B is for Blow-Moulded Blow-Ups

Another one of the Rico Firenze relief 'posters', also marked up to Master Mount in the USA, this one was lacking the header-card, but is possibly the more interesting of the two, dealing with Reptiles & Amphibians.

 

Snakes, Lizards & Frogs!

 

Lizard.

 

Frog.

 

 

Snake-heads, no gangs!

 

O-Level biology!

Yes, the girls cooked a bit of eye-muscle on a Bunsen-burner and ate it! 

 

Digestive tract.

 

 Hearts.

 

The lighting at Sandown Park is not that conducive to photography, sometimes, it's bright enough, but I think it resonates at a different speed to pocket camera's shutter's and with shooting them through their polythene bags, they've all had to be contrasted and enlightened in Picasa to get them closer to what's actually in the bag, which is very colourful!

 

Many thanks again, to Adrian Little for these. 

F is for Frog . . . Man!

This weirdness joined the stash a few weeks ago, and on one level I wish it hadn't, it's a kilo or more of cold clammy stretch-rubber I just don't need, but on another level it's actually a quite interesting find, despite being a pretty hideous thing!

 

This is how I saw him, and thought, "Oh, a rubber jiggler man-frog thing, better have that?", even though it was a pit pricy at a fiver. However, when I picked the parcel up from the Old House, the box was so heavy I thought Peter or Chris had sent me something without telling me (they both have, sent lovely things, in the last ten days!), but took it home and unwrapped it.

It WAS a rubber jiggler, and it WAS that stretchy, silicon-rubber, clammy stuff which gets covered in pet hairs, dust and some sticky substrate/exudate, so this shot is 'after cleaning', but the bugger was huge, and I should have guessed-so from the knicker-elastic used in place of the thin black elastic thread, the giant spiders and King Kong's of my youth used to get!

See! Mahoosive lump of rubber! But, marked AAA and dated 1968, the year AAA are believed to have been set up. Previously known for their animals, a lot subcontracted to other brands, I think this is the first/earliest [part-] human figure I've seen by them, and from the colours of both polymer and paint, we can probably assume, with some safety, that they are responsible for a lot of the similar rubber-jigglers found in gum-ball capsule machines, including some of the Lik Be (LB) copies, such as those we saw here.

 

Indeed, that A-mark (link post) may be a Tripple-A variant, they are known to have used single A's as well as triples, but it doesn't explain the 'S' and other letter (?) on my LB robot/aliens? So, on one level it is what it is, a piece of ephemeral shite from the 1960's, but on another, a useful connector of other parts in the whole-story, either though the clues, or the more empirical bits!

The elastic is perished and will need replacing, which will entail stretching the new stuff to maximum, to match the non-elastic remain's measurements, then cutting, and glueing to the end of the old one, so it can be pulled through a hidden bar of rubber or tunnel set into the rubber jiggler.

MTC is for Rack Toys!

Last post for now is a bit of a folder-clearer, not the both Brian's Folder and Picasa aren't still full of rack toys - they are, we will be having more Rack Toy months, although all the small scale ones will be on the HK Blog as soon as I pull my finger out, slacker; that's my problem!

Frogs! Not the same as some others we were going to look at, but time waits for no man, I'll try and get them into a 'normal' post soon; MTC frogs!

Jet fighters, MRCA's and the lovely A10 Warthog. I watched A10's down at Lulworth Cove many, many years ago, these days they are a welcome sight for chaps in the field - as long as they are pointing in the right direction, you don't want to be in front of them when they burp!

The left hand set are copies of old 1970 mouldings, including the veteran Phantom and Starfighter, they manage to be both better and worse than their precedents - being thicker more rigid plastic; they are nicer to handle and hold their shape, but the detail carving is deep and crude.

Sea life, if you remember the volcanic atoll diorama of last month, this is the sort of set you find your sea-monster, look at that octopus! We will be returning to that atoll in the post 'B is for Biggles' soon, with a first for the blog!

And a set of horses, around 54mm by the look of them and ideal set for individual figure modellers (Napoleonic Generals standing around on smart mounts!?), closing-down Rack Toy Month . . .

B is for [not] Bendy Toy!

Interesting little post today: any toy collector, especially toy figure collectors will instantly recognise these as 'Bendy Toys', those daft elongated caricatures of people, cartoon characters or anthropomorphic animals with little pairs or triangular arrangements of holes at the joints and a wire armature buried in the PVC to enable manipulation of the figure, as part of the play value, or 'play element' of the toy.

Clearing last year's tomatoes (toe'mate'ohs!)

Except that . . . in a brilliant piece of capitalist marketing (or creative 'out of the box' blue-sky thinking?) someone has decided to re-invent them as plant or garden ties! It is a very clever use of what may even be an original 1970's  moulding (?), but what rankles is that you can now get four to a card from the gardening sections of discount stores for the same money (in real, inflation adjusted terms) as you used to have to pay for one!

Have we had this shot before?

I have several of these and we've looked at them on the blog before I think . . . pretty sure the Pink Panther had his moment here, there are some Cowboys and Indians from Italy via-Hong Kong (image added above) and I know I have a 'combat soldier' type in storage, but there were loads of them back in the day, whether this frog was one of them, I can't say.

Mysterious holes

Giving thought to the little holes: I can only assume that they are left by holding 'pins' for the armature?

They could just as likely be due to the volatile nature of PVC; that when being moulded over cold wire as a hot semi-liquid, gas or condensation of some kind forms and the holes are to prevent larger blisters or blemishes' being created by letting such a build-up escape as the moulding is released from the mould-tool?

Another explanation would be that the holes allow for movement at the likely points of articulation (elbows, knees, wrists etc...) chosen by the child-user; to prevent stress cracks appearing too early in the toys life. But that seems even less believable and would seem to require more holes than are usually present.

All explanations are only my own thoughts on the phenomena, and anyone who knows for sure; please let the rest of us know!

If you collect bendy toys and haven't found these yet, try a search with 'garden-tie' or 'Plant Tie' in it, I'm sure there must be others out there!

Eff is for 'Phibbeous Fellows

A small collection of novelty frogs and a reptile! Playing the banjo! He's quite common and I think I've seen similar sculpts hinting at a set, sort of Marx / Disney knock-offs?

Magnetic novelties are a good standby to keep kids amused for a while and these frogs do spin, frantically, so some clever use of the positive and negative charge there?

The height of mechanical novelty sophistication in the 1970's? Yeah, a lump of bitumen! Now replaced by spring-loaded jumpers, or the types with time-sensitive lick-suckers, these guys rely on the spring sticking to a lump of tar long enough for you to get your hands out of the way!

S is for Scary-Monsters and Super-Creeps

Sung in a nasal voice: "She had an horror of rooms...full of toys!"

The term 'Rubber Jigglers' tends to brings to mind small hideous finger monsters, usually made of a semi-transparent silicone- or similar-rubber in an orange, flesh or khaki shade, over-sprayed with blobs of colour, maybe with eyes dotted in, but they have a term of their own 'Finger Monsters'!

The jigglers label extending out to various other cheapie toys (confined to capsule/gum-ball machines and shop-stock boxes or cards, rather than the smaller cracker and premiums type novelty sources) made of soft, synthetic-polymer, rubberised materials, which jiggle as they are moved, played with or dangled from an elastic cord.

We looked at a bunch of the sucker-fitted ex-LP sculpt jigglers a while ago, a large ant/bug thing the other day and I'm working on a page for the finger puppets (just because I say they're hideous doesn't mean I don't collect them!), but there are also more realistic jigglers, these constitute a quick overview:

Spiders, lizards (or are they newts?), frogs (not illustrated) a frog-monster, bats, snakes, all firm favourites with the William Brown type schoolboy of any generation in the last 50 years. But; leave them in a styrene capsule too long and they'll eat it with the same power an Airfix Tiger tank's tracks had, to eat their host, in the same era!

This is an early window walker, quite a popular novelty now, they can be much larger with ball extremities to flick-over and walk down the wall. This one on the other hand moves very slowly, and has leaked an unstable fluid into it's instruction-sheet over time, yet remains as sticky as ever! It's also tiny.

Three snakes, one a modern ethylene one (small, pale blue, semi-flat/relief design), you may well find in your cracker in 11 days time, under him is a 1970's classic in stretchy jade-green rubber (the only true jiggler in this trio) and under him is a more realistic 1990's dense PVC model with a half-hearted paint-job. We saw the spiders the other day, but boy; could you get you mother/sister/aunt to scream with a well timed reveal of a jiggling spider!

Still More Wildlife

Mike Beale over at the Norfolk Wildlife blog, link to right, writes in answer to my query about the white moth bottom right "That's a White Plume Moth you have there, Its wings are deeply divided into several 'fingers', each of which is finely feathered, or plumed."

The Best Winter Job!

This was my bonfire about three weeks ago, it had been burning for about two weeks and would go on to burn for 5 weeks (and half a day!) in total! We compost a lot here but this winter there was a lot of annual leaf fall, and a lot of 'catch-up' clearance to do.

Once you have got a good centre of hot coals, you can pile wet leaves on the fire for ever if you have them! I used the old rotting stuff left in piles by the previous gardener to put a damp, muddy 'cap' on the fire over Christmas, and even though I thought it had gone out at one point and I saw no wisps of smoke for several days, through the first of the recent cold snaps, it burst back into life when the wind picked up.

At one point the fire heap was taller than me and 12-foot across at the base, after Christmas, barrow after barrow of raking from the beds and under the trees went on the fire, some days as many as 15 loads. There is a lot of mud and grit in this stuff and you end up with a quite heavy aggregate, which is full of orangey or pinkish stuff that is basically fired earth, this holds the ash together and stops in blowing away, some 20 barrow-loads of this sandy ash will go on the vegetable patch before it's dug over (a job already started)

This Frog was rescued from the fire twice in recent weeks, I'm quite sure he appreciated the fact that for days it was giving of a lot of warmth while doing very little, but from time to time it would flare-up and I only hope he/she didn't get caught out...

Already piling stuff up for another fire as soon as we get a south-westerly, which will take the smoke out over the fields. Yes, I know we had Northerlies during the cold snaps, but the village school had broken-up for the Christmas Holidays and the Church is infrequently used in turn with several others, so annoyance was minimal.