T is for Two - Keycraft Novelties

While I was up at the Spring Gift Fair in Birmingham last week, I had a very useful chat with a rep' from Keycraft (among others), and while there are show reports to come, he actually gave me a couple of samples, both of which were figural and fun, so here they are, with a Brucey Bonus for a three count!

 

The first thing was this bendy-toy, astronaut, too cool for moon-shot flight school! To be honest, because NASA's spacemen have what equates to a fat-suit, by the time you've modelled it accurately, there is too much rubber compressing to allow the wires to move far, so he's probably the least bendy of all the bendy toys we've seen here, poses rather limited to Dr. Frankenstein's Monster in a flight-suit, but he's still fun!

 

He has the same twin air holes at various points in the back, as have all bendy toys since the year dot . . . Maybe it's to do with how they keep the wires spaced correctly, in the mould, for the surrounding substrate to be equally distributed, with the 'maquette' wires in the dead-centre of the cross-sections, if you know what I mean?

 

Well, well, well, really? Is he just using me for ideas now? That's tragic!

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-world-of-bendables-space-alien.html

 

The Keycraft chap also gave me this fun item, and as you can see, because both the cheese and the mice are made of stretchy silicone, you can stuff the meeces in one hole, and pull them out of another! This will provide hours of entertainment for little people of a certain age, or even excitable Aspergics of an embarrassing age!

 

I then found this, unlabelled, in the new toy superstore in Basingrad (Toytown), and a quick google suggested it may also be Keycraft, however the same Google results further suggest an outfit called The Senmsory Place issues them with grey, white or dun-brown mice, while Keycraft's issue are typically only the grey one, so this may be a Sensory Place one?

 

The purchase code, the only clue I have was KS, which could be Keycraft-something, or have a completely different meaning! You can see, however, it's almost the same size as the holey one, and there's another, similar novelty, in forthcoming posts!

 

I've since - this week - seen both the bendy astronaut and the holy mice for sale in Redfields, Fleet, so very-much out there now!

LB is for Like Bullets!

Or at least, they would leap like bullets if they weren't missing their baseplates and springs, for now they are rather stationary but these LB follow-up's by HF had to have an iterative trope in the title and that was all I could come-up with!

 

We have seen these before and two of them were complete, with a spare spring on the third to boot, so they can all share the bottom pieces for any future jumping competitions!

 

In the order they arrived; so, that's six now, two Vichy robots giving-up before they've got going and four of the 'officer' with pistol, so it's starting to look like only the two poses were used, but I'll keep half-an-eye out for more - poses or colours!

J is for Jumping Jazzberry Jaguar

I picked-up a nice mixed lot of jumpers a while ago, I think we've seen several now already, but there's a couple of 'jiggler' type monsters still to come, in the meantime and as a continuation of one of the side-collections, there was this Pink Panther.

Not a lot to add to the pictures, but you want to try and get three lines out of it to keep the Google-bots happy, so extra images for colour variation against different backgrounds and note he's wearing PE-kit of 'singlet & shorts' and looks happy anticipating his violent acceleration along a random trajectory with a 50/50 chance of landing on his head!

Marked-up to Hong Kong with a haloed globe and the letters HF (heliotrope feline!), I test fired him and he leapt about three feet . . . and landed on his head! Testing was in the interests of research of course, I'm a grown-up, I don't play!

This chap came in with a mixed lot at some point, I think. His natty jacket and hat also happen to match the sucker-pad on the one above, colour-wise, and I thought I might have him in the four we saw a while back, but he's new (there was one with a top-hat in that other set), and is probably from another set of four from the same source as last time.

T is for Two - Hobbycraft Rack Toys

These are fun, one being a copy of previously seen stuff, the other a rather weird take on millinery! It's funny, you can go to one of these big-box stores regularly for several years and find nothing beyond a mould-your-own pirate fort to shelfie, or you can go three times in three months and walk away with something after every visit! I was in Hobbycraft the other day for a multi-compartment storage tray and left with three, and these two!

"Throw an egg in it; that'll make it Easter-bonnet'ty!" Yeah, seriously . . . but a nice set of mini dinosaurs married to a scenic space-taker and a couple of bits of greenery, Easter bonnet's are all about the greenery!

The two on the right are from forthcoming posts on kids comic giveaways, and while the Hobbycraft ones are similar they are 'new' copies rather than pantographed clones, and - it has to be said - of slightly poorer quality/finish.

The palm trees are fascinating - from a technical point of view - as they are a single moulding (that frond is growing out of the trunk), which must be shaped with heat, probably while still hot from the moulding process? The shrub is clearly a fish-tank thing with a weight-basket attached to bury in the gravel at the bottom of a tank!

And they both have this bi-colour single-shot moulding which pushes the paler colour to the extremities, which have looked at before, again coming our hobby via aquaria? 

While these are branded to Unique, who we've seen before as purveyors of fine novelty tat! They are smaller copies of the Henbrandt ones we saw here, the originals going to five poses, to which we added a sixth pose here.

I don't know if these knock-offs have copied all six sculpts as they are only sold in fours and all the bags had the same contents? That's it; a couple of rack-toys in Hobbycraft now.

I would add that House of Marbles are carrying the Henbrandt set in new colours, so we will see these again here at Small Scale World.

H is for How They Come In - December 2020 - II Chris - Space & Sci-Fi

I should have added the TV/Movie image to this post to balance them better, but sometimes I lose the wood for the trees with the number of Toy Soldier posts currently in Picasa!

So a swifter read than the others, but heay-ho; there's a shot in the next post which probably should have gone with the cartoon stuff in the previous post (which was the TV/Movie image!), that's how it shakes down!

Smaller scales/sizes - from the left; an interesting figure who looks capsul'ey to me? A Putty from Galoob; another capsule-toy type I think (is he a character anyone recognises?); possibly another Galoob Micromachine, a character from Marvel or DC, which might make him late Kenner; a nice mini-Keshi of a sort of lobster-man, and a figure who looks like one of Hasbro's Air Raiders, but doesn't actually appear to be one?

A small group of space vehicles - fact and fiction; with two Bruder/Giodi/Kinder types, an Apollo Eagle Lander cake decoration (issued by Blue Shield in the 'States) and the lower half of Airfix's funny little Bell Aeronautics LFV.

This is nice, I haven't ID'd it yet (probably a die-cast or play-set accessory), about 30mm and PVC, I can't make my mind-up whether the visor is meant, or a home enhancement with a marker pen - I suspect the later.

I have apologised to Chris for not crediting him the first time I blogged this, but it was obviously because having shot it for these posts in December last, I then sorted it away, and found it again months later, with some surprise! A pop-up knock-off of an LB astronaut/spaceman! Cheers Chris!

T is for They Keep Turning-up For Duty!

Those who have followed the blog since the start will know I like any excuse to return to LB's space sets and derivatives, and while LB is still contentious as a title, time will tell, and those still using LP will have to come-round in the end.

Funniest was someone still using IDL till well after last May (2020) who then quietly switched to LP and within two months was lecturing Erwin on Faceplant as to why it was LP as if he hadn't spent the 20-odd years since LP was coined, continuing with IDL!

He's trying to hang it on the Lik Be Plastics' hook, but it's Lik Be Plastics and Metal, so would be - under any rule of nomenclature - LPM, LBPM, LP&M or even LBP&M, it's none of them it's LB for Lik Be. Only for Erwin - a few months later - to lecture someone else on LP as if he'd known it all along! They are awful, that PSTSM-lot are awful!

Anyhoos, four lots of LB recruits have come in the last 12-or-so months . . .

. . . including a new Moon Exploration bagged set (from the Antipodes - I think he's still listing one), four more chromium-finished chaps and two pop-ups . . . we've seen the erasers already but they can be the fourth! Bag is LB marked and - along with the four loose figures - contents all have the usual LB base-mark, the others are derivative/pirates.

I'm not opening these yet, but a few shots to show that you get all eight astronauts in plain white and all six robots in 'atomic-green', all in soft polyethylene and all carrying the full base mark, but of interest is that the robots have all have their conversion to hangers for key-chains and the like, as have the pink ones in the blister-carded set seen here previously, so the key-ring iteration (see Wotan Bill's posts on Moonbase) was definitely an interim phase.

The four loose ones were in a mixed lot with some other stuff which I was more interested in (even though I couldn't now tell you what that was/they were as it's all been sorted away in the chaos here at the moment), the lot only added one figure-pose  to the chrome sample (upper row), but I stripped the paint off the other three to add to my 'plastic variants' sample, and the lower row is that sample, now.

Because these are coated with a powder (probably aluminium or a zink-aluminium alloy?), when you strip them (which takes about four seconds on immersion in concentrated ammonia - TFR [Traffic Film Remover] or Silver-dip), they leave the varnish/glue coating with which they were covered before coating; it  doesn't show so much on the dark figures but which is obvious on the paler ones.

I know people bang-on about 'vacuum-coating' but that's a different process found on more expensive toys from big-brands and which peels in sharp-flakes, this is more akin to flocking, but with a substrate which is naturally polished (as granules or molecules) and settles in a shiny coat, to the human-eye. I've said before - you can get a similar product ready-mixed in cans as an aerosol.

Upper row are the new additions, lower row are some of the variants of the same pose. Except, the new ones are actually replacing my older samples as they were worn, through handling, while the incomers were pretty mint, so it was all change of the old guard! Although the full sample is larger as I've kept a few each of the chromium ones and the brushed-aluminium-looking ones over the years.

If you think I'm cheating by counting the erasers as the fourth addition when they've already been seen here before, you can count the middle guy here as the fourth-addition instead, but he was actually in the 'Unknown Space Men and Humanoid-Aliens' box, where he's been for years! He's missing his base-section.

The other two, a paler pink - came in with a mixed lot of identically-mounted rubber-jigglers (also marked HF) and a couple of Imperial Toys-marked similar rubber stuff, all-else of which we'll look at another day. Clearly they are 'after' the LB sculpts, both robots and spacemen, but how many were so copied I don't know. And you can see that without finding the more-obvious robot, the astronaut would have languished in the unknown's box for a while longer!

All three of these are hollowed, relief-sculpted semi-flats in polyethylene, and I doubt the HF is for Hing Fat . . . wacky novelties? Not really them; they have nailed their colours to a different mast, and anyway, I suspect these pre-exist Hing Fat's dates by a decade at least, however I don't have another candidate yet?

19th June 2021 - Correction! The other - darker pink - one had only been in the unknown box since December (possibly why I didn't remember having him!) and had come from Chris Smith as my mind was on Mum's illness over Christmas, so apologies to Chris, they all came in quite recently!

G is for Gurrt Guards' Gathering!

I was doing  a bit of sorting on Saturday, and I thought this would be a fun shot, all the larger novelty or touristy items of a guardsman-like persuasion! I think we've seen most of them before - separately?

From the left; A wooden Christmas tree decoration based on the nutcracker trope, a poured-resin chap '© G•G.' (Gisela Graham?) from Peter Evans and the Toyway guardsman from Chris Smith (who remembered they were Toyway after I'd posted him the other day, the RHA figure, also from Chris was another one).

Then another wooden one, this is a push-button/drop-down strung-toy, he's actually almost the shortest, but with a 30mm plinth would have looked silly towering over the first three had I placed him to the left!

The fabric Guard I found last November/December in TKMaxx (made in India), and finally a stacking toy which I suspect is quite modern, but which resembles one we had as kids. I occasionally see it on evilBay (the vintage one) and keep meaning to get one, it's a taller, thinner model, and the larger-number of segments are tapered, so have to be stacked in order.

That would have been it, but - of course - in the putting away of the one lot, I re-discovered the others! So, from the left; The twin-LED torch who plays some god-awful rendition of the National Anthem, or Rule Britannia . . . or the other one? He's on the blog somewhere with his full consumer details!

Then the flat, probably from a wooden fort set of the early-learning type (and looking more Wellingtonian next to the others), another tree decoration, based on nut-cracker tropes, then another push-button/drop-down strung-toy, both being about the same size as their counterparts in the first image, the wobbly one being tagged to Wilco and finally the Noki washing-up sponge seen before, but I think all this second batch have.

Airfix sax-player for scale, he's approximately 23mm.

S is for Shelfies - Catering Novelties

It's shelfie weekend everyone! Don't worry, it won't be a regular thing, but they have been building-up for about 18/20-months now and I thought I'd clear a few here while I've got them all together, although I know there are one or two others somewhere!

Staring with catering novelties which were mostly shot in TKMaxx, but with the last lot a more conventional toy thing photographed in Sainsbury's.

I'm loving these 'Mexican Wrestler' bottle-openers! Marketed by Kikkerland and presumably the result of some competition or sponsored thing (as our own Design Museum puts on or supports from time to time), and while I could only find two designs, there may be more and/or other colours?

I really ummned and arrrhhed on these, not so much the submarines as the divers, but the deciding factor on leaving them on the shelf was that they were full of liquid and might leak one day, quietly on the shelf, or in the attic or garage, messing something else up? I suppose you could get a plastic-surgeon (geddit!) to syringe the water out and replace it with clear silicon!

Close-up of the little divers, who could just as easily be spacemen or astronauts? Eight for three-quid is about 33p each, and Kikkerland again.

It was frog plant-ties which kicked-off our occasional visits to bendy-toys here at Small Scale World a few years ago, well now you can get chameleons in pairs, in at least six colours, although they don't change colour so more; 'big-eyed geckos'! These were in Flying Tiger (formerly Tiger) a while ago.

Found in Sainsbury's at the beginning of April; within a month Peter Evans had sent me the one on the right with the same green/yellow colourway! The sad thing is that Sainsbury's were selling these internally branded in 12's, three-each of four colours, while a few years ago they were in eights (2x4's), thus we see 'shrinkflation' come to Toytown!

One the left are the Henbrandt aliens (six to a set) in fours . . . Doh! 

B is for Beefeater

I hope I had Y is for Yeoman of the Guard last time, 'cos if I've used B twice I wasted an opportunity to get a Y in the tags! Since looking at one before Christmas, I've combined the various odds on this subject and shot the Charbens' one while I was at it!

The 'odds' first and from the left; The Doll which came in a Charity shop purchase just before Christmas, only because I'd got the same doll in a household cavalry uniform a few weeks earlier, but I have no good excuse for that prior purchase! Next to him on the plinth is a wooden pop-up, which was from Wilkinson's (Wilco) I think, I also think we've seen it before?

The third figure is [more!] resin, and only joined the team a couple of weeks ago, Peter Evans gave him to me in London the other day, he's presumably a current or recent Tourist thing, but - interestingly - is in the uniform of the old Elizabethan tower-guards, although at that time they would have been guarding the city gates, Bishops' palaces and Windsor castle as well - I imagine?

The fourth was among the first of Britains 'New Metal' figures back when my brother and I were just getting out of toys in favour of hard rock, beer and cigarettes! He has a small square base in a Deetail style, but is himself all-metal with a plastic partisan that seems impossible to replace.

Then the Hong Kong one we saw recently and lastly a little PVC/vinyl-rubber key-ring tourist keepsake (his loop's been removed - it arched over the top of his headdress) I picked-up years ago as a small scale curiosity.

The Charbens one is an odd cove, he has the sort of googly-bug-eyes you might expect to find on Hong Kong sub-piracies, not home-grown figures, but there you go! The unpainted figure is a re-issue and the one on the far right seems to be an attempt to re-ignite the spark of tourist trinkets inherent is the figure, using the recent re-issues, but may just be a gloss home-paint in the Hollow-cast 'Toy Soldier' style.

The group together make a nice sample of different treatments, which I've lined-up in what might be the age order, with earlier, better painted to the left and latter re-issues to the right?

I is for IT'S Chriiiiiiiistmaaaaaaaaaaas!

Yes, I think we've had that title before, or a variation on it and I'm sure we'll have it again because it's Chriiiiiiiistmaaaaaaaaaaas!

Muttonchoptastic!

Gisela Graham, purveyor of fine wholesale ornamentation to the gentry and anyone else who'll give her a few shekels for it! She is to Christmas; what Dorothy Perkins was for summer dresses, or to Christmas trees; what Cath Kitson is to tea-time and cushions!

Charity Shop!

We had two of these when we were kids, they came in our Christmas-morning stockings and were a tiger and a zebra, I don't know what happened to them but I've always missed them as they sat above the curtain-rail for the whole of my remembered childhood with a Wade drummer-boy, some Whimsies dinosaurs and wild animals (also Wade!) from Christmas crackers and a few other figural 'objéts', probably where I got the collecting-bug from?

In Operation!

I don't know what these are called in common parlance, do they have a name? Pop-ups, poppers, droppers, drop-downs, bowers, take-a-bows, collaps'ers, spring-ups? They are 'Pop-up Toys' in the tag list . . . all two of them!

I bought a Yeoman of the Guard one a year or two ago in Wilkinson's. Now, they say "More than two is a collection" so, that's another sub-branch/sub-section/sub-genre I seem to have embarked upon!

It's only 24 days 'till Santa comes!

F is for Follow-up - Henbrandt

Third post today and we're back to Henbrandt, and the current cheepie-bin stuff from The Entertainer, I went again, I saw more, I purchased . . . 3-for-a-pound! I buy this shite so you don't have to . . . but they're paratrooper-aliens, and jumping monsters, why wouldn't you?!

Plunder; I popped in as I thought there might be other colours/poses in the parachuting aliens box; when I went there last time I DID dig around, but the box was full, and it's the same sort of box Bic Biro's used to come in; tall but with a small opening at the top, and as it was full, I couldn't dig too far down without spilling paratrooper aliens all over the shop!

So, it was slightly less full, and I had a dig, found two new poses and a new colour and was going to make a six-lot when I happened to look across at the jumping monsters box, now; I dug to the bottom of that bugger last time, double checking with what was in my hand and mentally wondering if I should get another multi-eye - just in case it was different from the one I'd found in the road - but no, I missed one! Thus: I left with five aliens and one monster for the six.

After I'd taken the group shot on the right and was putting them away, I noticed there was a third pose (four in total now), so we have a guy in a waistcoat holding his head, a guy with boxing gloves and a girl in a Tutu or Ra-Ra skirt, and I'm going to have to go back and dig some more as it's such an eclectic mix there's bound to be more, while in the meantime a metallic aqua-blue has been added to the colours.

The sixth Jump-up Monsters pose is a smiling, red Cyclopean, or should that be cyclopean, red-smile?

F is for Funny How Things Come Together Sometimes

Or: H is for Henbrandt . . . Again!

I was walking up to the station the other day and a saw a piece of orange plastic in the detritus building up in the rain-channel the local authority gave-up cleaning as soon as they had installed it!

Picking it up (I'm a right old pikey!) I recognised it to be a jumping-toy mechanism and stuffed it in my pocket . . . for the spares box, you understand!

Only to notice a rather mucky blob of green rubber a few days later in the same damp leaf-pile, taking that home too - for a good wash with a toothbrush, it was obvious they went together . . . probably thrown from a passing car by a stroppy infant, or dropped by the occupant of a pram?

Thinking maybe it was a Frogglet from the Clangers, and possibly a freebie from one of these kids magazines, I put it to one side intending to include it in one of the future Christmas novelty round-ups or a [the] Clanger post (which has been in Picasa for a while now!) after shooting off a few pictures for whenever; and thought no more about it, for a week or three.

Then, when I popped into The Entertainer in Basingrad for my occasional look to see if there are any new rack-toys around, or any developments in Star Wars or Micro Machines &etc., I found a whole box of them! 50p each! You'd be mad not to (or less mad than me? Doh!), so I bought one-each of the four I didn't have.

Because we'll probably never return to them, and I quite like them - in my immaturity! - I took too many photographs, so here are a couple more! 

The blue one reminds me of Plug from the Bash Street Kids!

Branded to Henbrandt, and part of a promotional, pocket-money, toy stack/display called Fun Time, they were alongside the usual segmented snakes, yo-yo's, bouncy-balls and so on, all @ 50p per unit.

However, when I went to pay for my four-for-two-quid Jump-up Monsters (for that is what they are called on the receipt), the cashier said "That's one-fifty sir", says I "I think you'll find it should be two, there's four here and they're fifty-pee each?", "No" replies the lad; "They are on offer, it's all three-for-a-pound on that end", "Blimey" says I, "I'll have another look" . . .

. . . returning moments later, to the same till, with three parachuting aliens, each holding an umbrella - as an emergency 'shute - and a book to read on the way down! The three also in Henbrandt 'cellophanes', a quid: bargain!

In the meantime, I had found this further along the same footpath, but definitely a pedestrian's loss as it was where the path is further from the road - maybe a secretive baby is feeding stuff he wants to see on the Blog, to the Blog, by 'accident'!

It too is branded to Henbrandt, and I had seen them, a while ago (but can't remember where, as I never imagined I'd need to know!) in larger bags of 10 or maybe 20 units for a couple- or few-quid as bulk-buy, party favours.

[chant]

♪♫♪ Allll to'getheeer'now - alltogethernow! ♪♫♪

♪♫♪ Allll to'getheeer'now - alltogethernow! ♪♫♪

[up an octave]

♪♫♪ Allll to'getheeer'now - alltogethernow! ♪♫♪

[shout]

♪♫♪ Aaalllllll toooo'geethhh-eeerrrr NOW! ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

[repeat until you're sick of it in your head - earworm!]