B is for Big Box of Bounty - Animals

The penultimate post of plastic plunder from Chris, and it's the animals, the least documented of the collection, simply because there are thousands upon thousands of them, and they've just never been a priority, and as the pile of unknowns grows, it gets, like any dark secret, too big to face!

 

But one day soon I hope to tackle it (there's realistic-sculpt Lik Be hidden in there, among other things), and when I do, it will fall into place, or at least some of it will!

 

A Dino-skeleton, a modern phenomenon which is contributing to that pile, although we have ID'd a few over the years, but they keep coming, and this one, one of those 'berry-heads' (Pachycephalosaurus) by the look of it, is larger than most and new to me, it's creeping-up on two arguing cave-men, who are now known (by me, other people knew all along!) to be HG Toys.

 

Small PVC jobbies, and a big job too, with many ID'd and many still to be, here I think we have examples of two modern/current'ish sets, a good [detail] and a not so good set, and one of more vintage, the green one with a splash of pink paint?

 

Not Dinosaurs in my Pocket (Matchbox and cereal premiums), but 'Dino Brites' by Happyness Express of New York (1991), originally Panosh, there's plenty on the Internet about them, this is a good précis on the subject;

 

https://www.littleweirdos.net/2012/02/dino-mites-dino-brites.html

 

 

Larger chaps, with an erasersaur, and one from my favourite rubber set, front right, in a bit of a state, but that state is interesting - it looks upon first glance to be a string, tied by a young owner, which has cut into the foot, but actually, upon trying to remove it, it became clear it was actually an inclusion, running through the leg, and exiting at two points, a piece of cleaning cloth, or hessian sack used to transfer batches of product around the factory floor, which got flicked into the tool? Amazing how it's survived!

 

Two recognisable Holly's (now we've had half a look at them here, as part of the Gygax posts), and the silver one is a nice, but unknown, moulding? Which leaves a softer, more 'Chinasaur' Stegosaurus, who may belong with the Protoceratops and red chap in the second image above?

 

I've seen this chap in mixed lots on evilBay and wondered if it was a copy of one of the Wild West charging/fighting bears, but I think it's a copy of an Elastolin (or Lineol?) composition model, perhaps for Roggatz's ZZ-brand, although not with those green eyes . . . a copy of a copy? Still a nice sculpt, though!

 

Two Airfix piracies, getting a good sample of these now, with and without painted eyes, two larger Hong Kong/China pieces, being a mouse/rat and copy of the Corgi farm dog, a Matchbox boxer-dog from the pick-up truck, and a Berlin-marked bear, with MAMPE, on the other side, a logo-premium for the 'Berlin Mule' kicker-spirit!?

 

A flocked kangaroo, believed to be a Hong Kong-supplied tourist keepsake, three Safari animals, another weakness in the collection, as I've concentrated on the figural sets, and a collectable-series monkey from Topps, who need a better post, along with those Yowies, still in the long queue!

 

Tupperware zebra on the left, chalkware lion from the Naturecraft Christmas crackers in the middle, and one of the two, or four, I'm still looking for! And another bath-toy swan (there was a blue one in the last lot from Peter Evans, and I think I have a pinkish-red one?), which is almost certainly an early post-war novelty, brightening the Christmases, and bath-time's, of the nation's baby-boom.

 

Farm stuff, the composition cow looks particularly interesting (Brent?), while piggy-wiggies and eeeps will need their own ID pages eventually, as there are many of them, and so many copies of known sculpts, it's a collection field in itself . . . Indeed I know a cow collector, who comes round the shows, and from just what I've seen him buy, his collection must be amazing.

 

Two modern horses, and a rather knackered, but still interesting (a sample is always better than no sample) wagon or cart horse, in a solid plastic, which may be Bakelite, or a similar phenol-formaldehyde resin / thermo-set?

 

A bit of fun on the left (but it's a sample!), probably from a modern kid's magazine freebies, and a more conventional beetle on the right, I have half an idea, one day, if I get the time, to mount them all in thematic, glass-fronted, deep frames, as if they are real entomologists exhibits, and ladybirds will be first, as I have a dozen, or more, already!

 

 

Vitacup premiums, mostly damaged, but 'styrene, so usefully glueable, and kept apart, against a future mending session! The baby elephant is more robust, and has survived intact.

 

Lego (?) fish, a Hammerhead, who is damaged, he's missing his lower 'gape mouth' jaw, but it actually, ironically, takes him from the realm of rubber-juggler, to something more realistic looking! A Safari White Shark, and a more generic . . . Mako? Marked China and 'Shark'!

 

Two stretchy 'rubber-jiggler' lizards, probably from two sources, the one unmarked, and flattish with fine sculpting detail, the other fully-round, with fuzzier surface detail (marked China), despite both being metallics, common on these stretchy toys.

 

The turtle is amusing, to me, as I have a blue one which I think is a childhood survivor, despite my not remembering the set, or occasion of its acquisition, it seems to have been in the toy drawer for forever, and nice to find his mate, in another fantastic parcel from Chris Smith.

O is for Once Upon a Time, in June! Animals

Welp, seems to be turning into the animal end of the week! Back to Whitton, back to June, back to a Sunny day among friends, and it's the animals, now; prehistoric, wild, farm and domestic, and with a couple of Vitacup to start - I detect a theme!

 

A couple of Vitacup boxed animals, who seem to have been sold separately to any jar of bedtime cocoa-powder, but, two shillings & sixpence wasn't cheap in the early 1960's! So it may be that the price label is for animal AND drink?

 

And, further to the two previous posts, if both sets were twelve, that leaves a 24-count, which, with the other mostly domestic or woodland animals, means probably not enough room for three fallow deer, but there must have been three sets for a 36-coumt? Note their spelling of 'Ivorene'.

 

Already seen, they snuck into a Rack Toy Month box-ticking exercise!

 

A bunch of 'unknown' dinosaurs, the T-Rex is a particularly good sculpt.

 

Mixed, small animals, the blue monkey seems to have had a plug-on hat? While I forget if the ostrich premium flat had a branding or not. The crocodile is a 'rubber jiggler' type, while the monitor lizers may be Kinder?

 

Marking on the base elicited nothing from Google or evilBay, but it looks recent, and is KFS a subsidiary of Kentucky Fried? I don't think so, nothing about Animal premiums in searches ether, but?

 

Three polar bears, the left-hand one, despite not being the best quality copy of Timpo, you're likely to find, may be Blue Box, while the right-hand one is a more generic Britains copy, while in the middle, a modern vinyl-PVC jobbie!

I was sure these were Charbens, but now I'm not so sure! Early British plastic for sure, and very clean for their age, if not Charbens, who, Hill, Cherilea?

 

Mixed small farm, some Hong Kong, some better, hen & chick are PVC rubber.

 

Probably from a bagged rack-toy set?

 

Chambourcy nodder premium, the ring may have been for a cord or ribbon to hold the animal on to the 'petit-suisse' cheese product, or possibly for a keyring, a bit of a survivor, by the looks of it?

 

Mini-animals for future sorting, with a quite well painted OBE of the Airfix draft-horse, a Merit pony to it's right, and a bunch of piggy-wiggies!

 

Modern'ish sheep-dog, which I may already have, and might have ID'd somewhere, a fox who looks like he's from some larger scale action-figure, or doll type play set, and a - probably - premium peke, but he could be a better quality Hong Kong rack-toy?

F is for Follow-up, as Mentioned Earlier!

So, my thoughts, not canon, not necessarily true, but just my thoughts on, specifically, the origins of the Vitacup premium dear/fawn, and more on its ubiquity, which has appeared here before, in various forms, painted and unpainted.

 

Vitacup deer? The one in the middle, is the most likely, if Vitacup only had one (and they had no multiples of their other animals, except the 'Three Wise Monkeys' who were a single moulding), as it's the one most often found with the other Vitacup animals. But the male with small antlers has also come in with them.

 

Then this one came-in a while ago, a larger scale, and painted like others we have seen, a vague attempt at fallow deer spots, and will look at below, slightly more baby-fawn like with big ears and shorter proportioned body.

 

It's marked as a raised relief DEP, which can be short for Depose, a French term meaning 'Registered Design', but equally, can be short for Deponiert,  German, and also 'Registered Design', I suspect the latter, but the former can't ruled-out.

 

Shown next to a tourist figure of a miner (?) I remember a gift-kiosk full of this stuff back in 1969, somewhere on the Rhine, possibly the Niederwald Monument, but it could have been somewhere near Koblenz, or one of several castles in the ENESCO world heritage Middle Rhine section, I was six, and it was very foggy, I can only remember a large car-park/viewing area, and a long stone balustrade. We ended up with two gold-chrome plated plastic dwarf miners, with deer which were - possibly - even smaller versions of some of the deer seen here?

 

We saw a paler one, in a previous post, with similar but unrelated sculpts.

 

While this broken one also came in and was seen previously.

Note the Indigo-inked, rubber stamp 'Foreign', on the tail.

Here we have much larger ones, but with what appear to be painted versions of the Vitacup ones being used as actual babies, to the two juvenile-looking 'adults' who are about half-a magnitude larger, the slight absurdity being they are plastic figures pretending to be wood, on a pretend wood base, on an actual wooden plinth!

 

And I think Chris Smith took this image in a Charity Shop for the Blog, some time ago, knowing these were being collected in one place! So thanks to him for taking the opportunity presented, to add to the subject.

 

Here's another, from the scale of the figures, the same larger size, but now suggesting the 'babies' in the previous image, may themselves be larger than the Vitacup 'Ivorene' models.

 

Of interest here, is than despite now having over a dozen of the barometer figurines, loose, I don't have either of the two in the background here, so I need to look out for them both, and there must have been dozens over the years coming from the workshops of Switzerland, Austria and Germany, since plastic came into use, with many more wooden ones before them!

 

Here’s what looks like the painted version of the Vitacup, from the previous post, with the stamp again, but here on the belly. The Foreign mark was more common on German (and Japanese) stuff between the wars, and Japanese stuff after WWII, but that's a whole 'nother post, in porcelain it applies to a period between 1893 and 1923, while it is found on US workman's tools for the period 1890-93, and that's the tip of an iceberg connected to . . . Tariffs, taxes, recent enemies, new friends, and the hiding of origin, while flagging origin!

 

A painted version of the feeding pose, and a fourth pose/fifth variant, laying on the ground, these also look to be a larger size, and have a surface texture which suggests they may be a different maker, to most of the others, either as copies, or a renovated tooling?

 

While this is just a homage, in glazed china!

Much smoother lines. 

It seems, someone, probably German, who may or may not have been Siku, had a catalogue of these, sculpted as if made of carved wood, in the Erzgebirge style, in two or three sizes, at least four poses, with a head variant on the commonest pose, of which Vitacup took between one or three, in the plain Ivorene, while anyone else who needed them could arrange a supply to suit their tourist trinket, or, kitch tchotchke, in a variety of paint styles (they may have added themselves) with or without the white dots hinting at fallow deer, while other people copied the sculpts!

 

The Vitacup sets, however, are drawn from various parts of the supplier's wider catalogue, and the work of different sculptors, with several other animals having the carved-wood look, but more being realistically sculpted and one or two slightly cartoonish, but still with more realistic fur/hides.

 

Now, I never got round to updating the post which tried to list them all;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2018/06/f-is-for-follow-up-vitacup.html 

 . . . following the comments of Jungle Kim, and both (that post and the listing) need to be sorted properly, but suffice to say, all the ones with the pale blueish-white background are soft polyethylene (elastische plastik) and known to be Siku (tools which don't seem to have gone to DS Plastics, of the Netherlands), which suggests that while I might like the Vitacup et al to be Siku, for neatness, they may be by someone else?

 

However, Siku are known for providing may of the margarine/tobacco/coffee/soap-powder premiums of the 1950's, in hard styrene, so it's still an open question?

F is for First Show of the Year - I

And so we all trekked-off to Sandown Park for the first show of 2024, a lovely day in the end, given it seems to have rained every other day since the beginning of February! I didn't buy much, but there are some nice bits among all the make-weights!

 

How cool is this? Adrian gave me this Fairylight magnetic-novelty at the end of the show, when I asked him what he had on it? We like cats here, and there's a surprising number of mice in the stash too; rubber, cartoon, Erzgebirge/wood, I think we saw some musician mice one time, so adding one of each, in the same box - bargain!

 

These are under embargo until they appear in the ongoing Railway figure posts!

 

Two early Wiking 'planes, I think we looked at a good one a few years back, these are missing bases and the wire hanger, along with their little clear acetate 'propeller sweeps', which clip over the nose-cones and can be replaced. Both dive-bombers/ground-attack types, a German Junkers Ju 87 'Stuka' and what I suspect is a Japanese Nakajima B5N'Kate' or, because the tail's not right, a Grumman TBF 'Avenger'?

An eclectic mix here, which, from the top left includes, a Linde premium buffalo/wisent type, a Barrat & Sons flocked cow, and an interesting use of the Impro tooling; an eraser-rubber version, with the full marking of the originals, also left on the brightly-coloured Imperial reissues.

Below them are two Vitacup animal premiums, one in a darker than normal ivory shade (which may only be a smoker's house jobbie?) and two Kellogg's premiums of Sooty characters, actually sweep and whatsit-cat . . . Googles frantically . . . Kipper! Kipper the cat.

And I'm sure most of you will recognise the Charbens circus elephant, it's easy to ID from this side!

 

A couple of cheap lots of smaller (35mm) flats, actually the upper lot are technically semi-flat, being a bit fatter, German troops painted as Fins, by the simple expedient of painting the flag Finnish! I'm not sure on the lower flats, but they do have base markings under the paint, which I shall address at some latter date, there is a fair bit of material to dig into on these.

And this was also a gift, Christian Hatley had mentioned them a while ago, and not recognising me with my Spring haircut, it took him a while to realise who I was, then gifted me this Diddy Man, who, I found when I got home, is another KT novelty figure! And there are probably at least three more to find, if they are aping the Cherilea ones?

B is for Best Show on Earth! 7. Animals

Not a dinosaur this year, not a one, but it's not the show for dinosaurs, so that's hardly surprising, and a lot of these were in the donations, but there were some nice purchases too, so without further ado;

Mold-a-Rama Elephant, I like Elephants as those of you who've been here for a while will know, and I've known about Mold-a-Rama for years, but never had an example, as it's quite an American-specific thing, although it's also touristy, so a few should make their way over here from time to time? Mine came from Milwaukie County Zoo as you can see!

 

Having now found one, the first thing is how big they are (that's two of my fingers poking through in the bottom-right shot), and, because I'd always thought they were smaller, I'd always assumed they were solids and possibly some kind of wax (of the glue-gun type), to be able to be produced 'while you wait' (these are made in coin-operated machines at various sights and venues all across the US), and when you read about them, it usually just says "plastic", with no technical details!

The fact is, they are heavy blow-moulds, probably from a 'slug' or 'plug' of polyethylene which will look something like a 2" mortar round, Sodastream gas-bottle or extreme sex-toy . . . a round-bottomed bottle, they look like a round-bottomed bottle! This needs to be sized/weighted to whichever mould is in the machine.

 

The machines are changed from time to time, for instance; the silver Seahorse has been swapped for a pink Flamingo today (yesterday now), in the same Milwaukee County Zoo! And each mould, or whole machine (sometimes they change-out the whole unit) will require a different plug to rapidly produce the model (from a kept-hot tool?) while the punter waits, without filling the machine with flash or other waste.

 

So not exactly rare (although they were getting so before their recent renaissance I think?), but it's nice to have one at last, and there will be a greater rarity of those marked from now-defunct venues, one-off issues or long-gone events/exhibitions . . . I believe some of the dinosaurs are particularly sought-after. All the remaining machines however do date from the 1960's, so there is a finite life left to them, they won't last forever!

 

Inanimate objects are also featured, along with seasonal (Halloween and Christmas) items, there's plenty more here; they have a website!

Various birds came in, both purchases and donations, with a nice gull (or poor pelican sculpt) which might be Spanish or Portuguese, a Japanese novelty rocker in blow-moulded celluloid, it has a set-in weight to keep it upright, and predates Weebles by at least a decade-and-a-half!

A similar floating duck and one of the Marx Miniature Bird Model-Kits I think; the green one with separate wings - another post which has been in the queue since . . . well, September 2017! So I'll try to pull them out as a follow-up

I can't remember if I need the Vitacup reindeer still, I know I've had a broken one for ages, but I may have alleviated that problem some time ago, and I fear this one might be 'good one number 3' now! They all came together and mostly need a clean!

 

What can I say . . . board-game pieces at the infant level? I'll keep one for the 'sample'!

 

Two nice groups, on the left we have Tudor Rose in polystyrene, I have a decent sample, but these were clean, and I'm trying to get all colour variants of each animal, and don't carry wants lists at shows, so just grab them if they are affordable.

 

On the right a small group of composition animals, who seem to be all babies - calf and foals, and seem to be too good to be Brent (and we have looked at them in the past), so I'm at a loss, but they may be French?

A mixed bunch of horses from across the day's acquisitions include an early British (far left, Gemodels?), a flocked Cherilea (?) behind the probably New Ray foal pair, we've seen the white version before here. The kicking foal is Cherilea, I used to think it was Hilco, but the two are related so . . . and the Crescent foal on the far right. The red-and-gold one is probably a Hong Kong/China knock-off from a fantasy set (?), while the hard plastic foal with airbrushed tan is a mystery too.

 

A whale-tail pencil top! A third of a camel (Italeri or Heller WWII Western Desert kit, or Historex?) and a polar bear which - from the feet - looks like he goes with a construction-brick set. The two prehistoric mammals are Safari, and big-cats are big cats! The bags behind are all those smallies from Blue Box et al., with the odd Corgi and Bachman.

The polar bear from another angle, he's not Lego, as far as I'm aware, theirs is hard plastic and graphically simplified, but I don't think it can be Mega Bloks either as we've seen theirs here in the past, and it was different, or was that a yeti? Might be Mega Bloks then? But there's a lot of these improved Hestair-Kiddybrick issuers out there, and he could just be kinder with construction-toy stud-sized holes in his feet!

 

Odds; the rubber dog in grey on the right needs a brand, the Airfix pointer/greyhound/lurcher means I now have colour variants/duplicates of all six of the dogs, a Marx Miniature Masterpiece farm calf is mentionable, with a couple of Hong Kong's behind.

 

This is a bit of fun, in need of both sorting and - eventually - some ruthless recycling, but as an image, there's a story here I think. They all came in one of the donation bags, and are clearly someone's attempt to build a set of ammunition pack-mules for a wargames army or diorama, after the old Britains Hollow-cast set of British/Colonial mountain artillery!

Thanks to all for everything last month; Adrian Little., Andreas Dittmann, Gareth Morgan, Michael Mordant-Smith, Peter Evans, Brian Carrick and Trevor Rudkin.