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!

Frog is for Krugozor

Actually it means Flies Right Off [the] Grownd! This is definitely a convenient hook to hang stuff on; I've had the scans hanging around in Picasa for nearly two years while I wondered what to do with them, and the black-background'ed image is from nearly a year ago, from the photo-shoot of the parcel Chris Smith sent to the Blog before Christmas last, while the other shot is from a more recent donation also from Chris, they allowing me to get the others off the laptop whilst covering another Russian brand in passing, with - probably - British figures!

Not particularly rare, a Google-image search provides enough pictures of sets and part sets of the Frog F139 - RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) Oakley-class North Sea Lifeboat to work out that the kit seems to contain two of the plain, arms-down, standing poses and one coxswain/helmsman ('driver'!), advertised at 1:48th, they are 40mm figures and manufactured in 'kit' styrene.

Most of Frog's mould bank 'went East' at the end of the 1970's, where they have been rather passed around, most starting life with the Soviet-era Novo, as the Lifeboat did, only to turn-up in various colours, this tool is currenyly held by Alanger. However for a while there was a domestic issue of the model by Krugozor.

Literally translated (there's no direct translation) the larger text gives '<<Saver/Rescuee>> boat' where boat is the small word above the longer one. Obviously this is 'lifeboat' in English and a kit history is to be found here, albeit missing the Krugozor section!

The small banner - bottom right - translates as 'assembly model' or as we might say in the West/in English "model-kit".

Moscow Toy Tactory «Krugozor»

Krugozor was a large combine created in the early-1970's and formalised in 1975, by bringing together under a central management structure the assets of approximately 20 other factors in the greater Moscow region, including at least two of the Progress factories (Michurinsky plant and Moscow-proper), the 'Kid' factory (Malysh), the Moscow Doll Factory, the No.1 Soft Toy Factory (I kid you not) and others - probably including Horizon (Gorizont ) and Moscow Clockwork (Moskovskiy mekhanicheskoy).

A complication being that most of them continued to use their old logo's, now as 'brand-marks' of Krugozor rather than the former 'factory brands'! But the [two-kids] logo of Krugozor-proper slowly became dominant and is often found on the later stuff which is more likely to have survived with packaging.

From around 1973 through to about 1988, the various assets were brought together on one site, to create 'Europe's largest toy factory', and following the upheavals of 1989-91 it was transferred to private ownership where it continued to trade for some time, being a major supplier to the Mir department stores until the mid-2010's. The site is now a commercial park and office complex.

If you're familiar with the earlier versions of the kit, you will have recognised the artwork above as being a cartoon version of the Novo iteration's box-art and it would appear that the transfer sheet was replaced by card cut-outs on the bottom of the box, which was of the 'Airfix figure' design, opening both ends rather than the more standard lift-off lid type of model kit box.

Instructions for the placing of the cards!

Many thanks to Chris for the two lots of figures, it's another ticked-box here. A more detailed history of Krugozor - than the thumbnail above - can be found here and it is that which I used for producing this overview.

And; while I'm at it, here's F.R.O.G. on Wikipedia.