F is for Feelin' Feline!

An obvious title, I'm surprised I haven't used before now! We actually had a roundup of cat stuff not that long ago, and while half the stuff in this post is recent, some of it was found elsewhere in the unused archive!

A largish resin lump I picked-up at a charity shop back in '22, made by Sheratt & Simpson, I guess it's from one of those overpriced series of such stuff in jeweller's windows? But it's a reasonable sculpt, and when £20-something becomes 50p or similar, I ponce . . . like a cat!

Boysy-boy eyeing it with a modicum of suspicion! I still miss him every day, his weight on the end of the bed, his little complaints when he thought he ought to have a treat! But I miss both his Mum's too, and that's the burden of getting to this age, dealing with more and more death, in one's life.

Large Japanese blow-mould, marked on the other side with a three-leaved clover mark, and Japan in ink, and moulded on the body.

This is a modern set from Shing Hing, the people who brought a four-nation 'army man' tub to Smyths a few years ago. There's a lack of imagination in the decoration, but otherwise they are reasonable sculpts for a rack-toy type thing.

Three from Schliech, we looked at five back in October and I think two are duplicates, but the Egyptian-looking one is a definite paint variant, and the long-haired Persian is a new addition.

They are no better as cat's, than they were as dog's, who buys this shit?

Shelfied in Home Bargains.

Oh . . . I do! I actually grabbed these at Waterloo yesterday, a series of mini-adventures I could have done without - Travellers closing Charing Cross, football hooligans, and cancelled trains - led to my browsing the 'boutiques' on the new mezzanine, and I thought these were particularly stupid! The cord already hangs over the side of the vessel, how is a cat's tail going to make any difference, or improve things, one iota?

I found they preferred to sniff the fumes of sloe gin!

What? It's Christmas! 

W is for Water World

The next part of Jon Attwood's donation parcel to be looked at is the sea, pond or river life, and lots of interesting items were hiding among the dinosaurs, to be uncovered and shared here.

Bottom feeders, and the nice kind which aren't bidding against you on feebleBay to turn a quick profit on the only two things in the lot worth the not quite as much as they will reappear for, a few days later, on a BIN!

The larger lobster is marked for Shing Hing, and the two bigger starfish (brittle-stars) are maked BCLA 1997, which may mean something to someone (there could be a connection with the US 'jobber' Imperial?), the rest are simple 'China' marks.

Sharks, the two yellows are from one maker, the other pair from another, with a simple 'Shark China' on the yellows' (colour variants of the same sculpt) and only a China on the other two.

 

Mostly unmarked or carrying simple China-marks, the reef and flat-fish, I think the unmarked may have "Hong Kong" age, while the others are a little newer.

 

The cetacean sample has big whales (they're not a country Donald!), modelled small! Dolphins and probably a porpoise (I'm not sure if I know the difference - like kangaroos and wallabies; does it just come down to size and blood-tests?!) and a killer whale, off to Gibraltar to sink a yacht!

 

The fur-seal pup, is a two-part, possibly Iwako type eraser, but the polymer's a bit too hard, and the grey pup in a larger scale is in a dense 'polystone', and again the small sample ticks all the boxes, with seals, sea-lions and a walrus!

 

A frog of more decorative/ornamental origin, and two turtles and a tortoise who dragged some lizards to the party! For terrapins, see kangaroo/porpoise note above!

Again I thank Jon for sending them to the Blog, and we will have final reckonings when all this stuff is reunited, soon I hope, and we can start tying all the odds into sets, and attributing them to brands, lines or generic rack-toy titles!

D is for Dinosaurs, Lots & Lots of Dinosaurs!

And we arrive at the first post from Jon Attwood's latest and huge donation, which will be the last dinosaur post for a few days (already another one in the queue!), and because there are lots of animals to come in Jon's posts, I will try to alternate between donation and other posts for the next few days.

Because Dinosaurs are one of the unsung corners of the collection, which, apart from a few small scale and novelty types, have only really started accruing in the last 15 years, they all need a huge sorting and attributing session, likely to take a week or two, which won't happen for a while, and I can't pretend to be an expert on any of it, consequently I thought to do these as thematic shots, by way of an overview of what's out there, particularly of the Hong Kong / China variety, and to thank Jon properly for them by at least featuring them all here once, as while we will see them all again one day, they will be sorted into sets, by brand/maker . . . hopefully!

 

Here are me'fave's, the Dimetrodons, which, as I mentioned the other post ago, are not technically dinosaurs, but rather, to quote Wikipedia "a genus of non-mammalian synapsid that lived during the Cisuralian age of the Early Permian period, around 295–272 million years ago", in other words, among the first larger animals out of water, but not the first, and possibly warm-blodded?

 

Although there were also small ones, and two similar species - Edaphosaurus (large grey above), and Secodontosaurus are among the toys, which should be leathery, not scaled, but I just like them for reasons of childhood fancy and nostalgia! The pale gape-mouth/spotted pair which are a classic 'chinasaur', are actually dated 2001, but probably shot from old tools? the teeny-tiny one is marked Koka China which would seem to be a branding?

Triceratops, Styracosaurus and similar Ceratopsians, among other favourites from childhood, as there were quite a few different ones and they all looked suitably wacky, and of a mind to not be a carnivore's lunch, or not without a damaging fight! Always stand up to bullies! The blue one second from right is marked Chasmosaurus.

A couple of Protoceratops on the right and lots of Kerthunkersauruses, more formerly known as the Ankylosauria, I have always called them Kerthunkasaurs, because Ankee . . . ancky . . . Annekey . . . the real one is too hard to spell!

The bright green one looks like an infant or bath toy, could even be a pet toy, but no squeak, while the four small ones in the middle would look to be from the same maker, but two species, and have the look of erasers, but are polyethylene. The big Proto' with the red head is a lovely sculpt, well decorated, with a nod to modern birds such as the Pheasants? Or, yes, some monkey's arses!

 

Pterosaurs, when I was a little kid, there were really only two of these in all the books Pterodactyl (it's OK with this one, spellcheck gets it!), which all four of these are, and the dog-headed one with a parrots beak, now there are loads, but not many toys, and few really-good toys as they don't lend themselves to posing! But these are all quite good, compare with the various eraser Pterosaurs, which all look like comedy vampire-bats!

Stegosaurs, didn't we all have a soft spot for these, I'm sure half the reason we liked them was because they had a whole driveway of crazy-paving on their backs. You don't see much crazy-paving these days, but when I was young it was everywhere, the ultimate recycling of not so crazy paving!

 

The second largest (green with red plates) is marked SH, which I think is Shing Hing, still around, they did that four-nation tub of 'army-men' in Smyths a few years ago. While the dark one back-right, is called Tuojiangosaurus on his belly, but is using a classic Steggy' tool, the true Tuo' should have spikes or narrow, tapering plates?

 

Sauropods, due to their immense size, they are nearly always a compromise on scale/size, even from good, branded makers, and while the palaeontologists have classified loads of them, we tend to think of Dippy's, Brote's and the other one, and wasn't one banned, but has it come back again, and did two switch name or classification and, and, and, they are really big aren't they?

 

I like the biggest one (marked Apatosaurus) with the head turned on the horizontal. The two long ones are variations of the same tooling, and both also marked SH for Shing Hing.

 

Parasaurolophos, one of the duck-billed dinosaurs, again when I was a kid, the more normal duck-bills tended to be modelled, but now this one with its hollow trumpet is everywhere! And again the red-headed one is particularly smart-looking, while the one bottom-right, with a flap of connecting skin, clearly establishes himself as a different species/subspecies within the genus. he also looks related to the Silurian Sea-Monsters from Dr Who!

 

I couldn't remember what the bumpy-headed ones were called (like I ever knew!), but googling 'Grape headed dinosaur' gave an instant 'Pachycephalosaurus', and I think the various plate-heads are related carnivores, the double crest/crown one is Dilophosaurus, if Gooogle is to be believed!

 

It's confirmed by the bellies of the large green one (Toy Major) and the generic brown one next to him, if you won't trust Google! Face-on to their left is the peach/cream Corythosaurus,

 

You know my view on Spinosaurs, just cheap Dimetrodons! The two little ones look like they could be freebies from the Dino-mag we looked at a few posts back? And two paint-treatments of the same sculpt at back-left.

 

Carnivores; the two biggies at the back are marked Deinonychus on their Chinese bellies, and are paint-variants of the same uncommon, but quite realistic sculpt. And while there was T-Rex and Allosaurus when I wer't'lad, now there are lots of these Carnosaurs.

 

No names on them but various takes on Velociraptor, almost unheard-of in my childhood, they may have been in the books but I don't remember them, now made famous by the Jurassic Park movie-franchise, they are everywhere! They have also been bigged-up in other ways, by the filums, and were actually quite small.

 

Latecomers and oddments include a nice duck-bill (back-left) with an unmarked spiky-fellah in front of him, with a similar skeleton, a cartoony chap and another Pachycephalosaurus to their right, who missed his family picture!

 

Which leaves three dragons! The two larger just marked Made in China, the smaller green one unmarked, but looking like a Pokemon or Anime/Manga character of some sort, with very stylised spikes?

 

Sorting 2020

Just before they went in the car to storage!

 

Many thanks to Jon for all these, they will all be sorted into the master collection (shot above) at some point, and sorting was done as I went, as certain groups made themselves obvious, the gape-mouths with their '2001' mark, were a largish group for instance, so we will return to them as those groups, another day!

F is for Follow-up - Shing Hing's 'Army Toys'

Speaking to someone over the pond who has no charity shops like ours, and where the equivalent 'Thrift Shops' apparently don't carry the old tat I've been picking up, made me think . . . firstly that we're lucky to have such shops here, despite the existence of both feebleBay and the Car Boot Sale movement - and it is a movement now, with management companies organising the regular sites and magazines telling you where to go and when - and secondly that the luck extends to the current round of purchases.

I've been checking charity shops for years and this year has been a particularly good one for finds; no rhyme or reason for it, it just has! I used to get the odd bag here and there, through the 1990's/2010's but I was only looking for small scale, yet would only see - to pass on - the odd larger-scale bag of farm or dinosaurs, while occasionally noticing the Fontanini stuff which is a perennial staple of these shops; only the other day I let a couple - of poor-paint clowns - go.

Then I had a bit of luck when I started moving to large scale back in 2009/10, from shops in Newbury, but this year's haul has been quite sizable and varied, with something every week or two.

Back in Rack Toy Month I was discussing in one post the Jaru sculpts and their similarity to those of Ocean, Soma and Shing Hing's sets. In the case  of Shing Hing I was using shelfies I'd taken in Smyths' bloody-great, empty-hanger in Farnborough, and what do you know; they turned-up the other day, loose, in a charity shop!

I'll probably save the comparisons 'till the next RTM or the next time we look at all the figures together, but as a box-ticker on Shing Hing, let's add them to the tag-list! Four nations, German, US, British and . . .

. . . Japanese troops, all in the same soft PVC as those aforementioned makers and pretty-much run of the mill China-troops, but all worth a comment or two.

In the case of the Japanese it's worth noting that while four of the poses are ex-Airfix, the other eight (for a 12-count pose total) are taken from the Ecsi/Ertl poses previously copied back in the 1990's by Rado Industries and others as we saw here, previously in polyethylene, quite tinny in the case of the Ri-Toys, but a softer Airfix-figure style polymer in the case of the copies-of-copies.

The' enemy' for the Iwo Jima battle I seem to recall suggesting back in RTM, although six of the poses are the common 'Fritz helmet' post-Cold War China-troops common to many current Chinese manufacturers and their shippers.

The other six are good old Matchbox's US Infantry set, copied with little attention to detail, ironic as the half-dozen modern figures are among the better versions of these common poses.

The ambiguity of the US soldiers is not a problem carried-over to the British set, again 12 poses, but all taken from Matchbox; their 8th Army this time. Only missing the Monty character, the heavy-weapons and crews and the surrendering German DAK 'Schultz', I've also kept two pipers so I can paint-up one at some point!

These will need comparing with the Ocean Desert Sales figures to which they look very similar, but Ocean don't have the second figure from the left on the top row - as far as I know.

The Germans pull from three original Western manufacturers 1970's-set's; two Matchbox (Afrika Korps - 7 poses, and German Infantry - 2 poses) and one Airfix original; German Infantry which provides the three poses bottom left.

There is a small amount of colour variation among the figures, most noticeable with the paler and darker greens of the Japanese, who also had a miss-mould, shooting downward, as he's curled-forward a bit.

Every figure is marked with an 'S. H. MADE IN CHINA', following the newer trend we've watched unfolding here for Chinese and HK-Chinese companies to build brand, and brand-recognition in a way few used to.

A is for Army Men - RTM '17 - Part III - Better Crappytoys!

Into the home straight with part three and I only hope some people have got something from some of these posts, because a lot of people write-off this stuff as half-a-carat shit, and they're not wrong, but intrinsically there is no difference between a mounted Swoppet knight and a cut-n-shut Crescent Mexican copy blob, from Hong Kong!

We return to those 14's for the first half of this post, but will also look at a few similar figures. I have in addition to the 14's a second set of very similar figures, the same pose is a little smaller and I think it's a size difference, not the differnet shrinkage rates of the two materials, but it could be?

Base-edge treatment, the plastic colour and the marking (less the numeral on the PVC figures) are all so similar as to point to the same source and neither sample is big enough to be considered 'all', which means the pose differences could even-out over time/with more finds? Hoever, see below.

The other common denominator is that they are nicely sculpted, well produced figures with lots of paintable detail visible, and apart from Chuck-Noriega with his linked-belt feeding out of his hip pocket, they are all pretty useable versions of figures previously seen in Parts I & II - I particularly like this version of the running M60 gunner, although I'd be the first to admit the SMG's both look a bit 1970's Italian police?

So . . . having looked at the Jaru set yesterday with the 18's and the same card-art as this larger set, we are faced with what looks to be a set with all-14's?

Firstly, although the picture is blurred for being a low-res publicity puff-piece, you will notice there are only two poses shown, one of which isn't in 14, 18 or 20 (yet) - the standing, no: 'running' firer ('a') in the sand sample, while in the green sample, some of the figures are reversed ('b')!

This is a Photoshop'ed mock-up! It proves nothing, but it gives clues, and is therefore useful nonetheless, providing you spot the 'deliberate mistakes' that is! The tank is the same as the Hunson set we looked at yesterday (very sharp 'boat-front' to the hull's glassis casting) which is one of the clues.

Now I have been seeing the Hummers in mixed, loose lots on feeBay for a few years now (there were at least two lots with them on there last week), and as it takes a year or two for this stuff to filter through, we can assume they have been around for a while now.

Next to the Jaru mock-up is a shelfie I took last week in the new Smyth's in Farnborough (farn-brer not -burroh!) of a set by, or purporting to be by a Shing Hing which has what looks like 20's with additional poses (standing firing ex-Matchbox GI is to be expected; given the rest of my sample!) but the tank/s is/are different, being the small ones we looked at the other day (from two sources with two sets of 'additives') and a scale-up of it with a more rounded front than the older one.

But, the colour of all the green components is another clue.

Shing Hing are also marketing a large tub with four armies (also currently in Smyths), and as far as these toys go it's a good one, we've got the GI's with ex-Airfix Japs and sets of ex-Matchbox 8th Army and Afrika Korps, so in one tub you have Tobruk and Iwo Jima - and for a 'tenner -  bargain!

But ignore the other three and check the GI's, there's the running shooter, along with most of the 20 poses, but with the 14 base marking, and having handled them I can tell you they were PVC.

Jaru claim to be one of the biggest middle-men in the importation and distribution of rack-toys (they don't call them rack-toys!), and there's no reason to disbelieve them and plenty of evidence of that being the case; indeed what we seem to have here, with yesterday's post and in among the truck and tank posts that preceded these, is evidence of that 'finger in every pie' position of Jaru's.

Reiterating a line from yesterday's post: "different contract: different mix", Jaru being the lynch-pin for all these pale-jade green toy soldiers, whatever the size, material or pose mix and whatever the accompanying accessories (which will be coming from different contract-manufacturers) and - ideed - whatever the colour of the 'opposition' if any.

I would put money on 14, 17, 18A and B and 20, all having some connection, with Jaru in the procurement chain somewhere? And going back a few years! In last years RTM post H is for Hangin' on the Hook! we saw that my 20's came in a purchase with PVC 8th Army, a different color from the Shing Hing set above and Brian B also donated the Ocean set with blue ones, but another two links between them all.

These (also from Brian Berke) are similar, and almost certainly PVC but will be either licensed or bog-standard'ish copies. The Soma (Mr. So and Mr. Ma) partnership was established in 1968 and was one of the bigger contract-manufacturers for the next 20-odd years before starting to use their own brand in the mid-1980's.

Unusually for Soma these are only marked 'CHINA' and while they undoubtedly use smaller contractors for sub-assemblies, they are big enough to have made these themselves - in their 'signature' figure-material.

I've highlighted the QA-coding both on the card (red arrow) and in each bag as a strip of 'ticker-tape' (yellow arrows), this is a trend that's here to stay.

Might as well have a look at Soma's other PVC output! I'd like to find the rest of the 40mm GI's, he's the only one I've found, the little ones we've looked at before, there were 12 and they were issued with generic push-and-go jets and prop-jobs - real infant toys; I sent them straight to charity (mid/late-1990's?)

As are their juvenile 40mm's which come as pirates, Wild West (above), Robin Hood (above) and the Sheriff with their men, Medieval and the Crusades, sports, Mermaids, cartoon/anthropomorphic animals, Ninjas, Manzinger-type Autobot things, Mexican/TV-wrestlers, fairy-tales and fantasy/ horror types (I think), in sixes or twelve's and often with a second, or subsequent issues in different colour-ways (there are three Hood's, yellow (above) cream and black - that I know of). I have a load in storage so we'll look at them properly one day, but there's plenty about them on the Wibbly Wobbly Way!

Loose-ends, left to right:

Marshall's were carrying these wholesale until recently, they look like figures in previous parts, but the tub suggests they are a tad bigger so they ended-up in this folder!

Bigger, better looking figures from XMT, follow the link for a made-up-brand! They look to be ethylene? It's not even an SMG is it; it's a hair-dryer!

These look very interesting, they seem to have some of the old Arco Rambo poses, along with a couple of the Jaru poses (including the running chap who's a very decent figure sculpt), along with the almost de'riguere these days Matchbox GI poses, along with a couple of helmet-swap Airfix paratroopers, all well-finished and looking to be at least 54mm, give or take, the bino-guy is a bit challenged in the height department!

♫♪♫Short People - They got little hands...And little eyes...And they walk around...Tellin' great big lies...They got little noses...And tiny little teeth...They wear platform shoes...On their nasty little feet...♪♫♪ - Randy Newman

Also I'd draw you attention to a letter from Tomas Korecek in Plastic Warrior magazine's issue 165 (March 2017) which shows bigger-still (75mm/1:24th scale) versions of the figures we've been looking at the last three posts, currently for sale in one outlet in Prague, but they'll probably be available elsewhere, in another colour, another card . . .