N is for November's Sandown Park - Vehicles

As always, I picked-up a fair few vehicles a month ago (where does it go, this time which is already so limited to us!), and a pretty eclectic bunch at that, but Sandown Park was originally a train and die-cast show! Anyway, let's look at 'em!

A bit pricey, at a tenner; I like mine around the five-quid mark, but it does have one of the MPC-copy astronauts, which are harder to find. I may already have one, but unlike my MPC sample (Golden Astronauts), I can never remember which Spacex ones I have and which ones I need, so there's a tendency to just buy them! Not that the MPC situation is any better, I know I have all bar one, but can never remember which one, so don't buy!

 

Couldn't resist this Hot Wheels model, it's the basic 110 'Defender' as we took delivery of, back in '86/87, ahead of the rest of the British Army, because the Berlin Brigade had a separate procurement / purchasing system! Although most of ours were soft-tops, and the CO got a windowed 'Safari' hard-top 'limo' with foot-steps and roof-rack!

 

Nice - probably copies of a Western novelty - all plastic, Hong Kong made, road rollers, two in one colour, the other - bagged - in another and many thanks to Adrian Little, who found these and put them to one side for me. They'll make a nice line-up with the Blue Box, Blue Bow and others, alongside the Montaplex ones!

 

Eldon, no, Elmont, a mistake I always make! An early British maker of road transport models in plastic, rival to Wells-Brimtoy, with similar fly-wheel, push-and-go motors, they are manufactured in an early, soapy plastic, similar to the French cart in Chris's last parcel, but less stable and prone to warping.

 

It's in a hell of a state, but . . . I have a red one with . . . green (?) cable drums, which is so badly deformed, I will cannibalise it to get this one ship-shape. This has a slight shrinkage dip in the cab-roof, which will need hot water, a wooden wedge and some super-glue to straighten again (for a decade or two?), but my existing one has warping through the cab, body and cable drums, so there was method in the madness, and it was barely any money!

 

A lovely French motorcycle, possibly Cofalux, and probably a team-support vehicle from a Tour de France boxed set, alongside the Matchbox scrambler one, but not the common yellow plastic, number '8', this red, number '10', was from a gift-set.

 

Baby in a boat . . . it's a boat, with a baby!

 

Seen before, but another sample, cheap!

Kamley/Kwong Shing

 

Magneto, a German firm which actually produced a few of the dancers and ethnic dressed figures seen here before, and there's a post in the pipeline, but for now - missing its propulsion wand, this is a magnetic push-novelty, where negative magnetism is used to propel the car.

 

Zero-Hour / Code Zero plane, someone had glued the broken tail stabiliser back-on, but back-to-front, which I've fixed, but it made it dirt-cheap! These have passed their silly-money point now, and there was a lot of Zero Hour stuff around the halls, most of it very reasonable, compared to evilBay prices of only a few years ago!

 

I was getting stuff from the horses-mouth on this Bluebird line, a while ago, but then he started sending it to other Blogs, so it lost it's exclusivity, and I realised it was more about promoting his site, than supporting mine, or contributing to fandom, so I dropped out, and have stuff I'll probably never publish, and which subsequently appeared elsewhere, anyway. I'll promote your site if I chose to, or because it's the right thing to do, not because you ask me to, or it becomes conditional! 

 

I tried to pay Steve Vicker's for this unmarked 'British' generic novelty, on Saturday just-gone, as he'd given it to me at Sandown Park, and I felt he'd given it to me because I'd told him the vessel was a German premium and didn't belong in the box, but he wouldn't take money for it, so I filled my boots with French, Canadian and American plastic, to even things up a bit!

 

Technically, it IS a German premium, it still has Sanella on the hull, but it must be clearance or some kind of unused-stock sell-through, and once I'd found the little cellulose sheet (bottom left image), and read the instructions at home, it became obvious, from the faint traces of dark-brown glue (Evostick as was - evo' for evil!) on the sheet, that it was the correct ship.

 

The set of premiums (Manurba, Siku, someone like that) can be found unbranded, usually in brighter colours as later rack-toys (Tallon like), or with branding, like the Sanella here (a German margarine for baking, still going), in a number of configurations, but all on the same hull, there’s a liner, tramp steamer, small tanker and this . . . exploration vessel/mail packet?

 

It says "Gives hours of fun", but I suspect it was minutes of misery, trying to get it to work, against a very sensitive chemical reaction that's too easy to muck up, and where would you get small camphor tablets these days? The threat of banning moth-balls was enough for the industry to withdraw them, and while the EU never passed the rule, they've never returned, and most of the ones you might find on evilBay or Amazon are fakes . . . another missed 'Brwreakshit benefit"!

F is for First Flying Saucer

Except, they're not saucers are they, they're domed, and it's not my first, as I have the wonderfully lethal Marx Mystery Spaceship, and its half-controllable, 20-kiloton, kinetic-engine, with air-raid siren wind-up! But, this is my first 'full size' Hong Kong, placky-tacky, big-box toy, and I think it's one of the more common designs, not least than because PMS reissued it without stickers, a few years ago, also branded to a 'JS' (?), and claimed for China on a rack-card.

 

This is the older version, with NASA stickers, and while it was a bit grubby, which may have contributed to a cheap price, it cleaned-up near new, abart from playware to the gummed-paper flag.

 

What was known as a 'bump-and-go' toy, an eccentric steering, at the front, allowed it to escape obstacles by changing direction every few seconds, like a robot vacuum-cleaner, but it doesn't collect dust, or cats tails!

 

I don't know if the PMS issue had the original markings, or a new China-related message, but as far as I know the original was an unbranded generic?

 

One vinyl, one paper. Another Sanddown Park purchase, it ticks a box!

S is for Seen Elsewhere - Sci-Fi Library (1) Toys

I shot these for a Faceplant group, over a-year-and-a-half ago, and unlike the other shots in this occasional meander through my library, these were all cover-scans, taken at the time, rather than the more casual shots of the previous posts (see: Bibliography Tag), and most subsequent posts, which will take a year or two to get through at the current rate, with some duplication, because shooting them all was a bitty business, as they were recovered from the garage, reunited with the stuff in the house, added to on the hoof, and/or sent off to storage, in batches!

 

Beautifully illustrated with, yeap, a thousand images, actually more, and even more items, as there are a few multiple shots, however, the beautiful illustrations, a trope of all Taschen publications, is tempered by another trope of theirs, a 'coffee table' lack of text! It's really just a captioned guide to some of the loveliest Sci-Fi toys ever made.

 

And yes, I need both the figures on the cover! But they are likely to turn up in some mixed-lot from Adrian,  Chris, Peter, Gareth or Trevor (the guys who regularly save me this odd, ephemeral, unknown stuff), as they are likely to turn-up in a rummage tray, at a toy figure show!

 

 

In it's day a lovely book, albeit a cheap softback, it's now a bit dated, but still a useful reference work for quickly flicking through to find the robot you may be trying to identify, or to ID the robot a more generic toy might be based-on, so worth grabbing if you see it.

 

This is a lovely guide to what appears to be one man's collection, and from the given dates (1972-82), there's a suggestion other volumes may exist coving the 1950's or 1960's, but as I bought it for next-to-nothing as a remaindered import from one of the shops in the Charing Cross Road, or more likely, a vast, bare floorboarded, enterprise selling straight from the cartons, on the Wandsworth Road, or Lavender Hill (I can't remember, it was more than 30 years ago!), I've never known?

 

 

These two are less useful, being more in the style of the Taschen, but less well illustrated, and with a fair bit of duplication on the more common robots and spaceships from Horikawa, Masudaya, Yoshiya &etc. but the text is more useful, being as how, while both are also in the coffee-table style, they do have more author's input and narrative text.

 

Think 'Pulp', and this is the meisterwerk! But, it barely covers the tin-plate stuff in the five tomes above, concentrating more on the 'Western' pocket-money ranges of the 'Dime-Store' plastic-era's, bagged and carded toys, and the related peripherals such as board-games, home casting sets, hollow-casts and the like, with chapters on the books, magazines, comics and annuals . . . masks, helmets, costumes . . . cards and artwork, ray-guns, pin-ball machines and such like. But, the modern 'Bible' on plastics, with a very good chapter on Dr Who stuff, contributed-to by an old colleague of mine.

 

More of the same but with a wider remit and covering a bit of everything, it's quite a good primer, and worth having on the shelf, to try, if you can't find something in one of the others!

 

While this is a private, or semi-private publication, I think, very much in a recognisable US style of a certain kind of collectables book, I have quite a few of, now, cars, planes; usually a guy sharing his collection. And, in this case what he shares is quite thorough, but his collection parameters are quite tight, so it's very useful for what's in there - Colorforms, Matt Mason, Zeroids and a couple of others, but that's your lot!

 

While these three are, really, only 'shelf-fillers'! Some nice imagery, mostly borrowed from bricks-&-mortar auction-houses, who may or may not have a commercial interest in the title, post-publishing, beyond the name-checks?

 

But the contents of all three are common or popular stuff, aimed at the general or casual reader - the same-old-same-old, big name toys, few of us collectors have forgotten, or really need to re-learn about, and which now have whole sites, forums and wiki-pages dedicated to them, so/also, of limited use as research-tools and adding nothing to better works! The third is a more general title and could go elsewhere in these posts, but was included here for its connection with the TV-Movie related theme.

 

I still buy them, 'just in case' there's something new, interesting or useful, but usually when they are remaindered in The Works or similar, although, in recent years remaindered book stores have all but disappeared, indeed, on the high street it's The Works or nothing, but you can often find them on Amazon or evilBay for next to nothing, and grab them as shelf-fillers/box-tickers.

 

But PostScrip, the mail-order people, often have useful collectables books in their lists, especially the autumn lists, with all the coffee-table titles for Christmas presents! And there's Books2Door, which I haven't tried yet, have you; are they any use?

S is for Sandown Space Car!

 I know, but I ran out of civil, military and Wild West, so it's back-to-back space this evening! This was less of a calculated purchase than the other three (LB space cycle, Scout 2 and the Firefly), and in point of fact, I sort of let the seller of the Firefly talk me into this one at the same time!

 

The 'Space Car', more of a space liner, but scale is a moot point, entirely down to your own imagination! No box, and it's hard to love, as it looks a bit like a cross between a guppy and a knuckle-duster, but I think it will go well with the streamlined rural coach, also in metallic maroon, from Beeju/EVB, which could be parked-up on the apron, transferring passengers!

 

Because I try to only use internet scrapings in context, these have been in Picasa since 2014, that's 11-years and two laptops! But now I have a better one, there's no need for them, and they don't add much 'in context' either! Hey-ho! But we do have a black plastic motor-housing as a slight variant. It's obviously missing space-headlights and space-windscreen!

 

It's the game we love to play, and we can play it all day, Copice. This was on evilBay a year or so ago, and is also a bit chewed, but was worth a download for the box, but then, in August just gone . . .

 

 

. . . this sold to a lucky new-owner, I've only kept one of the machine images, as it's a better angled ¾-view than I took of mine! The X-20 Space Car, very much a generic, which may have been an early issue by someone who would later go on to use a brand-mark, like Hover, Hoover, Jimson, Lucky, OK, et al! And, I'd say, not that rare, given the number that turn-up? But I've never seen a blue one, still, there's always the next Sandown Park show!

 

'Images from eBay', hee-hee, and I've got thousands of them, if that's how we're gonna' play it?

J is for Jimson . . . Firefly XYZ Mk. III

I really don't know what the hell's happened to Google, but apparently The Economist magazine was asking the same question the other day? Certainly, if you Google this, using any search-term, you'll be excused for being convinced it doesn't exist, and never did, even though, here is one, and it clearly does!

 

The box is a reproduction, and while the seller was good enough to point that out, and I'd been surprised at it's clean-sample quality, I wouldn't have known for sure; it's not got that comic-book artwork look, of the home printed ones from a few years ago, and if you rolled this down the drive on a dusty day, and then brushed it off, you'd never know it wasn't a Jimson original.

 

It's a big old chunk of half-Space Car and half-Space ship, and the scale - going on the figure - is a bit bigger than I might have been interested in, only a few years ago, but needs must when idiots try to drive!

 

And, while I would have been happy to just ID the driver, in the past, I've now got one to compare with any similar loose chaps in the pile! There is actually minor damage to the rear-right (facing forwards) of the canopy, but, luckily, it isn't actually obvious, at any angle!

 

This pair, sadly, weren't purchased at Sandown, but - as an in-context 'question time' - were seen on evilBay back in 2021,Rocket Racer behind, Explorer in front, and usually sold as generics - "Another plastic toy", "Another siren toy", &etc . . .

 

And, while they could also be Jimson, I don't know, Google doesn't know and Alphadrome seems not to, either! Pilots' say no, styling and portholes, say maybe not, push-and-go motors say possibly, plastic colours say probably, the little radar says absolutely! Obviously, the egg-shaped one is missing a green 'wing'.

 

Jimson stuff does appear in generic packaging sometimes, or seems to, you never know if they aren't close clones, but they also supplied Fairylite and others? Could they be the Mark's I and II?* Coding is 609 and 614, close enough for their similarity to each other, but a long way from Firefly XYZ's 101? Could they, despite the higher numbers, actually be earlier toys? I genuinely don't know - do you?

 

*That's not a serious question, I don't doubt there were never Mk I or II Firefly's, and the Firefly itself, has a very lazy XYZ moniker, before the 'Mark III'!