E is for Everything Else - Odds & Sodds!

There were a few smaller pieces and loose figures picked up at the Last Sandown Part show, which was, in some respects, one of my best yet for purchaes, but in conversation, there's a feeling that while prices are down, this stuff is coming out of the woodwork at the moment, I got a really nice, never seen before piece off of that evilBay the other day.

 

I've never really followed this stuff, nor felt the need to, poorly acted 'C' movies, for kids, in the 'over the top' style of kids programming, never grabbed me, but there is a big following for the whole Kaiju, Gojira, Ultraman, Atomic-boy stuff, and these are probably quite modern 'Ultramen', and may be from one source, but two are realistic 54mm'ish solids, well within the scope of the collection, the other two are a super-deform (right) and big-head (left), both of which, leave me pretty cold.

 

A Christmas cracker bike, and two micro-trucks from Italy, another 1-ton Humber knock-off, too close to the Dinky original to be considered the donor for all the Hong Kong copies, but could be based on the Pyro/Kleeware minis? And a post-war US 'duce-and-a-half' probably an M39 era/generation?

 

Very obviously an ex-Giant chariot, we looked at them on the Romans page (above), and eventually will look at them again on the But is it Giant sub-Blog, in greater detail, but for now, this one needs a good clean, or at least, the horses do!

 

A couple of bags of odds I picked up on a wander, the gum-ball robot will go in a bag with several others and bits, in the hope his arm turns up one day! Two lesser characters from the larger, 'styrene set of Noddy figures, a Fozzie Bear pencil top, and another of the Rupert Bear pencil-top torsos, I think I have four now, two Kinder and an LB for Culpitt spaceman!

 

Adrian found these two for me, French clowns in hard plastic of the polystyrene type, but being French could be Phenolic or a formaldehyde resin of some kind, although both are stable. Cyrnos, Clairet; someone like that?

 

A bit of fun, it links a common-enough piece of scenery to a specific animal, so not that useful, but it also links marks together.

 

Swoppet knock-offs!

 

A nice, early piece of, probbaly German composition, around 45mm, and unmarked, he's obviously a WWI-era German soldier, and I rather like him, as a possibly very old survivor . . . 1920/30's?

 

Isaac gave me these two lots, the Cherilea 60mm's are clean, but have lost 90%+ of their paint, while the karki infantry might have all been home-painted to match, or are a new-to-me paint scheme, the radio-operator is Benbros.

 

Seen in a recent book-post, useful little monograph on Selwyn Miniatures.

 

I'm guessing this is American, but it could be French, or from down the road! It's a solid lump of die-cast Mazac / Zamak or pure aluminium (not light enough?) with wooden wheels, and may once have been a penny-toy . . . a whole penny!

 

Make your own caption! How cake-decorations are born!

U is for Ultraman Ululators!

Well, if they're not Ultraman I'm sure someone will tell me! What can I say about these? Obviously they're not strictly ululators, except that when operated by small children, I think whistles can be classed as ululators . . . "Ululation is a howling or wailing sound"!

 

For some reason I seem to have taken three sets of images from the front, but none from the back, and as I've had a mare of a round tonight - targeted/tracked box with different bar-codes on either end, one of which was correct, but the contents weren't, then I ripped my finger open and lost my vape, so stress levels rose!

 

Anyhoows, I can't be arsed to collage anything, so you get them raw! Novelty whistles, probably from Japan rather than Hong Kong, but who knows, not me, that's for sure! I'll use both Tags.

 

Ultraman 'type' on the left and a couple of Kaiju, one more monster, the other more golem? They're not vast, with the mouthpiece, about 3½ / 4 inches, and soft, blow-moulded polyethylene.

K is for Kollection of Kute Kaiju Killers!

Bit of a mystery these, they appear to come in two sizes, big and very big, I now have all the big ones but only two very big ones!

 

The story starts about 15 years ago when I bought three off the brothers' Curry, who used to have one of the most interesting stalls at Dave McKenna's toy soldier show in the old masonic hall in Birmingham.

 

They didn't know what they were, I didn't know what they were (apart from the obvious; some kind of Japanese monsters, probably dinosaurian Kaiju from the Godzilla franchise), but I could see their potential with small scale space or GI figures, so a price was agreed, and a deal was done!

 

These were they, the initial three, I now know the one on the right is only a big monster, from the set of twelve this post is mostly about, the other two are very bigs from a set of unknown quantities!

 

I posted them on Brain Heiler's fan site on Faceplant a couple of years ago with a call for help ID'ing them, and Keith Bowman and David Crow both answered the call, with the upshot that it is believed they are all Kaiju from The Ultraman / Ultra Seven franchise, not Godzilla, and from the left, can be ID'd as;

• Bemstar
• A version of the Red King
• Neronga
  

But then this turned-up! Credited to a Victory, and carried in the UK by Henbrandt, I've seen them on eBay in the US and Germany, but with no clear jobber beyond the Victory brand-mark, I've added the extra three as there is room, indeed, there's so much room in the box, you'd think it was a counter-dispenser with maybe 24 items, but the box makes clear it was a set of 12.

 

Grouped mostly in pairs of matching plastic colours, presumably for production reasons, so I shot them in the same groups. These are the pair of reds, who are exploring the ashes of the bonfire down the bottom of the garden, both have green spine plates, and both need ID'ing (as do all bar the Neronga), if you know more about these things than I do!

 

The Greeny-golds! Another pair, and including a baby Beamster? They got to fighting on the gravel area at the back of the drive! The two larger ones in the original purchase have moving arms, with the red king having moving legs too, the smaller ones don't have moving limbs.

 

A pair of pinky-golds, while they don't have the moving limbs, they do have two halves, but only for reasons of production, there's little deliberate or meant movement, and they may actually have been glued or heat-sealed?

 

Running out of ideas, the blacks and grey (another Neronga) were posed round my late Mother's kitchen! the Neronga is slightly different to the first one I found, but we'll compare them in a minute.

 

Ah! The 'fairy' trio! Pale blues and mauve, I'm guessing these are not terribly close to the the characters they are ripping off, but it would be nice to get some sort of name/title for them all, if only to give me the excuse to blog them again another day!

 

Big and very big on the left and variations of the Neronga on the right, none of the ones in the box have 'China' stickers, so maybe they were marketed in different forms of which a box of twelve were one, and individual shelf-sales (with separate stickers) was another? Of course, it could just be that someone took all twelve stickers off! The older purchase has more silver paint and slightly darker plastic.

 

These were on evilBay the other day, only six of the twelve and more variations, but then you may have noticed some variety, just on the box-top photo'? The mauve is purple, and one of the reds has gold spine-plates, as here.

 

I think the dark blue one here has been given a home-paint, there's washing/weathering and more colours than the others normally have?

 

"Yeah, well, yer'no, it started small, lighting BBQ's for tourists, dealing with the rubbish on the beach, then one day I caught the changing shelter's thatched roof, and I was like, 'Wow, that's awesome!', soon I was doing whole fishing villages, moved on to small towns and then, well, yer'no, the whole Tokyo business init! But I'm a changed Kaiju now, mostly these red-carpet events and the odd drug-bust destruction fire for the Police . . . just keepin' me'hand in, like - it ain't easy, bein' fire-breathy!"

U is for Ultrapenciltop!

We looked at these years ago when I did a pencil-top round-up, but one or two more have come in including a rather fetching white one (from Chris Smith or Peter Evans), so I thought I'd do a new shot for the family photo-album and share it with you.

I muttered something about super-boy last time I think, but the top figure is supposed to be Ultraman or some similar 1970's Japanese TV character, the robots don't seem to fit Ultraman's 'Mechas' though so may be from other series'; Manzinger or Gundams or something. Four poses found and five clear colours with a lilac variant of the purple and redder-oranges, or an orangier red!

The new addition, definitely the smartest, he's a minter! I'll thank both the above named as things have been pretty chaotic around here and they've both sent stuff since I called a halt to blogging, while a lot's been combined/sorted and I've shot loads of stuff, but lost track of some origins! 

T is for Toppers; Pencil Toppers

So to something completely different - Pencil Toppers! I originally started 'collecting' so that I could get as many poses as possible for painting-up and adding to my armies and or vehicle models. Knowing about the Blue Box and other HK figures 'cos they were already in the big tin (ex-army bulk biscuit tin with very sharp edges!), I moved on to tracking down the - then new - Atlantic and - short-lived - Rospacks, minor kit-figures from Fujimi, Hasegawa and Esci and such like, from there I started to find other bits and bobs and thought I waas getting somewhere only to find in Fleet toys ( months before I left home!) the new range of Esci ethylene figure sets.

After about six years faffing around in the Channel Islands and Infantry, I took-up where I left off, getting into shows and swap-meets and the then pretty new phenomena of Car Boot Sales, and realised that to get small scale usually meant either 50p bags or - increasingly - at shows £5 bags of all sorts. Buying like this brings in a plethora of weird and wonderful figures and other bits, among which has been over the years a fair few pencil toppers, so here are a few...Heroes and Super Heroes;

These are based on the Japanese character Ultraman I think (lower row), as are the little inset heads, done like the Munch-Bunch 'foodstuff' toppers. I'm don't know if the robots are Manzinger, Transformer or actually from Ultraman...and I don't care...although I'd be interested purely for identification purposes!

These turn-up quite often and I think I'm right in thinking that the one with the lightning-strike on his chest is 'The Flash'? [No - he's Captain Marvel, see; comments] If there are two Batman poses, there may be other poses of the other characters still to find? The brown Flash is in a softer PVC, the others in a harder, less flexible type.

BA Baracus (Bad Attitude); Whadyameen Foool! I 'aint gowin-in no-'plane...[Later] Whadyameen we're in'Hondurass...Foool - I'm gona'kilim!...From the TV series The 'A' Team, there are - I believe - 4 poses in the set and the other characters were never done as pencil tops?

Also from TV are two versions of Worzel Gummage (spell that again please?), staring one ex-Dr. Who (Jon Pertwee) and Postman Pat with his Black & White cat...Jess was it?