M is for More on the Margarine Menagerie - from Malta

These came as a bulk lot from the excellent Swagman's Daughter, and for a very reasonable remuneration, so many thanks to her, and they/this post help answer a few questions, left from last time, along the way.

One of each pose/item in each of the two new colours, it's a odd selection, with a couple of question marks (in my mind at least), such as is the horse supposed to be a Zebra, which is the American Buffalo and which the Eurasian Wisent, are they both buffalo or are they both bison, is it a seal or a Sea-lion and how do you tell without a given scale, why so many deer . . . and etcetera! And while Google would help with some, I'd lose the paragraph and I've lots of images to provide copy for here!

Useful for backgrounds and narrow-shelf displays, these new ones are all in soft polyethylene plastic and two wishy-washy colours which don't photograph that well, but by the end of the post you'll be pretty familiar with them! The 'Birch' is a bit of a guess but the only obvious alternative is those trees in the Southern US states with that mossy stuff hanging in them?

If I didn't lump the sea-life in with this shot it would be a kangaroo (or wallaby - no scale again?), but all the sea-life are common in the Southern-oceans or Antarctica so we have a four-shot!

North American doesn't fare much better! I've called it a Buffalo Bison to differentiate it from the Wisent and used the bigger model for the North American version, but are they the bigger, are they Bison Buffalo? Does anybody care!

Yeah! I should perhaps have not bothered with the labelling, or got a biology degree first! Reindeer are bigger huh? Red, Roe, doe , fawn, Hearts or Harts, are they a species 'white hearts' . . . too many deer!

The horse should probably be a Zebra but he's too big and the mane's too long and the tails too fluffy so I've made him a steppe-pony; arbitrarily! The fox and the pig are straightforward, but see above for the buffalo notes!

Small ears and round back make him Asian! The Rhino looks Asian too actually? Is a Dromedary a hybrid? Having recently watched a program of the Bactrian originals - which are very different - and remeberering research we did on the HaT site years ago; I've chickened-out of going firm on that one, most are hybrids weather one hump or two! Haven't the faintest which Gazelle-Impala-other one is depicted, but 'gazelles' leap about!

Plastic colours and types so far found; the original margarine and other premiums were in various shades of off-white, cream and pale-beige polystyrene and the same material has provided the oxide red, scarlet, blue and jade, while the same blue can also be found in soft polyethylene along with the green and yellow (prompting today's post) and black.

However all but a few of the creamy-white ones I have here come from the Swagman's Daughter (there are more originals in storage), as well as the people thanked last time (Paul Morehead and Brian Carrick), Peter Evans gave me another handful at May's Plastic Warrior show, while I've purchased a few of the smaller lots along with the bulk clearance 'bundle'; and they all came - originally - from a wholesaler's stock in Malta.

They are used on religious high-days and holidays (and other civic events?), wrapped in little paper twists and thrown from the houses to the children in the street 9nowadays it seems to be mostly confetti streamers and balloons), if you've followed previous links to the Swagman's Daughter you'll have seen all sorts similar novelties previously associated with gum-balls, Sobres, Christmas cracker-prizes and so on - a lot of them came from the same vendor in Malta.

Clearly this was another outlet for such stuff; I guess a 1970's piñata would have contained the same little novelties alongside the sweets they also carried [and which are also thrown in Malta, were among the first items ever in Christmas crackers and often found as part of the mix in Sobres, Wundertutten and Lucky Bags], it's another source for the mould-owners to sell product too, and another source for us collectors to mine!

Now last time I mentioned that people had named both Jean and Manurba as the origin of the larger versions, they are in fact Manurba as seen by the catalogue image provided by Andreas Dittmann here, but only some of the poses have been scaled down for this set, while other poses in this set are either original sculpts or taken from elsewhere?

I've since picked up another hard plastic one from the Manurba set, a Llama (missing from the small set) although his Prickly-pear is damaged I notice! Whether Manurba were the holders of the original tool, back in the margarine-premium days, is still anyone's guess, but I wouldn't bet my shirt on another brand at the moment, although I think the moulds had been passed-on by the time they were building-up in a warehouse in Malta?

Another question which arose, not in the last post, but in the sorting of the ethylene batch was; why have a set with a 29-count; 28 or 30 being more obvious targets for the sculptor and tool-makers? Well, there are more fence pieces in either colour than there are of any other sculpt, with most animals outnumbered in both colours, the clear inference being that a full 'set' or mould-shot contains two cavities of the broken-down fence, giving a likely 30-count after all?

And they are bloody useful when you have them in such numbers!

 

I know what you're thinking Giselle -

have I used six; or only five?

Well, in all the excitement I clean forgot to count...

Adjusted set-count; the numbering is arbitrary I think.

Two of the animals have suffered from miss-moulding or short-shot, the elephant and the fox, the fences also suffer, but they are bound too with all the thin channels which make-up the moulding.

As well as suffering short-shots the same three sculpts (along with the two palm trees and leaping 'gazelle') also have some very flashy examples, which was probably because the pressure was turned-up or the heat increased - to prevent short-shotting - with the result it 'over-flowed' it's designated parameters!

There's also a great variance in colour across both colour samples with a lot of washed-out semi-transparent examples, where not enough pigment has been added to the raw material and the neutral granules haven't picked-up enough colour to go fully-opaque or 'solid'? That last lot was a mouthful wasn't it . . . the vagaries of 'getting technical'!!

'Image 13' my notes say - unlucky for some? I think the combination of the three problem areas is what decided the Swagman's Daughter to offload them for a reasonable-sum in my general direction, and I in return for a bargain said I'd only swap them . . .

. . . so while I have a few complete sets of these for swap, it'll be on a no money, no pack-drill basis! Therefore; if anyone would like a complete example (with two fences) get in touch and tell me what you've got to offer in exchange, early applicants can stipulate green or yellow, or get a default 50/50 mix.

M is for Margarine Menagerie

As the common cream coloured 'ivorene' margarine premiums these have been identified as being issued by Cleverstolz, Lowenbrink, Markt-Apotheque, Raulino, Sanella and Voss (among others), but the four sets represented by the small sample below remain more mysterious...to me!

The smaller ones are just the original premiums in new colours, with a second variant being in soft ethylene palstic (the right-hand column of blue ones in the main image), while larger versions exist in both hard polystyrene (lighter grey rhino) and soft polyethylene (dark grey horse), in which guise they have been linked with Jean and Manurba in the past, neither seem the right answer to me.

Thanks to Paul Morehead and Brian Carrick for most of these, I have the cream ones and a better sample of the larger ones in storage (with whites and browns), so hopefully we will return to them, by which time I may have a better idea on these - probably later - issues.

W is for World Dolls/World Dancers Part 1

Right, sorry for the delay, but personal stuff has kept me away for the last few days. Having learned to do the second part first in order that they run in sequence I should have done this the same night as the Commonwealth/Van Brode post, but hey, better late than never. Tonight's post concerns the World Dancers/World dolls known to those in the States from the adverts in comics which ran from the 50's through to the late 70's/early 80's? To Europeans from the margarine give-aways, and to the citizens of the UK from, er...I don't know what!!

The first to make an appearance were the 'Tanzerinnen' or; Female Dancers. A set of ten different figures given away as premiums with K's, Schipka and Voss (not Fri-Homa as stated on the US Comics Website [link to right], nor is there any evidence that they were among the sets manufactured by Siku), these figures (above) are not from those sets which tend to have different bases and greater detail, but have been separated from the US comic set to give an idea of the European sets. A further word on origin; While Siku did produce a lot of the premium flats in Germany in the 1950/60's, there were many other companies in Germany, France and the Low Countries producing these, selling the product, selling/leasing the moulds and the designs and copying each other's work. Moulds (both originals and copies) ended up in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil, Singapore and Macao/Macau. Not forgetting that the early plastic flat history includes the WHW winter/war relief sets, and running plastic through 'Nuremberg Flat' moulds!

They next turn up with the US comic 100 World Dolls set, with the addition of 20 new poses, missing from the above photograph are a clown and Santa Clause on a sleigh. The US issue additions are a less quality sculpt, being much chunkier. Over the years they were sold by a number of (apparently) different companies, which are all on the US comics website.

During their lifetime the figures have turned up elsewhere, and here we see a few, on the left are two factory-painted examples, the Chinaman had an umbrella glued into his hands, both figures have the remains of card/paper and glue on their bases, and probably came in little tourist gift-shop type vignettes (these two were found separately, several years apart). Then the two on the top row - centre and right are different colours, hard plastic and may have been premiums or Christmas Cracker novelties. Centre of the bottom row shows a figure who's release pin has become stuck mid-way through the moulding process, leaving a rod of plastic sticking out of his back. Finally a soft plastic Cracker gift. [And I covered some other copies of this set under 'B is for more Betterwear' in November '08]

  This is the real mystery, containing 7 of the ten dancers, and 13 of the twenty US dolls. You might think "Well the others are just lost in the mists of time?" but the group 'as found' contains exactly two of each of the figures present, making a total of 40, those two neat numbers add-up to more than a slight coincidence, so I think it's a complete 'sample'. The question is what? There are undocumented rumours that these may have been issued in UK breakfast cereal or biscuits, while the possibility remains that they could be the unsold (complete) contents of a shop-stock box as supplied to a bakers or cake-decorators? They are in a pinkish plastic. Indeed, the pink flesh colouring of this set and the subject matter of all the sets are the main links with the sets discussed in part 2 - Below.