the same firm moved to larger (or smaller) premises?

 

These are quite large and well detailed for Erasersaus, so they may have been moulded from tools usually used for actual carpet-play dinosaur models? And - as far as I could tell - there were only the four sculpts, in all four colours.

Modern'ish erasers, which I think we've seen before in other branding's (the Asda and Paperchase set), here is the Chinese (?) parent - Shangxin? And new colours, arguably more realistic, the red one excepted!

These are older, and more mono-horned dino's, who would normally have pairs!  A little smaller that the previous set, and simpler, but still some nice surface detailing, no brand but claimed for Taiwan, which is less usual?

 

Very simple and taken from the 'rubber jiggler' set I've sung the nostalgia-praise of here, in the past, as my favourite childhood set, I think this was an eBay shot from years ago, and looking at it, they may be the smudgy silicon-rubber which makes for crap erasers!

These are credited to Rex London who we've previously seen here importing unpowered (or hand-powered!) gliders, so a consistent novelty importer then! Smaller than all the above, but really nice sculpts. More to come!

R is for Rubbed Out

I know, but I'm in a hurry and they did all go extinct! Back to the Iwako 'Dinorasers' or Erasersaurs, and I did manage to get one of the new 2020-launch sets back in 2021, so as a bit of a box-tick, here they are, and the backing cloth really seems to be that colour, I can't remember what it was, but the erasers are all relatively colour-true!

 

Packaging

 

Parts count

Assemblies;

Spinosaurus (poor man's Dimetrodon!), Sauropod and a Kerthunkasaurus!

 

I think this means I have all the known Iwako dinosaurs now, but not knowing if the Dimetrodon I found, or these above, will have other colourways, while knowing I still have two colour variations of the Paralophosaurs to find, means the search goes on!

I is for Iwako - Toy Fair 2020

Yeap! 2020, because, despite TJF's protestations about "Timely Manner" 's, most of what I shoot at the toy fairs is non-toy soldier, or non-time sensitive, or both, and is as much for my own records as anything else! Particularly with a novelty item like Iwako, who regularly get pirated by Chines producers, so it's as useful to have the record of the right colour-ways to help filter out copies, as anything else!

 

And I did post the new dinosaurs at the time, so this is a sort of bonus post! But to presage the next post, here's what I shot a few weeks before Covid started to visibly undermine capitalism and our trust in capitalists, if we had any?!

 

The main display; showing how this stuff is never actually rare, a row of modern injection-moulding machines will churn that lot out in ten minutes, and they can run for days, weeks or months - if you want, so people getting excited about late-production Starlux or Britains Deetail is just not something I can really get my head round!

Wacky/non-realistic colours were the thing that year!

Larger Paperchase stores had these point-of-sale displays before their recent bankruptcy. Smller stores may have had one of the others above?

That's it, just a bunch of images I took as much for my own amusement as anything else, and with some 45 folders still in Picasa from the 2019, '20 & '22 seasons, and '23's not even sorted/broken-down yet, I'll be bleeding the stuff onto here and the A-Z Blogs for years to come!