P is for Plastic Power . . . ♪♫ I Gotta' I Gotta' I Gotta' Jigga' Jig-Jig . . . Yeah! ♪♪

There are moments when you struggle to believe you've done something, and at Sandown Park the other day week month one of those moments overtook my ability to escape them and I bought a twelve-inch doll in order to add a one-inch doll to the collection!

A crime; a sin; a monumental act of stupidity I have still to fall-for a possible four-more times! Still, it's a while since we added a Galoob to the tag list, and getting the Spice Girls into the metadata won't hurt traffic!

Probably my favourite spice-girl (if I have one?), Posh was a haughty, humorless, thin-lipped tart, Baby was . . . well; a baby! Scary wasn't and Ginger was a bit OTT, but little Mel C was just a spunky Liverpudlian with a bit of attitude and 'up fer'it, jahnowhatahmeeen yer scally!'

Years ago, we had half a pallet of these to shift at the on-line auction house I worked for and they were bloody hard work, with a 99p start-price 'business-model' at the firm, we let a lot go for 99p, even whole sets of five, some people got mega-bargains!

I nearly got my mate JB to bid on a lot for me at the time, but I couldn't bring myself to subject him to the ignominy of taking delivery of-, or providing house-room for- five Spice Girl dolls! I did get him to bid successfully on the Star Wars stuff we were selling at the same time!

I daren't check what they go for now, but suffice to say I paid too much for it, I won't be telling you what that was, and you can be assured that everything bar the little figure was dropped into the Blue Cross animal-charity shop last Monday [last, last, last, last, last, last, last Monday now]! Sometimes you have to cut your losses and run, to save face; not with your mates, but with the chap in the mirror!

The little figure, however, is in the collection for keeps, I've been waiting for them to turn-up in mixed lots since I first became aware of them, and that was so long ago I gave up waiting and bought a whole caboodle a fortnight ago, just to get one!

Marked with a number and based to match the later combat infantry and Star Wars Micro Machines, the Galoob DNA is clear and as a standalone figure, just a young civilian woman; suitable for O-gauge railways! I wonder if that's where they all are; waiting for trains!

By now you've worked-out that each of the Spice Girl dolls comes with its own doll, the packing of which mirrors the packing of the larger dolls box, I still have four to locate and that's it . . . a bit horrid, but it had to happen - Toys is toys . . . all of them!

K is for ♯♪♫♫♪ Keep'ouwn Raaahhkin' . . . ♫♪♪♫

♫♫♪. . . in the Freeeee-wooorrrlld! ♫♪

Ladies and Gentlemen . . . The camera never lies!

The esteemed editor of Plastic Warrior magazine played the Teamsterz Stadium, with Dylan - fact!

Get the ultimate Rock'n'Roll merchandise here.

PW4 is for Polymer Player Paul Plucks Plastic Plectrum in Purple Pumps!

Or R is for Rockola, Replicants and Ruddy Hell; He's Only Gorn and Touched the Big Seven-Oh!

One of the nicest surprises at the PW show was a special figure from Peter Cole at Replicants, made to celebrate the 70th year (or 70's years?!!) of our estimable editor and all-round good-egg; Paul Morehead. The surprise being shared between both attendees and Mr. Morehead who had no idea the figure was going to be there!

Groovey-Scot Farmer of the Applegate Experience - '67 man!

Peter and Paul have been close since long-before I've been getting Plastic Warrior magazine, each helping the other with their respective projects and problems, whether practical . . . sculpting and moulding plastics, or historical; where Britains and Herald have dominated, so I think it's really nice that Peter went to this much trouble.

And, I don't know who painted the figure but look at that face  - that's Paul . . . with sideburns!

As if there was any doubt; the tale was explained on a little info-card on the day, and figures were available for sale for those of us who needed a voodoo pin-cushion! Joking! To be fair he hasn't changed that much, but if I had the chance to judge for myself, I missed it, as he only told me he'd gigged a pub round the corner, after the event!

I bought one! I'm going to have a stab at painting it at some point, but something a little more subdued than the show-sample, leather and denim maybe?

Should still be available from Weston's ToySoldier & Musician's Emporium

Paul Rocks!

I done did a .gif! This is it! It needed a scaler, or at least I thought so, Mr Morehead clearly had other ideas about sharing the stage with a berserker!

A few close-ups of the axe-man, out of the pack, there's quite a large undercut filled-in behind the gwi'tar but it looks easy enough to trim back and will be below the eye-line in any normal event, unless you mount/display it way above head-hight!

"How much did I drink last night?"

The word on the street is that 'Pluckin' Paul' would play '...any band, for beer!', and this old archive image of him and Hillbert Grape backing for Bat Fink & The Screamer at the Teamster stadium in Toytown, Toysylvania would seem to go some way to proving the truth of that particular rumour!

A is for Answer . . . from the Antipodes!

I may have mentioned a parcel from Mr. Sibbald down there in New Zealand? He actually sent four 'things' to the blog, three of which will be Blogged over the next week or two, and while the other things involved multiples of figures; the fourth 'thing' was this single figure, but how useful he turned-out to be:

He's pink . . . he must be Pink!

It's the missing colour from the unknown board-game set I couldn't find in the recent past despite trying various search terms on both Google and feebleBay. But as soon as I saw it (and I may have posited pink as one of the possible colours of the missing figure) I knew where to look.

Not only did the pink give it away, a quick look at the other's revealed the red, blue and brown to look confirmatory familiar, and I eMailed Glenn the same day to say I was sure they came from the Minimodels plant in Havent, as they match some of the figures from the 'Cops and Robbers' Sweeny-branded and Geronimo's Treasure games.

Sir Geldoff of Boomtown auditions for Boyzone!

So it was straight to Boardgamegeek, for searches of Berwick, Condor, Omnia, Tri-Ang, and err . . . the other one . . . Ariel! Nothing! Not a sausage, definitely not a guitarist! So I went to feebleBay and tried Pop Band, Pop Star, Rock Band and Rock Star, Band, Guitar Player and Guitarist (including all the usual Board Game, Vintage, Old, Plastic and Toy Figure prefixes or suffixes). . . some results were too long to be faffed-with, others drew a blank.

I was getting worried; I'd promised Glenn that by the time he read my eMail - which I'd sent in what was the middle of the night down there - I'd know the name of the game and it was beginning to look like I'd drawn a blank . . . again!

"One more note of Tar-rar-rah-boom-di-ay

and you'll be an ex-guitarist mate!"

But discovering in the course of these searches that Waddington's carried versions of some of the games carried by the other companies above - presumably as Waddington's bought them out - and remembering that Waddington's ended-up with the Subbuteo system also linked to Havent through the supply of the Stadden-designed figures, I thought I'd try Waddington's as a search subject.

I tried Waddington's Rock . . . nothing, Waddington's Star (as in rock or pop-star) . . . still nothing, finally Waddington's Pop (obvious; but it took me five or ten minutes to try it!) and BINGO! Two, near-mint, for sale as of last Friday;

Mike Reid's Pop Quiz, 60mm, polystyrene, six board-game pieces, Minimodels for Waddington's, probably, also, a Stadden sculpt?

I don't know, but suspect it might have been sold under other names/titles in other places where Waddington's operated (Oz, NZ, South Africa?) as Mike Reid wouldn't have been known outside the UK, being a British radio DJ!

Anyway; mystery solved . . . thanks to- and thanks; Glenn!

P is for Plastic Popsters

A bit of a swizz, as we've seen these before here at SSW, but I had them out and shot them so we might as well have a brief reprise!

Above; we have a variation of colours, the final guitarist is more orangey than the camera's flash would allow, I think I've seen yellow sets (they tended to be sold in sets of the same colour), but never  ared set, which, as I've suggested before, is probably due to the fact that the drum-kits are always red plastic.

Below; a bit of paint variation within a single plastic-colour's palette.

The aforementioned Drum-kits; I gave him a 'proper' set, so he can knock-out a rolling solo while the rest of the band pop-off the stage for a top-up of Charlie!

The kit is well made, and clever, but machined not hand-sculpted, like the later skis we looked at a day or two ago, and consists of a hollow bass, two side-drums and a single cymbal on a spike. The skins - suspended over both ends of the hollow 'tube' - are just blank, self-adhesive, paper price-labels!

A complete band, but with colours from three 'sets' . . . Let's Rock!!

With our frilly, crooner's shirt! Hee-hee!

S is for Subbuteo's Snappy Songsters!

Although known to be by Subbuteo in the UK, it's likely these were bought-in, and probably from Hong Kong, for several reasons, not least that a falco subbuteo (European hobby), as a small raptor, probably eats beetles when it's had a poor day's hunting larger pray!

Two other [proper!] reasons for suspecting importation are that 1) they were also issued carded in the 'States with white rosette-backs as lapel badges, presumably to cash-in on a US Tour?

2) They are made of a softish plastic which could be either a polyethylene or a dense PVC, either way; it's a much better material for making footballers than the brittle styrene Subbuteo was using at the time.

Nevertheless, they are very well-done compared to all the other 'Beatles' cake-decorations we've looked at, although Subbuteo sold them as stand-alone (stand- together!) figures in a window-box set. All three guitars are different shapes, with well-registered stickers applied, and all are held in place with a small black rubber-band on the note-forming/fret-board wrist.

The drummers stool is glued on and the Drum-kit usually has more than just a bass-drum if I recall correctly (with a stand of some kind?), but a slip of the scissors (you had to cut the kit out) and you might easily end up with just the main drum! Indeed, the lack of a 'proper' drum-kit may point to the US badges coming first?

R is for Rock Chick Rolls Around Again

I thought I recognised that Japanese guitarist the other day and sure enough; when I got the civi's out of storage there she was again, as an unpainted Mattel import with most of her band -mates (I'm missing one).

Sold as both CUTIE (Coolest Ultra Tiny Individuals [on] Earth) in four figure random blister-packs and Tiny Trendies as full set of ten window-packs, by Mattel and also five-figure sets, maybe? The one we saw the other day may be a Japanese Bandai-issued original, marking is the same on both.

F is for Follow-up - Beatles Cake Decorations

The last time we looked at some of these (if not the time before as well!), I think I mentioned that I had another set in storage, and these are they!

They are midway between the smaller and larger examples we've seen here before, but Ringo at least (if you're a cake decorator) comes firmly attached to a drum! Like the previous sets you can see these in other colours on the Wibbly Wobbly Way, I've seen them in a similar pale blue to the smaller set, apple green, lemon yellow and primrose.

When we looked at the - still title-less - pop star board-game playing pieces a few months (weeks?) ago, I hoped out-loud I might have a 6th-colour in storage, I didn't, I had these two who are now 'for swap' duplicates, also in the box was the rather sullen looking grunge-babe who I think can be dated to the 1980's 'pop scene' by dint of her pixy-boots!

She's marked 'Japan' and definitely comes under the 'factory-painted LRG' (little rubber girl!) classification.

1st May 2020 - Turned out a few weeks later she was one of the Mattel 'Cuties'

P is for Pop Music . . . ♩♬ m'Pop, m'Pop, m'Pop-Musik! Talk'a'bout doobie-doo Pop Musik! . . . ♩♫

Picked this quintet up the other day, for a song ('juke-box hero' . . . heh-heh!) I know I have a purple one in storage, but five was too good to pass-up, they're playing pieces from a board game the name of which escapes me but I haven't got time to look it up (timing's all shot to pieces this week!) and I think there may be a sixth (black?) piece missing, or was it a five-player game? I'll dig it out next week.

Pretty clean-cut for pop-stars; I tend to think of them as Cliff Richard'a'likes! Around 54mm and made in a standard model-kit type polystyrene you often find them at shows in the 50p rummage sections with broken or damaged guitar-necks.

Detail shots.

Thought for the day

There used to be a joke that when Elvis died there were x-dozen registered Elvis impersonators or tribute acts, ten years later there were x-hundred registered and ten years after that; x-thousands of the bespangled crooners, and that extrapolating those figures forward, the entire population of the planet would be Elvis impersonators by 2051!

Now - with news of a holographic Roy Orbison back on tour, and Elvis having already had similar treatment, will we one day fill the known universe with the sound of comfy-rock; with the entire population of the human race either impersonating a 50's pop-star, or paying to see a holographic one? Will planets of fake Elvis's launch vast armada's of killer death-ray armed starships against planets of Roy Orbison-a-likes.

Will the night-skies of a thousand star systems be lit-up with the supernova-flashes of intergalactic battle fleets deciding arguments between fans of Supertramp on one side and Supertrooper on the other! And will they all go into battle playing Wagner's Ride of The Valkyrie's? In space; no one can hear you croon!

Or should it be 'Sista', good name for a band; slimmer-sista! Comparison shot; all the others have been seen here at Small Scale World before, trouble-is they are hidden in the tag list under 'Band' I think, which is full of Guardsmen, one day I'll have to re-tag the relevant posts under 'pop music' or something, but we have a couple more HK sets to come and will revisit Gem at some point. Not to forget - rock star Smurfs!

Emirober on the left, two Hong Kong's and a resin 'unknown' (second from right) along with the game piece; centre.

♩♬ New York, London, Paris, Munich - Everybody talk about . . . m'Pop Musik! ♩♫ 

1st May 2020 - The upper five were joined a while later - Courtesy of Glenn Sibald in Australia) with a sixth, pink one, which revealed them instantly to be Tri-Ang as - together - they looked just like the Cops & Robbers figures seen here before!

 

2nd April 2024 - the resin figure is a Cakeboards chap.

Q is for Question Time - Rhine Find, Saved from the Oceans!

Reader Sylvia found this in the silt of the River Rhine and asked after it, while I'm sure I have some flats with similar two-part bases (with heavy machine-tooling marks), I can't even picture them at the moment (with my eyes shut - which usually works), so does anyone recognise it?

Semi-flat frog musician, who I suspect is polyethylene; to have retained all the guitar-string tighteners on it's way down the Rhine? Were there some Italian toy soldiers with those bases? Anyway, if you recognise this, Sylvia would love to know more about it . . . premium?

C is for Crooning Liver'blokes

Or: M is for More Insects!

There was some anniversary the other day, a photograph book of some kind I believe, I wasn't following the minutiae of the business but I believe it involved that popular Merseyside beat-combo from the sixties - init'bluuurrd!

You see these (or - more usually - part sets of them) on evilBay from time to time and having covered most of the other examples of the plastic plectrum pluckers here at small scale musician's world; I leapt at the chance to shoot this set of bobble-headed, flat-fringed, suited & booted, boy-band'ers.

A tad fuzzy, I'm afraid; much as I remember their output! It's a bit like trying to photograph insects! "♫♪Whay-hey we're the . . .♪♫ ", oh-no - they were monkeys weren’t they!

You could almost use them as pencil tops, but they are quite heavy, so only advisable if you wanted your handwriting to read like one of Donald's tweets . . . WTF? The man's a loon, they elected a loon to the highest office in the land!

The only reason you can't hear the world laughing at the OOH-KAY is because they're laughing louder at the OOH-ess-AY!

Oi, Macca! There's a song in there somewhere?

Thanks to Adrian of Mercator Trading for allowing me to photograph these.

R is for ROCK & ROLL!

We've looked at most of the Hong Kong Beatles and a few other Rock Star types here in the past, here's one that escaped closer attention . . .

. . . The Swingers Music Set - Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!, boxed in all its slightly jazzy loveliness, it's not that rare, but like all the 'Beat Combo' sets does command a premium, especially when in this sort of condition, with the fine mouldings of the mic-stands, the cymbals &etc, all present.

Ladies and gentlemen; May I present for your pleasure, fresh from the top nightclubs of Tokyo, Kowloon Bay and 'Kay-Ell', the world famous, Sino-Japanese Beatles tribute act - The Beatelles!
Like most of these HK sets, they don't claim to be the fab four (the left-handed guitarist is the giveaway), and while none of them really resemble the boys; unlike the other sets these don't even look like Western musicians at all!

Seemingly based on 'The Swingers' we've already seen here (large blue ones) before I knew their title, they are poorer sculpts, but a fuller set, and about the same 66/70mm size, both sets would seem to be following the 'Go-Go Swingers' we have yet to see here, who are smaller and the best sculpts of these HK chaps.

With the three - above mentiond - and another 54mm HK set (in four colours), the named Spanish (Emirobar) and British (Subbuteo) Beatle sets, the board game guitarists (also four colours) and Gem for Culpitt's band (several colours), you can mount quite a festival on your display shelves, add the two types of Beatle 'Bobble-Head' (blow-moulded and styrene) I've tracked down over the years and all you need is love . . . and Nirvana's front man! Or is he from Guns and Roses?

Practicing air-guitar on a beach-inflatable; he's a resin cake decoration, in shops now, probably available from Wilton over the pond, or one of the bigger online cake-decoration suppliers, that only leaves me needing the Mattel Pop 'Cuties'!

Thanks to Adrian at Mercator for letting me shoot the photographs.

W is for Warblers-on-Wirrel

Wellll, overrated in my opinion and I was always a Stones fan, although they are all sell-out litigious capitalist swine now!

One of the first words I remember actually 'learning' was Synergy (the first ever - in my memory - was People, taught to me by Mr Barker, headmaster of the village school in Heckfield, long-ago turned into yuppie-flats...pea ee oh pee el ee, it sort of rhymed!), and the reason I looked it up (other than someone had used it in a context I half-understood) was because like 'Egypt' it had too many of the odd letters in it to make sense! Suffice to say that the dreaded Wikipedia defines it thus; Synergy is two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable.

Well, if I hadn't posted the Spanish-made mop-tops the other night, and if the seller hadn't taken these to Sandown Park on Saturday, they wouldn't be here now...is that synergy or coincidence? It's synergy in my book, as I've seen them before and not bought them, but had half a mind to find some more Beatles at the show!

When I mentioned the other sets, the other day, I was thinking of a set of 70mm Hong Kong figures and the Subbuteo set, so when I saw these in a little bag, I was surprised by the size (54mm) and the level of painting which was much better than the larger ones (or at least - I think it is, I'm not sure as they are in storage so I can't check!). Not having any funds I hid them, rushed away to borrow some dosh off a mate and went back to see if they were still there, they were...and I paid too much for them! Moral...never rush away from a stall-holder and then come back panting with a large denomination note!


Then once I had them in my grubby mitts and showed them to the other guys - we were hanging around the 'car-boot sale' some dealers have on the terraces of the main stand while we wait to get in - they all said something to the effect '...they're not the big Hong Kong ones...' so it was agreed they were worth the effort, and means I can bring them to the blog while they are still half topical, I can still bring you the other two sets another day, and compare these with the larger red ones (I'm pretty sure they are the same poses pantographed up, or down?).

M is for Mop-topped

A quick box-ticking exercise this one; That too-famous (in my opinion) bunch of mop-topped beat musicians John, George, Ringo and the money-grabbing one were immortalised in plastic several times, both in Hong Kong and the UK, but also in Spain.

Whence this set issued-forth, it was apparently a mail away premium offered by a Spanish Comic which I'm assuming was called Emirober? But it may have been several comics and such-like in different European countries? The figures were probably made by someone else...Jecsan maybe? The comic obviously thought they would sell like hot cakes as they ordered what seems to have been hundreds of thousands of sets, with the result that a quick Google will reveal them to be as common as anything, with whole stock boxes regularly going through auction houses, while FeeBay and it's contemporaries always have a few sets kicking around.

The trouble being that despite it's availability, dealers seem to think that all things 'Beatle' must carry a premium, and tend to price it to reflect that. Fortunately there was an ethical dealer at the recent Birmingham Toy Soldier Show, who had a bunch at a couple of quid each ($3/4 or Euros), so I picked one up to 'tick the box' here.

Each card is different, having identical sides, which differ from the other three to be sought if you are that level of completest, The cards each having a different Liverpudlian balladeer as the central theme. I went with the one I think is meant to be John Lennon. Figures also come in orange, sky-blue and dark green plastic, giving the same completest 28 figures to find!

M is for Mop-Tops - Culpitt 'Battle of the Bands'!

More Culpitt's - These are 45mm 'Beatles' era musicians, if you want a collection they turn up all the time on eBay, however, don't pay silly Buy-it-now prices, you can pick them up for pennies if you're patient!

The pale blue variant I mentioned in 'lazy post' last night, this is a 'full band' there was no left-handed guitarist, so they never tried to be the Beatles, although there are at least three lots of figures in 54/60 & 70mm that do represent that very band.

The various parts of the drum-kit with the brown boys, note; there is a slight colour variation with some a pinkish-brown, this doesn't show well in the photo, but there is a clear difference. The skins on the drums are paper stickers and were applied to one side only.

Two of the three green band with Culpitt's footballers, the footballers were never made in the brown, but there may well be yellow band around somewhere, but I've yet to come across any, nor indeed red ones? Yet the drum-kit only seems to come in red!

The figures are unmarked, and late production would have come from Hong Kong, however early production will be UK-sourced. The lack of a mark makes it hard to say for certain weather they were by Gemodels or Festival. Most think Gem, however the base designs, size/scales and sculpting are so similar between the two companies, I'm beginning to suspect that Festival was a trade-mark of Gem, but they may just have been sharing sculptor!