N is for New Finds, Pt.2 - The Works

I've mentioned this shop before quite a few times, but they do keep finding stuff through the global clearance system and then offering it for next to nothing...all these are currently available in one store or another; I regularly check four now; Basingrad, Fleet, Newbury and Woking and they don't always all have the same items at the same price so it's worth searching about, although there is a web-store as well.

These two came from the Fleet store, B'stoke and Newbury were out and Woking still had 7.99 on them. Forgetting that Airfix only produced a 1:32 scale Cromwell in the olden times, the real times, the before the evil Heller times, then getting further confused by the fact that Matchbox did make a Cromwell and Airfix made a Crusader with similar track guards (well, they look similar in my memories!), I assumed they would be the 'old kit' with an added wading sprue!

The modellers and WWII war gamers among you will know, I was being an idiot! It is in fact a brand-new and very good tooling (there seem to be some photo-etch and resin after-market detailing sets out there as well) with solid track units in a new style. Anyway my retarded assumptions aside; well pleased and will do one in wading gear with new barrel for D-Day as a Royal Marine  Centaur IV and the other with hedgerow-device and camo-strips as a later Normandy/Bocage slugger.

The Works also have 1:72 scale aircraft and larger scale car kits in the same promotion.

This is actually branded to (or at least; 'Imported by/for') The Works and is a bit poor. It was cheap and I bought one specifically to show here and so was expecting something a bit basic. It's really aimed at smaller kids and has a clip together construction and no traversing of the turret due to the turret basket mounting sockets!

I say 'clip-together'; you have to force the hull halves together and force the turret on and then find all the other parts are too loose! However...if you are gaming 28/32mm Sci-Fi and you want a cheap source of vehicles it has potential and is cheap enough to cut-up and/or convert to a hover-tank, SPG or turretless APC? Or it'll put some bits in the 1:48th scale spares-box!

December 2020 - Currently available in the US under the Grafix craft label with the same four PVA paints and a brush.

Then this turned-up about four weeks ago...you may remember we looked at the blind-bag clearance nearly four years ago World of Warcraft, how the starter sets can be released as clearance four years after the collectables is beyond me, but maybe it was a one-off that fell down the back of a radiator at The Works warehouse! Worth Looking out for though.

W is for World of Warcraft

One of the more recent trends in toy collecting has been the emergence of the 'Art' or 'Designer' toys, which were born in the 1990's; Wikipedia.

Of all the branches of our hobby, this is the one I have the most trouble getting my head round, they are produced in the same factories, from the same materials as figures similar to the ones in this post, given the same finishes and yet start at £20/30+ per small figure and can retail for thousands. They are also often quite grotesque with lots of blood, guts, dripping flesh, genitals, empty eye sockets etc, etc...

How can a 10-inch bunny-robot with an open belly full of bloody skulls or fetuses be worth ten times the retail price of a Wizards of the Coast 16-inch At-At Walker? So with the latest version/edition of WoW (as they are known) reaching the clearance wholesalers at £1.99 from their original retail price of £9:99, I though it would be an idea to look at them while musing on their over-hyped bigger brothers.

Two of the techniques common to Art Toys are metallic decoration and the use of transparent vinyls. The Elfin figure top left had a two-tone sword in metallic maroon and lilac, would you pay $300 dollars for a zombie bear in the same colours when this chap is currently around 75p?

Below him is a winged daemon of some kind, he has clear yellow vinyl wings with an over-paint of graduated red-orange, so what's so special about a similar half-dead corrupted duck-skeleton that it could be 'worth' a hundred time as much or more? Also of note, the Wikipedia article states that the production of designer toys is moving to Japan - in part - because they use transparent vinyls, yet these are made in China, I would suggest the move toward producing in Japan has more to do with Japanese proclivities toward torture, tentacle-porn, machine-porn and schoolgirl sex!

The Mage in the group of elves - bottom right - has many of the elements of a 'limited edition' designer toy, spikes, skulls, frown!...yet is pocket-money, not annual bonus money!

In the large picture a figure has been produced totally in clear vinyl, then painted until only the Jewell in the end of the staff is showing transparent (I can't tell whether the whole figure is yellow, or the Jewell is over-tinted), while the little pink-haired dwarf girl-warrior is exactly the sort of thing the designer toy people will sell you, in a larger size, for half a weeks wages!

As someone said the other day re. the current price of gold vis-a-vis historical gold trends, and bearing in mind the Tulip craze of the C17th, if something looks like a bubble, and feels like a bubble it probably is a Bubble...how long before the buyers of Designer Art Toys realize they have filled their lovely, sleek, black-framed, illuminated, glass cabinets with modern, industrial-processed, culturally meaningless, deformed, soul-destroying crud?

The above figures are from the latest incarnation of WoW, being the 'Miniatures game', there's also the 'Collectable card game' the 'Board game' (with smaller unpainted figures) and other branches of the franchise, nothing like squeezing the maximum out of your fans, but at least this is the affordable way of shifting a ton of vinyl to those with disposable wealth!