H is for Hairy Horrors!

When I was a kid, Trolls were a simple thing to get your head round, they were slightly larger, toad-skinned goblins who lived under bridges and ate slow, or dim witted goats.

 

Then Tolkien arrived in teenage'hood, with trolls the size of land-tanks who breathed fire, while the Nottingham Mafia and Garry Gygax's D&D monster handbooks, along with dozens of whitemetal manufacturers split Trolls twenty ways, and suddenly they could be large, small, relatively harmless, existentially dangerous to the planet, green, brown, orange or yellow, or anything between!

 

These trolls, the 'Scandi trolls', fill the slightly larger, relatively harmless, goblin niche, I think, but clearly this lot are strangers to the barber's chair!

 

The final tranche of Brian Berke's Icelandic shelfies and he thought the chap with the shield reminded him of Eccles from The Telegoons, while I thought those (red background) reminded me of Michel Bentine's Potty Time, characters which was a sort of second spin-off from The Goons!

 

Many thanks to Brian for all these, they've been a lot of fun!

T is for Tröll sem eru í Treyjasum!

Apologies to any Icelandic Loyal Readers who may have just chocked on their elevenses, for my miserable attempt at a line of Icelandic grammar, and even I know (now) Treyja are really cardigans not jumpers, but sometimes my desire to be a clever-dick outweighs any need to be more sensible!

 

More Trolls from Brian's visit to Iceland, and these are your every-day, regular tröll, not seasonal guys, and it seems even the locals need jumpers to meet the weather in those northern climes! The jumpers themselves are part of the resin moulding, but I think the little woolly hats are actually real, knitted apparel, while, obviously, hatless tröll have too much hair for hats! More on the hair in the final part of Islensku tröll.

Y is for Yule Lads!

It's always fun finding out how other people do Christmas, because it's not all the modern iconography of Albert, Prince-consort, The Saxe-Coburg-Windsors or Coke Cola, endured by the English-speaking world, with or without crackers! And I well remember nearly having a fight with Krampus and his 'pals' in an Austrian pension one cold night in December!

 

In Iceland, they have the Yule Lads, a bunch of Icelandic Troll types (more to come on them), who fool about at this time of year, each having a day between the 12th and the 24th, in the lead-up to the big day, almost an half-advent of annoyance! Brian Berke, roving reporter, sent some shots he took in Iceland, and off down the rabbit-hole I went!

 

They actually leave little gifts in children's shoes, the equivalent of our stockings, but lesser, yet daily! However, if you've been bad, you might get a rotten potato, or a sour-onion!

 

This is Pottaskefill (Pot-Scraper, December 16th), he scrapes the food remains from the pots and pans!

 

While Skyrgámur (Skyr-Gobbler, December 19th) loves skyr (Icelandic traditional yogurt-type dairy-produce), and if you don't leave some out for him, he'll just steal it!

 

Ketkrókur (Meat-Hook, December 23th), he steals meat, gripping it with a hook! Another steals sausages!

 

Þvörusleikir (Spoon-Licker, December 15th), he steals spoons to lick them clean, but there isn’t much food left on spoons, so he is supposed to be scrawny, this one looks well-accommodated with bounteous spoons! Presumably, the spoons quietly reappear in the drawers when little people have forgotten them?

 

You'll have to Google the rest yourselves! And there are a couple of equally (supposedly) execrable parents and a dodgy cat! Many thanks to Brian for the introduction, to something completely different!

P is for Potpourri of Plastic Peeps! Sci-Fi, TV & Movie

So, we reach the end of Chris Smith's latest donation, and while, obviously, toy soldiers/ceremonial, ancient/medieval, civilian and Wild West are the core of a collectors' stash, I always like this group for having some of the quirkier stuff, rarities and smaller production-run figures (even 'non-toy soldier'), and this lot was no exception!

 

A selection of Bluebird's Manta Force/Viper Squad and Exin Lines' Lego-likey astronauts, some arms missing, but the master sample will provide, or these chaps (and/or chapesses, they're all in suits) will donate!

A larger troll, a hard plastic, probably polystyrene, but could be a propylene polymer, robot type space warrior, who l;ooks quite recent/contemoray, but might not be, just clean! And a large PVC robot, who could be a specific character, I have a feeling I might have a smaller version in the plastic-pile somewhere?

A GLJ-Toyway astronaut, a Galoob Putty (?) from the Power Rangers franchise, a nice whitemetal Genie from some fantasy gaming range, an alien from Toy Story and a skeleton pencil-top guarding a keg of rum!

I think the Birdman is from Thunder Cats or He Man, while we saw the Star Wars Episode I/4 board game figures a while back, the daft lizard is from a recent Disney kid's thing, I believe, but is also a bendy and they have their own tub these days!

Have we seen these before? It's like all the cereal premiums, but in a soft PVC-type polymer. A mini Thunderbird 2, done here as a desk-toy hanger/fidget toy I think, but it could be flown in a Christmas tree, I wouldn't, I like my trees traditional, but many would, witness those Disney tree-hangers we looked at back in December, last year.
 

Speaking of Disney, one of the 7 Dwarfs, but not the usual set of generic cake-decoration/garden ornament ones (gardeners and musicians), although in the same two-polystyrene-halves, glued-together design, but a rather more obvious Disney character, I think Bashful, but could be Sleepy?

But back to the opening paragraph, and this was lovely, quirky as they come, and while I don't know how many pieces it left East Anglia in, Chris had put it in its own bag, so I'm assuming more than one, it arrived in five, one piece, being no more that a speck of dust, was ignored!

So, having had some success with the baking-powder/super-glue technique, recently, I prepared a station with a pad to soak up excess glue, a puddle of the same, some baking powder, a toothpick for applying glue and manipulating the white-mud, with a nail-file, filling-in for a snuff spoon! Once I'd begun, I remembered the applicator pen for Superglue Plastix, which helps speed everything up!

 

And a half-decent result was achieved! From the back it's a bit of a mess, as you would expect, but from the front it looks factory-fresh and ready to blast across the room from a sprung-loaded sucker-pad, although if I were to try, it'd disintegrate!

 

And, while cruder in the mirror-imaging than the previously found examples, it is another of the LB (Lik Be - it's so obvious when you give it some thought) knock-off's, given a less-robot, more-alien look, and raises the question of how many sculpts did they copy for the set, four, six, maybe three spacemen and three robots . . . only time can tell?

 

Many, many thanks to Chris for another fantastic parcel of odds, sods and unwanted's, those of you who know me, or who have followed the Blog for any length of time will know, I don't often wax lyrical about Britains or Timpo, Starlux or Elastolin, Marx or MPC, but rather tend to get excited by the ephemeral, quirky, oddities on the periphery of model-figure production, and it's all the stuff people save for me, give to me or donate to the blog which helps fill-in all the many missing links, such as the jumper-toy above. Thanks, Chris, much appreciated!

W is for Which Reminds Me . . . Elektrokideez!

Apropos the Trolls in the previous post, reminded me these have been in Picasa since '21, sent to the Blog by Peter Evans in one of his many donations, it's an ephemeral capsule toy, troll thing, not the new trolls, but not the old ones either, sort of  . . . intermediate trolls!

Certainly closer to the old ones in shape, they have the various coloured bodies of the new ones, but themed around popular musical genres! From the Hong Kong/Canadian WowWee, and obviously serving a secondary purpose of pencil-top, I think they are just called Elektrokideez?

 

Although the folder was titled Rock Trolls, I may have made that up in a hurry to name the folder . . . I hate naming folders, especially when uploading images, I tend to just run my finger across the keyboard, so I have lots of folders in Picasa starting asdfgh . . .  or qwertyu . . . or even, being daring - mnbvcx . . . !

Packaging gives you a better idea than my blurb ever could! They may or may not have been common in shopping-centre dispensers a few years ago, or even now, but will clearly turn-up in mixed lots for years to come, and presumably - they are commoner in Canada?

F is for Follow-up - WH Cornelius / Success

This was supposed to be a follow-up to an August (Rack Toy Month) post . . . at the end of August! But things slide here at Small Scale World, and now's as good as any time! I found the catalogue the previous post's images were taken from, and there was a bunch more stuff of interest to Loyal Readers, if their interests are as eclectic as mine!

 

Lots of Gum Ball/Cracker fayre to be seen in these random contents, along with larger novelties, and we've seen most of the smaller stuff in one version or another here, at least once!

Trolls; somewhere there was a mountain of these, and all sorts of people issued them in all sorts of formats and sizes, usually credited in the first instance to Russ Berrie (and no, It wasn't a pun, he was Mr. Russell Berrie), the iconic Trolls, recently trashed by a movie which changed them all into multicolour-skinned, multi-shaped parodies of our little tanned/pink childhood friends.

Another source/set of the small PVC-vinyl animals, and some bendy-smilies, similar to those we've seen here from Henbrandt and messrs' Generic!

Oww! More to find than we have so far found!

Bigger animals, novelty animals and counter-box stuff.

More of the same!

Jon sent us a tailess version of the scorpion only the other day! 

This was actually shot on 35mm I think, by me at one of the first toy-fairs I ever went to, I think I met Paul Morhead there, who I already knew (he'd got me the 'press' ticket), Peter Evens for the first time, and someone else, whose name/face escapes me now?

 

The other three were obviously looking out for 54/60mm stuff or useful scenics for Plastic Warrior Magazine, I had been tasked with the first small-scale Toy Fair report for One Inch Warrior, and managed these, some Blue Box fort sets (the animated cartoon mini's - Cavalry, Knights and Pirates . . . were there Romans?) and a few other bits, I think I mentioned the Balsa boat-kits from Hobbies Annual and possibly the Great Gizmo's dime-store revival stuff, but some of them might have been another year, it was all over 20-years ago, where does it go to, all that time?

H is for How They Come In - March to July!

A couple of Charity shops have re-opened, one has already gone, is cleared-out and being decorated by the landlord while the rest are still closed (and dumping tons of stuff straight into their skip-bins), but I managed to grab a few bags of plunder earlier this week for the first time in months, so we have an H is for . . . post!

Four bags, the larger bread-basket they were in had room, so I suspect a feebleBay bottom-feeder had beaten me too it, the shop opened last Monday, I got there this Tuesday, so I wasn't expecting much and was happy with what I got - four-quid all-in, can't knock it?

Contents of the four bags laid-out in absolutely no order whatsoever beyond vague morphing of themes!

Not looked at below; a couple of Pepper Pig types, probably from kids' magazines, four Ardman Animation figures, one or two of which may be Phidal, an unmarked Soma-like rubber builder, two Russ Berrie trolls (late type cereal premiums?), a clean Crescent Indian,  a handful of Hing Fat pirates and a farmer with a huge pitch-fork!

Another! This one is turned to the right, or glancing to the left depending on your point of view, but it's another! You, loyal readers, have watched this sub-collection growing, by accident, almost in real time!

His flesh is purpler than the previously seen examples, and his hat brim has gone the way of all flesh (and hat brims!), but that's a simple matter of cutting a washer of black art-paper/cartridge paper and slipping it on, the flat board at the back has survived, if a little dog-eared, so stiffening with super-glue and he'll be right as ninepence!

You'll also notice I've touched-up his chips with a black-marker between the overview picture and this one. That's two officers and a trooper now.

I think these (Marx Disney figures) are worth the whole four pounds? Neither has any damage, despite some thin or delicate parts although both are dirty and a bit paint-chipped. The plastic is not the chalky stuff of my unpainted Swansea ones, and I wonder if these aren't some of the first mementos to be brought back from the original Disneyland Park in California which opened in 1955.

The state of them (tatty) but also quality of them (no damage) suggests they may have been in a cabinet or on a shelf somewhere, but regularly taken out/down and loved? They'll clean-up a bit and were a real treat to find in a bagful of shite!

The four teddy bears are waiting for dark to fall, and they are going to give that modern Disney shit, sorry; pooh, a new [old] nose! Three 'in my pockets' (MEG?), one Disney squeaker/pet toy (?) and an unknown happy-looking chap who can be a pencil-top, but actually has a larger cavity?

New colour-way for the collection on the Deetail, and a Supreme for Toy Major, imported by Tiger here, hard to believe they are 25-odd years old now. I suspect the Deetail is a newer one from the 2000's re-issues?

The really quirky stuff, two wooden figurals (cat and rabbit) made from turned balls with felt ears, and a plastic cartoon cat, they all have a place in the sorting boxes! Hopefully, there will be more plunder now the Charity shops are opening-up again, but a lot of it is going in the bin in the meantime.

ELC is for Extra Large Crowd

Or - B is for a Bunch O' Biggun's

I'm not being lazy, I'm out in the garden, this isn't the weather for blogging; this is the weather for a good dose of fresh-air! Especially when you have firewood to cut, firewood to split for the coming winter, and a tree or two to deal with! Shot a slow-worm yesterday, so that's all the native reptiles bar an Adder photographed in two weeks . . . and I got Adders twice a few years ago!

But I have a load on on the back-burner, have received all sorts of stuff from Arto, Brian B, Chris Smith and Theo van der Weerden by eMail, two lovely lots from Chris and Peter E via the mail system and am awaiting a few more bits and bobs to add to things.

But I did mention - just as we went into lockdown I think - that I was bringing all the ELC figures together and would Blog them as a group, and this is that post!

The good guys, or at least; I assume they are meant to be good-guys for the target age-group who may still believe in such fairy-tale nonsense! We all know those at the top are robber-barons, intent on screwing someone, somewhere, whether they have title over them, or not!

There's a weapon missing from the palace guard/man-at-arms and it's probably an axe or a lance, as his sword is in it’s scabbard?

Might be good, might be bad, and probably depends on how much silver you have to cross their palms with! What games-master's might call the 'independent adventurers', or 'non-aligned', the witch looks to be a good fairy, the other two look a bit rough-about-the-gills to me! I could fix the swords, but they'll only bend again when they go back in their bag, better to wait until they have a tub or shelf of their own and straighten them the once.

Badder than bad things which have gone to university and had themselves elected joint-heads of the being really-bad department! Some sort of Troll on the left and an airborne Ork on the right . . . an airborne Ork? Isn't it enough than Orks are pretty awful already, that you'd go and give them a pair of wings, f 'f 'sake!! And these were sold to five-year-olds!

Is it a Troll and an Ork, or an Ork and a Goblin? Flying Goblins . . . even worse!

If the previous two were bad; one of these is dead and the other's eight-foot and has burning-eyes! These are the anti-heroes of the piece and no mistake!

Berserker says -

Cumm'ooohn dude, this isn't funny! I don't mind the odd 60-mil, but . . . WTF?

Scale wise these are collectively around 90mm but vary considerably, although at this size it doesn't really matter, especially given the fantasy nature of them as a whole, and they will go perfectly with similar figures from other manufacturers.

To the eyes the three medievals are 80mm (King, designed to ride and stand) and 85, the witch is only 75-mil, while the rest are 90-100mm, the red-eye from horrorville being the top end.

S is for Stationery

This is the last of the pencil top stuff for a while - promise (you don't want to see the recent Weetabix football shirts and shite like that, do you!?), and as we were looking at the TV related stuff last time, some more of them first;

From left, top row; Skelator and She-ra (I think - Teela see; Comments) from the Masters of the Universe franchise, I was busy playing big soldiers in Germany (providing real-time OpFor for a couple of Soviet Shock Armies!) at the time MotU was popular so know little about it, I think it involved a grey skull or something! Then a soft vinyl Flintstone figure and a Hello Kitty cat differing from Miffi only in the shape and size of the ears...and the marketing budget! Strange how not only is Hello Kitty so like Miffi and the boys of South Park resemble the earlier Mainzelmännchen?

The flying Snowman of Raymond Briggs, and figure I think is Lucy (or the other one!) from Peanuts and a knock-off stupid kid wizard like Harry Potter.

Two characters from Rupert the Bear but I think the old git is from Popeye? A non-stationery frog (in love with a pig...since when was that sort of thing to be encouraged on kids TV?) trying to work out how he too can get a pencil up his arse and two of the dreaded Trolls that were literally everywhere in the mid-1970's...and still come around on a regular basis, these days Russ Berrie exploit the franchise, the two here are - like most of these toppers - Hong Kong.

Not Toppers; 'Clingers' and 'Holders', all Kinder with K-numbers from 2000 and 2004, I had to use the lids to show-off the 'holder action' as anything more than about a third of a wooden pencil is too heavy!

Finally the old and the new, both figural; The pencil sharpener is marked 'GERMANY' and dates from the 1950's (if it's a day) while the Sports Relief chap is currently in Ryman's. The Cowboy is that much copied pose originally by Lido and the like, both the sharpener and the Harry Potter lookie-like'ee above are polystyrene.