T is for Two - Keycraft Dino's

I actually had a good interaction with the Keycraft rep's at Gift Fair Birmingham the other day, well, a week ago today as it happens, but I'd already found some of these and shot them months ago, and picked the other one up at Redfield's garden centre the next day, where i saw both the items they gave me as samples at the show, which will be in a forthcoming show.

 

 

I actually bought these over I year ago I think, there were in the cheapie-bin by the tills in Hobbycraft, and I rather liked the Moshops type (green, another non-dino' synapsid), bought the salmon-red one because it was an equally unusual subject, and then the Steggie' for comparison with something more conventional.

Then I got this from the same store a few months ago (part of the Crimbo' toys reconnaissance!). Mentioned in a recent post, I consider them to be mid-range, in both sculpting and decoration, similar to the WHSmith set of a few year's ago, while they are also what I call medium-sized, and in the 2nd commonest 'group' of toy dinosaurs, after the very small 'toob' types.

The 'header card' has changed graphics over the time I've been buying them.

The newer is the upper card.

 

These came from Redfield's the other day, and are a bit of fun, which I didn't notice on the keycraft stands at either London or Birmingham, but I haven't done much with the images, yet, and they may be there, in one of the collective display-shelf shots?

 

Yes, they are daft, and very-much an 'infant toy' thing, but they are fun, coloured like all those 'Erasersaurs', and can be stuck all over the place, annoying Mum & Dad, so very-much a toy success in my books! There were three (same colour as their oppo') duplicates, so I'm guessing they are assortments, and a pose or two may be missing from the shot, or even/therefore a colour or two?

B is for Bag o'Bugs!

Apart from the bag of 80 rings, which we saw in the 'round-up' post in the early hours, the only other 'rack toy' I found this year was a large bag of mixed bugs, critters and skeletons, from Amscan in Tesco, so lets look at it!

 

You get a lot for your £2.50, sixty items, which have clearly been bought-in from more than one source, as they are different plastics and there are alturnate designs of bat, spider and skeleton, but it'll be fun for those who get one.

 

One of each above and the piles of polyethylene to the lower left and PVC-substitute to the lower right. Black predominates (easier to lose?), but there's a good smattering of 'seasonal' coloures - I get the orange (pumpkins), but the green and purple are more arbitary, yet very traditional?

 

In addition, you get some white skeletons and a sextuplet of glow-in-the-dark bats!

The fly design is another variation of the 'new design' simplified ones we looked at a few years ago (no seperate clear wings), when for one or two years only nearly everyone had a go at this kind of set! Likewise, the centipede, while the rat and bat are pretty generic types, both based on their predecessors, if not actually from older tools? I forgot to do a close-up of the black bat, he's a semi flat and a bit naff!

 

While of course - those of you who have followed the blog for a while will know - I'm calling the bottom left image three girls have a picnic! The smaller black spider seems to be the design, or one of the designs you find sewn into Halloween costumes, or attached to hanging sheets of cobweb or micro fairy-lights.

The skeletons, from at least two sources I suspect, if not three, but all equipped with hanger holes, for hanging them around the house or patio/garden, so they can hang-about, hung!

 

While the rat and the glow-bat both have small holes which are too narrow to be for pencil-topping, yet too wide to be mould-release pin-marks, and as I'm not happy about the speed with which some in the hobby excuse/assume all holes in bases/undersides are for release-pins, the explanation here, is to be found on the blog, where we saw a green bat, attached to the very sucker types I used to hang the skeletons in the previous shot.

 

So these two are sucker novelties being repurposed as party 'scatter' or playthings, and it's probably the reason for a lot of these 'half-sized' pencil-top holes, which have featured before. I kept a few, one or two of each, and the rest went to the Blue Cross shop to help fund pet help.

 

That link also contains my example of the finger-puppet monster (I'd forgotten it got blogged!) , and it is different to the pair Chris Smith sent to the blog (I thought it was) but is the same colour, so that's three now, the next quest is how many were there altogether?

 

A few minutes later . . . that cowman/bull thing, also in that post, is the same as the Devil-Santa Theo sent to the blog, the Frankenstein's Monster and skeleton Chris sent on seperate occasions and the skeleton I already had, and which I had posed in a coffin one Halloween, so there are five of them about the place now, sans a couple of legs and an arm I think! All waiting to be reunited into one horror-tub! If you scroll the Halloween tag in a spare moment, you will find them all. Or wait a year or two, and I'll blog them all together, with any others that come in!

LB is for Licky Bottoms!

Continuing the series of follow-ups to the output of Lik Be and/or their imitators, and we're looking at mostly feebleBay stuff on the sucker-toys which are probably all knock-offs, both silicon 'jigglers' and the rubber erasers.

 

More of the erasers we looked at here, and with the 'Wotan' bot turning up we can assume the other two 'Vichy' and 'Rocket' are out there to be found, we also get another version of the Bike Cop, with two cup/suckers and more segmented arms.

These are obviously by the same source as the Lik Be copies below, but consist entirely of Deiner Industries eraser knock-offs, in this case as silicon-rubber sucker-toys. Taken from the robot/alien set and the horror set, there's possibly twelve or more sculpts to track down?
 

And you may find them with the LB piracies! These are - I think - the third generation of sucker knock-offs (the ones above might be a fourth, or end of mould, they're very poor quality), we looked at the better ones here, and consist of the poorer sculpts with a single spot of leery paint to add colour to the counter-display box?

 

 

Here's a bunch more, no Deiner sculpts, but a decent idea of the range of polymer colours and the range of over sprayed spot colours! Along with confirmation, they did the robots as well as the spacemen. All six robots seem to have been copied in all 3/4 sets/lines of sucker toys, I'm not so sure about all 8 spacemen yet, it may only be four or six sculpts stolen?

 

Comparison with LB originals

Seen one of these before, the fact that I've encountered several now suggests they aren't that rare and it's just a question of waiting until one without a silly-price turns up! These are the better quality sculpts with several colours, both brushed and sprayed-on.

LB is for Lik Be!

Because it's a B! More on that in a mo', first a quick reminder of the carded robot set I picked-up a while ago and showed briefly the other day;

 

The robot shape-specific blister means another set with the other three is a probable certainty, although that is itself an oxymoron, but you know what I mean! Wotan over at Moonbase has specialised in the chunky-monkey one, and I'm pretty sure he has one of these faux-vitreous ones, so the other three are out there!

 

But that logo . . . the clearest or 'best' yet; it's a B, isn't it? A 'B' for the Be of Lik Be, not Lik Pe, not Lick Pea, and definitely not Lick Pee!

 

I realised looking at this, that the two uprights are - roughly - centred, so the whole monogram is actually placed to the right, with room to the left (as we look at it) for the 'sun' rays in white, coming out from the centre to be visible, under the monsters arm. On the right you have the dark rays going in, but no white rays coming-out, because there's the bottom curve of a bloody-great B in the way!

 

It's a pain, it's always been a too-busy, shit-rendered, poor logo design, but get used to it, it's LB for Lik Be, and you read it here first, twice, several years apart; 'cos I'm calling it again!

 

The Robots; Police Motorcycle, well, that's how I've always thought of him, or 'Motorcycle Cop' but he could just as easily be ray-gunning, pressure-washing the streets or painting hoardings! In the style of the fake glass-animals which also came out of Hong Kong, he's moulded in clear 'styrene and overpainted in transparent yellow and jade.

 

I used to call this one Marcel Marceau, but now I call it Vichy (cheese eating surrender monkey) in homage to Mathias and his mob! Minimal decoration on an already weak sculpt, sums this one up!

 

Stern Gang! He's always wears a clear, definate, permanant frown, and one feels he should be the sidekick for the 'Darth' sculpt in the Airfix Space Warriors set?

 

I also picked-up a loose set of the ones I've already got in a bagged-set (seen here at Small Scale World passim), so they can stay there! The other three I call Lobster (obviously!) Rocket Robin and I can't remember what I used to call the fat one, but nowadays, it's just Wotan!

 

I've had two lots of the small scale versions come-in recently as well, all marked originals; gunmetal polyethylene above, and chromed hard plastic below (with a few knock-off spacemen), both samples having no Lobster!

 

A poor factory-paint version and another sucker copy have also been added to the pile, and I nicked the mustard-yellow image from eBay a while back I think, cropped-out of a larger image, The soft plastic large-scale are pierced for key-rings/fobs/chains, so must be later production.

 

The small scale Bike Cop has quite different arm sculpts from the larger one, who has 'cup and ball' hands and elongated upper-arm segments, against the smaller one's flatter-cup (potato masher!) and pointer (Biro!), with double ball-joint arms.

F is for Follow-up; the Mailman Called!

So, further to the previous two posts, the other sucker-toy spaceships turned-up, as did another larger lot of mixed erasers, pencil tops and fridge magnets, so a quick follow-up here, a return to rubber robots later and then something else, because you can have too many multicoloured infant toys in any given period!

 

Three new ones and a duplicate of the evil-looking crab-like, bomb-shaped, claw-armed one! I have no idea how many there are, or how many colours they come in, but I think I have seen them in the background of other fleaBay searches over the years, and there are a few more to find . . . or one or two maybe?

I shot them twice as it'll be a while before we see them again, I don't doubt! And as I said the other day; they are made out of a polymer which doesn't seem to be aiming at erasing anything! So potentially capsule toys, sold as 'sucker' novelties rather than erasers?

They still stick to windows, but the sky was less interesting today! The act of photographing them against glass with the background at infinity (photographically speaking) makes them looks slightly fake, Photoshoped or an animation cell!

The other set which came in, contains various themes, some of which I've been aware of (spaceships and robots) some I wasn't, while the two 'mineral samples' (or asteroids?) came with a different lot a while ago, but clearly match the rest.

 

Spaceships on the top row, the fighters may be re-issued, I know I've seen the F14 Tomcat in other colours (Diener?) but they may be bigger, likewise, the vehicles in the bottom row have 'vintage' counterparts. Another clue to their being re-issues is that markings differ between them, while the quality of the mouldings is good, due to their being from Japan rather than Hong Kong or China.

There's also some robots, here compared with a previously mentioned Diener chap ('Gill Face'), nicely compatible, and again I don't know how many there are, do they go with the spaceships, or are we looking at several part-lines here? I suspect various part lines, re-issued in gold/silver elastomer and sold out of shop-stock grab-trays? Certainly I do know the robots had a vintage issue, in primary colours, and there are several more to find in either iteration - a lop-sided 'duckting' one and a couple of Diener-alikes!

UFO is for Utterly Frivolous Objects!

Following-on from last night's post, I sort of went off down a quick flying saucer/eraser rabbit-hole, and here's the results, nothing too exciting, but it's all fun!

 

The Imperial saucers again, along with those polyethylene ones we looked at here, and the red one in the middle which is a newbie! Not sure if it's meant to be an eraser, or just a novelty, but it has a sucker-pad and is manufactured in more of a PVC-alike, than a pencil rubber material type?

On the left here are two combined erasers (outer, white portion) and pencil sharpeners; hidden within the coloured transparencies. They are still wrapped in a crisp film, but I can't decide which one to open!

Adding the two rounder ones from the previously blogged lot (and I forgot the Silvercorn saucer in that post, but I don't know where it is right now, to compare anyway!), and a mini UFO Frisbee, branded to Dick Turtle, who was the mascot/brandmark for one of the lucky-bags available in the late 1990's. He WAS a 'space' turtle, more normally depicted riding a rocket, than a UFO though!

Three more of the sucker set (there's a few in the post, so we should soon be returning to them briefly?), they are more generic in their sci-fi'edness, but shades of Star Wars and Star Trek I think? Even Alien, with that chunky, funky-green 'factory ship'!

They stick to windows!

C is for Chris's Autumn Parcel - Ceremonial & Historical

Less fighty-bitey, but still fighting men! Dealing with the ancients, medievals, ceremonials and other more colourful types and there were several interesting things among them, not least a childhood favourite, but smallies first;

Seven Giant or Giant-like, the green 'loon' being a less common moulding to find, three items from Quaker Oats's premium line of Gladiators, a broken Marx knight from the Miniature Masterpiece range, I have a whole tub of these, and being hard, glueable polystyrene; I have every intention of having a conversion session in the future, chopping some to save others as all-new figures! To his right (as we view) is the rarer soft plastic version from the window-boxes, which - as they only had a few figures per set - are hard to find loose.

Now, these were awesome! I'd actually found two, a pair in this colour-way and another pair, on feebleBay a day or two before these turned up, while looking for something else, both pairs were chipped, so I left them but, it reminded me we had a drummer when we were kids, he broke once or twice.

Mum dutifully glued him back together with Araldite and rubber bands, this, back in the days when Araldite left a brown vein through the work to show the mend, like cheap Kintsugi (another one for NZ Paul to Google)!

Anyway, to get half a platoon in one lot, no appreciable chips or scratches was a lovely surprise, so a mid-post 'Thanks' to Chris for these lovely chaps, our drummer was yellow or yellow/blue if I recall correctly, so other colour schemes may well be out there. The 'Foreign' probably masks a Japanese origin, although West Germany earned the same moniker between the wars (and immediately after the second!).

Chris even sent the originnal gift- box! As you can see, with or without the packaging, there is a fourth, smaller compartment; I believe that's where 'our' drummer would have been found. A lot of these would have been broken-down and sold as single mouldings in gift shops, tobacconists, corner shops &etc., or eve as actual Fairings so our drummer may have come singly, that way?

But I have no idea if these are 1950's (probably, more likely) or 1920/30's, in which case our drummer may have been a junk-shop find, or part of a mixed auction lot of the type Mum used to bring back from Persons here in Fleet, from time to time!

These have only ended-up in this post as opposed to one of the later ones by dint of the slightly military/ceremonial type on the right, but he may be a bull-fighter/gaucho type, or a Camargue horse-catcher type (their traditional dress seems to be black), or is he a mounted member of the Vatican Guard? The sort of thing you might get from a broken snow-globe, but no sign of glue, so we may assume a set, somewhere, factory painted?

The horse may be from a circus set, while the dancer must be a decoration for cocktail glasses, but she appears to have no damage or missing part, so seems to have been attached to whatever piece of fruit or vegetable (those f**king olives; they taste of soap or armpits), via her pointed foot, or equally pointed hand?

Two sucker Guardsmen; too cool for the photo-bay, so they were attached to the mirror in the bathroom and turned though 90° to make sense - he's actually shooting the ceiling! The Highland piper is one of the - previously seen here at Small Scale World - PVC key-rings, his loop removed and a base added!

Finally the third chap (40mm Hong Kong swivel waste) arrived just as I was shooting some others for a post (I know, we've seen them two or three times already, but I like them!), and he was a colour variation (a more-orange torso, paler trousers) so quickly got added to that in-the-queue post!

My first 'putty' coloured Kulikovo example, his lance-tip is missing, but I have some old Testors body-filler somewhere which is almost the same colour, so with a bit of Plastercine I should be able to mould a new tip straight on, using one of the existing sculpts?

Above the Hun is a Jean knight (or Blue Box? I'll have to compare side-by-side) in a darker gunmetal to the usual silver and below him another of the 'brown' Tatra for Nabisco premium figures, with this Conquistador it's clearer to see the brown is actually a dark bronze/gold than it was with the previously seen Zulu.

And this one is another marked 'Made in England'; I'm still looking for a made anywhere else mark, and having tracked down most of the Rubenstein bagged sets now, have still to find one for these - in any colour - so am starting to question the [exclusively] American 'fact' that they ever had anything to do with them, either as themselves or for, or on-behalf of, a third party / Cereal company?

Cheers to Chris, lots of useful, interesting things here!

D is for Dang! It's the Dastardly Day of the Dead Again!

Rather like with this year's ITLAPD, Halloween hasn't gone smoothly, and might seem a bit bitty to some, but I managed to pull back a few boo-boo's at the end of the week and am starting the blurbification on Friday night to get the posts done in time . . . I hope!

And . . . although I've never intended Halloween to grow to the size of 'Pirate Day, A) I never intended West Country Accent Day to grow quite as big as it has the last few years either, and B) these things will wax and wane under their own steam! But we might as well start with the same 'round-up' post/format I've adopted for ITLAPD!

I've had this for years (I think?), anyway it was in the mixed, unbranded monster box, and while sorting earlier in the year, fired off a few shots for today before it went off to storage. It's a sort of dragon/bat/vampire finger-puppet, and in polyethylene so not as comfortable as the more usual PVC ones on a finger, especially a fat, grown-up's one!

But it also makes a passable stand-alone, 'toy soldier' figure, and is here posed on 1898's Transylvania, then the eastern part of Austria-Hungary, now in central Rumania. Worth a read . . . Wikipedia

This came in recently (charity shop mixed lot) and is - I suspect - quite modern, being a sort of flexible polyethylene which means the sucker doesn't really work, but it's a bat, on All Hallows Eve, so that's a box ticked!

I seem to have ended-up getting eMail updates from Poundland, due to some past, self-inflicted, button-clicking misdemeanor I'm sure! But I've recieved several on Halloween stuff recently (very little of which seems to have made its way to the store in Farnborough as I checked once or twice), but of use - if you could have found them, or to ID when they turn up in job-lots a few-years hence - are these skeletons in larger pairs (44cm/17"!) and smaller quads (160mm/6").

These came in with a mixed lot I'd bought for something else we'll see today, but turned out to be the hard-plastic versions of one of the STS or Greenbrier sets we've seen in the last few years, but missing from those posts. I think it's the latter Greenbrier, but I'm too busy to sort it out now, however we'll have a full round-up/comparison of all these grey sets in a year or two.

Because Halloween is firstly a North American thing, and secondly a kids thing, there is a tendency for me to look upon the day as a more general fantasy/medieval day, as far as subject matter goes, and these are obviously from a board game I haven't tracked down the title of yet, but appears to be about four empires/nations, and aimed at younger players?

The dragon giving it an Arthurian bent, it's otherwise a medieval setting with a (THE?) sword in a  stone, wishing well, sub-scale tent and pack-animal, and two figures per 'side' or 'team', there's definitely a dragon missing, and possibly other stuff?

On one of the Faceplant groups I'm on, there has been a lot of edible Halloween stuff in the last few weeks, not least a recurring line of seasonal breakfast cereals, and the coffin-candy we looked at a couple of years ago, so I was happy to find these in Sainsbury's and post them over there the other day, as it's mostly an action-figure site, so I don't post as much as some of the others! Purple Jaffa Cakes! They're Purple and they're JAFFA CAKES!!!! Well . . . lilac . . . with an orangey-bit! I've still got a pack . . . I'm going to go and have one in a minute!

I've also been filling gaps in the Technolog collection and here's four suitable for Halloween, from the top; chocolate-brown Heroic Barbarians, lilac Amazons, large green Orks and a set of what I suspect are bad Knights, very bad knights, and god knows what that colour is; metallic mauve? It's not quite purple, it's not quite maroon . . . Kriminal Krimson?