P is for Puffy Projectile Pen!

As the Actress said to the Bishop! Real life seems to be intervening again, but here's something I picked-up in Home Bargains a couple of days ago. As well as small pulp-rockets trending these days, pen and pencil tops are also enjoying a renaissance, with the big displays of such items, in The Works and some garden centres, and the many museums and 'end-destination, high-end, tourist leisure-facility' gift shops, where such things have always been the pocket-money staple!

 

So, combine the two tropes, with a soft-foam, spring-loaded, cartoon rocket on an teathered elastic string! Branded to TJM worldwide and Maxi Save down-under, it's a bit of fun and another Retro Rocket, which is not the same as a retrorocket!

B is for Blasting off Again!

My evilBay treat to myself this month was the other configuration of the Blast Off eraser set from TJM, for nine-quid-odd with postage on a Buy-It-Now. It was preferable to drive to Basingrad to see if the Home Bargains there had taken delivery of the other set (Fleet's branch of the TKMaxx subsidiary still has a stack of the set we looked at last time!), only to find they haven't, which would cost the same in petrol.

The two together, for those who need to know, the yellow is a good match, the red is pinker, and the green and blue are different shades, brighter and darker respectively. Pencils and box are identical.

 

The blasted additions, the rocket can lose the column of flame, to stand on its stumpy fins, and the two planets are the same moulding, which is also the one used for the 'rings' planet in the other set, as I suggested might be the case, last time, and that's them, box ticked!

B is for Blast Off!

I'm sure we've had that title before, but it keeps appearing in popular (and not so popular) culture, the 'Blast Off' hook; books, toys, board games, T-shirts, nightclubs, maths programmes, several movies, songs, poems. . . and now, these eraser sets!

I thought I'd shot these on the rugs from the kitchen before I put them into storage, but I'm not so sure that it's the same pattern, so I'm not so sure that I did? Therefore, they may be feeBay images, but whatever, you can see a nice set of erasers with a large'ish astronaut and some space-related items - a nice pulp-type ship atop a 'pillar of flame' (to milk the metaphors) and two planets.

 

Then I saw this in Home Bargains the other day for less than a fiver, and thought "Blog!", so grabbed one, not realising the contents were different, so I will go back and try to get a spaceship one with another-colour of figure for a follow-up post!

 

Credited to a TJM, which I think is the in-house label of TKMaxx? Which would mean that TKMaxx, Homesense and Home Bargains (a downmarket clearance type rival to B&M) are the same company, as is Maxisave in Australia! We are being corporatised!

 

Clearly the UFO (or it is Saturn, one of the planets in the other set, given a skirt?), needs some hot water, and the shooting star is the weakest of the seven items ID'd so far (astronaut is the same in both sets I think), but - from its shape - would be the best eraser!

 

The pencils are all gray/graphite pencils, not coloured 'crayons', and each has an uplifting motto, including the eponymous Blast Off! There's no sharpener to get them started though, which given the cheap nature of the units we've looked at here at Small Scale World for things like novelty sharpeners and Christmas crackers, seems a bit tight?

L is for Lost Lot!

Totally lost it with this lot, I'd named the folder stupidly and mislaid it in front of my face, but found it this morning and have just shuffled the images for a quick shelfie post, these were all taken in February, so mostly post Christmas 'first quarter' stock. And I was embarking on a 14-image post when I realised the first three were TKMaxx not B&M, so I'll fire these off and do the B&M in a minute!

Nearly bought this for the astronaut, but realised it would mean filling a whole tub with memory-foam shite, because 'set', so I'll wait 'till a badly-coloured-in one turns up in a mixed lot in ten years, bleach him overnight and give him a silver-grey wash! Marked up to both TJM in the UK, and a Maxi Save Pty., in Australia.

 

ID'ing mini dinosaurs, we've seen Teamsterz before, usually (but not always) badged to HTI, and I think we might have had a stab at deciding whether they were Supreme or Pioneer figurals, plumping for the latter if anything, but I can't be arsed to check the past posts - it's all on the dongles, so it will be right when the A-Z entries get written-up!

 

A couple of nice Animal sets; wild and extinct! Also Maxi Save in the antipodes, over here they are claimed for TJ Morris's of both Liverpool and Belfast, obviously the same TJM, and chosen for one reason TJM = TJMaxx; the US meister-office!

 

I thought these might be Terra by Battat in new packaging, but they seem to be different, however they are nice sculpts in their own right, and will be supplied by someone else.