C is for Cap Bombs and Chessmen!

Two themes presented themselves as last weekend developed. In previous years it's been Merit, Blue Box, or Sports Figures, one year in was Gem-Culpitt/Cake Decorations, all of which had quite small, or no representation this year, but as I pointed out in a comment the other day; you don't pick them, the themes choose themselves! And this year, I had three lots of chess-pieces come in, and a handful of cap, and other bombs, so that's where we're at, in this post!

 

 

I got this set of Crescent's chessmen from Colin Penn, and they are rather nice, with all bar the Castle being fully figural, and with a sort of late-Norman / early-Plantagenet feel to them, or their costume. Maybe a bit more Wars of the Roses to the Knight and Pawn?

 

Also interesting, and often the way when you discover stuff outside a company's normal (or known to you) oeuvre, the material is not the normal Crescent 'Airfix' figure polyethylene plastic, but a denser, slightly soft polymer, it could be a PVC, but I suspect not, we exported the filth, pollution and health-hazards of vinyl-production quite early! But certainly a hard-wearing, and slightly spongy plastic which might still be a PE?

 

Colin then gave me these! They are from a contemporary company, Professor Puzzle, but differ slightly from the set currently on their website. Wooden, both sides are incomplete, but there are the 12 you need for two of these line-ups, which is the proper way to display them for sale, and that's not me lecturing you, I had to research chess twenty years ago, and that was one of the factoids I unearthed! King to the left, down to pawn, although I've placed the Queen first, Doh!

 

While these are the Mokarex coffee-premium chess set, and, possibly not by coincidence, all from the 'white' set. We saw them here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2024/02/p-is-for-perfectly-planned-paint.html

 

You'll notice the two outer mouldings in the five-shot, are a darker plastic, suggesting that the tool was run for some time, and that they're probably not rare, like cereal premiums, there would have been millions, as there were millions of coffee jars during the promotion. But I've still got more than half to find!

 

In the order in which I bought them, I think, four cap-bombs, at a toy-soldier show? Shocking! I removed them from the room, as a matter of common courtesy! I took the plunger from the damaged silver one, when I realised it fitted the blue/yellow one, which has the anvil/striking-plate, but another plunger, striker and two springs are required to get them both up to scratch - there is a tub of these, with various bits, so one way or another something will be completed!

 

Sizer!

 

These two had been in the odds-drawer stuff the night before the show, so presaged the theme, obviously the one on the left is a sucker-bomb, or dart from an infants shooting/target game, while the metal one has some similarities with the bomb on the Dinky Toys model of a Junkers 87 Stuka, so I'm guessing a similar toy, but no moving parts, so no cap-firing capacity - anyone recognise it?

 

Thanking, for help, support or 'stuff' at this year's show; Adrian Little, Brian Carrick, Colin Penn, Isaac, Matt Murphy, Martin Fahie, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin. 

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 wearing a clear, definite, permanent 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!