M is for Merten's Menagerie

While I was taking the shot's of the exquisite little wooden animals yesterday I took these as well, they are not all the Merten animals I have, just those that fell out of a box during the move in November and nearly got left behind! Still they are a reasonable sample to give an impression of what Merten were capable of.

The loose set at the top is set 1001, but there is a question mark over the central horse running without a base, then there are two 1002's (one missing the two smaller animals) to show how the paint changed from batch to batch (or; out-painter to out-painter?), while Preiser went with lesser numbers of animals in a standard box depending on the size (with exceptions for the very large and very small), Merten produced custom boxes for each set, with the N-gauge being left on the sprue.

Set 1003 has the larger native wild animals, common to central Europe with three different types of deer and a couple of wild boar for Obelix to track down!

Below are some more wild and domestic animals, probably the contents of more than one set, with pigs, sheep, goats and some smaller Red deer (fawns?).


Some more horses, with a comparison Airfix piece and one of the aforementioned sprues with N-gauge versions attached.

S is for Stationery

This is the last of the pencil top stuff for a while - promise (you don't want to see the recent Weetabix football shirts and shite like that, do you!?), and as we were looking at the TV related stuff last time, some more of them first;

From left, top row; Skelator and She-ra (I think - Teela see; Comments) from the Masters of the Universe franchise, I was busy playing big soldiers in Germany (providing real-time OpFor for a couple of Soviet Shock Armies!) at the time MotU was popular so know little about it, I think it involved a grey skull or something! Then a soft vinyl Flintstone figure and a Hello Kitty cat differing from Miffi only in the shape and size of the ears...and the marketing budget! Strange how not only is Hello Kitty so like Miffi and the boys of South Park resemble the earlier Mainzelmännchen?

The flying Snowman of Raymond Briggs, and figure I think is Lucy (or the other one!) from Peanuts and a knock-off stupid kid wizard like Harry Potter.

Two characters from Rupert the Bear but I think the old git is from Popeye? A non-stationery frog (in love with a pig...since when was that sort of thing to be encouraged on kids TV?) trying to work out how he too can get a pencil up his arse and two of the dreaded Trolls that were literally everywhere in the mid-1970's...and still come around on a regular basis, these days Russ Berrie exploit the franchise, the two here are - like most of these toppers - Hong Kong.

Not Toppers; 'Clingers' and 'Holders', all Kinder with K-numbers from 2000 and 2004, I had to use the lids to show-off the 'holder action' as anything more than about a third of a wooden pencil is too heavy!

Finally the old and the new, both figural; The pencil sharpener is marked 'GERMANY' and dates from the 1950's (if it's a day) while the Sports Relief chap is currently in Ryman's. The Cowboy is that much copied pose originally by Lido and the like, both the sharpener and the Harry Potter lookie-like'ee above are polystyrene.

W is for Wooden Wildlife

From time to time the odd piece come into the collection which either defies labelling or is so exquisite you feel it should be in a museum cabinet not one of my little plastic bags, here are on or two, the largest item is probably the snake, with the Airfix 'control' a near match, so all very small.

The two images top left show little animals of an Asian look, probably Indian or Burmese? I suspect some sort of votive or other little religious ornament, but they may have enough 'age' to be export items from the days of the Raj? Maybe from a little zoo set, Noah's ark or for use as dolls-house ornamentals? Although in support of the religious possibility - some are slightly fantastical looking or mythic.

The Bear is typical Black Forest craft work, but about as small as they come and of very fine work, as is the cow. Given that it is probably another craft piece, it shows an incredible knowledge of anatomy, even a 'love' of the animal form, it seems to have lost two - probably paper - ears and two horns, which will need to be replaced with steam-bent cocktail-stick tips.

News Views Etc...Blogger!

Right - I've now lost my entire 'Followers' list and gained a message telling me it's configured wrong! As I also seem to have lost the ability to edit from the blog screen as well, and have touched not the settings for a while - I'm going to assume this is the Blogspot.annoyance.elves and go to bed in the hope that it's back to whatever Blogger deems will be 'normal service' tomorrow!

D is for Disneykins

We looked at the Marx Disneykins not that long ago within the context of the European bubble-gum premiums taken from the Heimo moulds and one day I'll post more of the lose and individual boxed ones, but having been busy with other stuff today I thought I'd chuck this up as one of the old 'lazy posts'...

I think the date is 1971 (MCMLXXI?) which makes it quite a late set and interestingly states that it is made in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Among others I have the resistance fighters with both markings, but had always assumed the mould had moved mid-production, this set would seem to be suggesting that there were several sets of moulds?

Not the complete set of Disneykins, but the main - and therefore; most popular - characters in a hard styrene plastic.

P is for Pompier....' i!

Well I said we'd look at a couple more of the Italian sets, and this is my favourite of the three in my collection, we have looked at the Firemen before (Starlux Firemen), but I seemed to cover only a few of them so no harm if we have another look...

A close-up of the figures and the box with it's lid on, also the box from the late unpainted issues; you can just about see the fireman on the deck of the landing vessel in the background!

With this set the artwork is everything and the reason it's my favourite, I have quite a decent (not large) side-collection of 'Adult' comics and graphic novels with the work of Mobius, Milo Manara and Drillet to the fore, but as a youngster I was drawn to the cartoons of people like, Degano, Mordillo, and Serrano and this artwork is very reminiscent of some of their stuff.

If anyone can identify the unnamed illustrator I'd be very interested to know who he is, the firemen look a lot like some of the characters from the opening and closing scenes in Yellow Submarine, that seminal work of animation attached to some music by a Northern beat-combo who's name escapes me!

Sadly - Jean Giraud who's pen name was Moebius died last Saturday, at the youngish age of 73, but he's had a bloody-good innings and left a body of fine works as a memorial/testament to his passing through this world. I'd recommend him to anyone with an off-beat sense of imagination or an appreciation of the drafters art; his economy of line and the little hidden gems in the backgrounds make going back to his work a pleasure - time and again.

One of the figures missing from my loose sample is the hose-head guy (left), also; a close up of the diving team, comparison of the two rope-carriers (early version on the left) and a better/different angle on the ladder-climber.

A is for Aluminium (or Aluminum!) Animals

Having told Sam in the comments section to the Starlux Italian circus set post that I couldn't see myself publishing more circus for a while, I remembered that I took these at the Sandown Park fair the the other week...so a Small request-post for Sam and a bit more circus in an unlikely material...

From Wend-Al (or Wendal), Britain's only volume producer of toy soldiers in aluminium, they are all from the circus range and consist...(I was about to list what is clear from the photographs!)...of what you can see! Like most of the bits I shoot at shows these were on Mercator Trading's table and may still be available from him, link; top-right somewhere.

Because my knowledge of Wendal is no better than my knowledge of Quiralux (which is non-existent) I couldn't tell you if these were also made by the French firm and with collectors varying in opinion as to whether Wendal copied Quiralux or Quiralux copied Wendal or some mould-sharing went on, I'll leave it as a maybe Quiralux carried these in their own civil range!

M is for More Mud-hopping

Well - back out to the garden and sure enough I turned-up a few more pieces, though not the trunk of the Lego tree I was hoping to find, also as I suspected the number of items has lessened the further away from the corner I dug...

Top left looking East, the bits of Lego and Airfix Betta Builder I found a few years ago (2006) were in the highlighted corner of the strawberry frame, the stuff I dug yesterday came out of the bare corner, and - I believe - the real mother-load is within the overprinted black border, beyond the frame where there is a distinctive mound.

I suspect (due to the antique bottles) that the owners before us knew there was an old Victorian dump there (most houses in the UK built before the 1920's had one somewhere at some point) and just carried on using it, the plastics having survived along with the old glass bottles, why it would only contain toys (and one shampoo bottle lid) and why more than 50% are not damaged is the real mystery...maybe some draconian punishment..."If you don't clear your playroom now, I'll..."

In fact the shampoo bottle lid (see green lump in last nights post) is instructive, as it's easy to forget we've had 'dayglo' shades of ethylene for several decades now!

Other photos are looking West with yesterdays 'hit site' in the black box and the first fork of the day turned-up a Timpo horses base! I think I must have missed it as it got dark last night!

Another graphic pinpointing where I believe the main load to be, which also shows the bed finished (you can see where this is leading can't you - I'll be shifting the gardening Blog over here too!) and today's haul...the other wing! It had better transfers as well, but went in the bin without a clean this time...sorry Spitfire.

As well as the Timpo base I got a Stickle-Brick wheel centre, two nice pieces of 'Legoland'-era Lego (headlight grill and the Legoland block that came with all the lorries) and a bulkhead from something like a DC3 Dakota or Mosquito? Whatever it belonged to it will go in the spares box; being a tad more useful than damaged spitfire wings!

So - more free stuff out of the ground and I only put the seeds in this afternoon! Spinach (nearest viewpoint), Broad Beans (behind), early spuds (nearly out of shot far left) and Onions round the back corner of the Strawberry frame, but I've laid-down the rest of the toys to vintage for a few more years!

What I'm hoping will be in the future dig; Missing poses of Lone Star musketeers, loads more soldiers, lots of rare Lego pieces, the rest of the white Aircraft kit - complete.

What will actually be there; More of the same odd tat and a shattered Matchbox Spitfire fuselage...with transfers intact!

C is for il Circo; the Circus, le Cirque

Speaking of Italians as I was the other day, Italy provides us with a nice range of own-language Starlux sets, very similar to the window-fronted boxed sets in French - contents wise - these Italian market sets have a completely transparent lid which is stapled on to an under-tray.

A couple of shots of the set with the lid still on, the contents don't really add up to a circus in my opinion, but there is play potential there for a younger owner, not least the big cats eating the other members of the cast...well; if it hasn't got tanks in, you're going to have to make your own ultra-violence aren't you?!!

Lid off; this is a delicate operation, that involves carefully opening each staple for re-use if you can't match them exactly with modern staples, a lot of old staples have a round cross-section which is impossible to match with modern domestically available ones, these were easier and a match was found - I have three staplers and about 5 different kinds of staple for exactly this purpose.

Various studies of the contents and a couple of colour variations, the dark bear with the farm/civilian pig and the paler lion with the two clowns (another old scan previously published in black and white). This is hardly a circus, with two keepers, two clowns and a compare that leaves a lion-tamer as the only 'performer'?

For added play/educational value there was a data-card (small poster) and a sticker (on the right) included in all these sets and we'll look at a couple more over the coming days.

I love the artwork on these, it's sort of the cusp between 1960's psychedelia and 70's style pop-art, all Heals or Habitat, A Clockwork Orange, the Magic Roundabout or the early packaging for Britains Detail, dating this nicely to the early 1970's...around 1971/3?

H is for Howdahs

Continuing to look at Elephants with a view to scotching a few myths or just generating a better understanding of the practicabilities of using elephants in the field as war-machines.

All these images are taken from Mundy's Pen and Pencil Series - India (or; Journal of a Tour in India by General Godfrey Charles Mundy), published by John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1858 (from the 'Books for Railway Reading series - those were the days; black smuts and a good read...are we there yet Papa?), now available as a Google eBook, but these photographs are taken from a private copy.

Mahratta Chief and Horseman - Gwalior in the distance

How most elephants in most battles in most wars have been attired, heavy blanket protection and a bit of jingly-jangly and colour to add to the overall impression. No heavy wooden tower or throne-like structure, no castellated, crenelated fort with crew of four, no forward firing siege-engine, no overhead protection, just a huge beast with heavy hide running at the enemy with cavalry outriders to keep ham-stringers away.

Lion and Elephant

The purpose of this and the next three images is to show the sort of typical construction of a structure an elephant could be expected to carry for a day - or even a week's expedition - a well-fed elephant mind. It looks as if the front of the howdah, forward of the entrance has been torn away and is falling away over the left shoulder of the elephant.

Tiger attack on the Elephant

Here you can see the entrance and the forward screen intact on the elephant being attacked by the enraged - and probably wounded - Tiger, while others have a fully-enclosed howdah, the elephant in the right-hand background for instance, the Europeans are putting their weight on the walls so they must be fairly stable.

Starting for a Tiger Hunt

Here the construction can be clearly seen to be a light timber (or bamboo?) frame filled in with some sort of fabric, board or matting and with the provision of cartridge-pouches attached (riveted rawhide or sewn leather or canvas?) to the central area of the infill 'screens'.

A grab-rail and parasol are further equipage on both animals, note the means of egress on the left-hand elephant by means of a ladder, the howdahs with 'gates' would be easier to enter from a lower platform. The parasol of the right-hand animal is lying within a cargo compartment a bit like the trunks that would be a feature of early motor-cars.

Elephants crossing at Nullah

Here the fabric is quite obvious, note also the carrying of the ladder and the reinforcing cross-spar, which is why the figures in the shooting incident above are able to put their weight against such a light structure. Note also the fourth slimmer (younger?) figure on the lead animal apparently keeping the howdah steady by holding its sides and bracing the rope with his feet.

Also - in all the pictures where it's visible - the Aṅkuśa (Eng.; Ankus, or; Anlius) is a deal longer than most war-game elephant makers provide their mahouts with.

Lion Gate (Sing Durwasu - at the Black Pagoda)

Reading highfalutin language seems to have lead me to write in a more pompous fashion than normal (?!!), despite no actual quoting from the work...so apologies for the hectoring or tutorial tone tonight ("motorcar"!! "equipage"?...Ha-haha!), however as it's one of my life's crusades to see the back of heavy timber forts on toy or model war-elephants, I hope it makes people think...also I can't re-write it as my voice is 'set' now for this piece!

M is for Mud-Pies

I was thinking of doing more Starlux or more Elephants tonight, but then these turned-up and I thought I'd do a quick "Look what came out of the toy-mine today", with a single photograph as I did when I found the lead horseman a year or two ago, but the more I dug the more turned-up...literally; as the fork was producing them as it turned-over the soil.

So these were the harbingers of the mother-load to come...I was digging Mum's veg-patch, bearing in mind that she has lived here for over 30 years and both my brother and I have dug bits of the garden from time to time, dug-out old roots and weeded here and there, and I have found the odd bit of Lego or Betta-Builder over the years but thought nothing of it, there are billions of bits of both in the UK and you often find them in the strangest places...but this; this is different!

The stuff was eventually coming out of the ground with every forkful, and I dutifully put it to one side along with an old Marmite bottle and a Camp chicory bottle, both pre-dating this stuff by several decades and both in good nick.

Top right shows the washed articles like a plate of little jewels, for the most part the plastics hardly faded or affected by several decades in the ground, bottom left shows them divided into four piles; Binned before you read this (sadly that included the Matchbox Spitfire wing...why were their transfers so much better than Airfix's?! +/- 33 years and a wash in hot soapy water and they stayed on!); The 'Savable with work' pile - yellow and green bits, the 'Odd bits for an eventual feeBay lot' which will join tons of similar detritus in a large picnic-tub somewhere and the 'Going into the collection' pile which consists of the items in the close-up.

Being - a near-mint Charbens lifeguard trumpeter on foot, regal trumpeting, for the use of. He did have the remains of paint on, but it was so sparse I removed it at the washing stage. A rocket-tip or bomb for the bag of such things and a piece of pink plastic which I'm pretty sure is from the Merit castle-builder/infant-toy we looked at ages ago, I'm so sure I'm not even going to check that post before I publish this, so maybe a slice of humble-pie before bed? [Hark the sound of an ample slice of pie being consumed - the hole wasn't even the same size! so...] If so it will go into the useful bits pile!

Top left is a few of the other usable items, and the broken car, which I show here as I have a horrible feeling its a Mebetoys car, a few years ago I worked with a chap called Andrew Adamedies, who is a bit of an acknowledged expert on Mebetoys and remember him telling me how you could tell them by the self-tapping screws rather than rivets on the underside...this one has a self-tapper!

Weird how the ear from a Mr. Potato Head - usually the first item to brake - is the only survivor of a long-lost set! The yellow thing is some precursor of Kinder, and I have found a few of these over the years, the holes are for sticking things into it to make something a bit more recognisable that an egg with holes...gum-ball machines?

The flat-bed for the Lego articulated lorry seems beyond redemption, but a judicious cut by the wheel-stops will result in a usable piece. The fork unfortunately killed the Lego tree made from raw-material pellets (my favourite type of Lego tree) and I think the base is still in the ground as the break was clean. However, a bit of rain may reveal it, or tomorrows raking...and in the meantime the three-pieces will glue-back together to make a fine bush!

So, a bit more digging tomorrow and then planting, but from plotting what I found today and where the other bits were a few years ago, the main mother-load is still to be dug, they are safe in the ground for a few more years and one day I'll make a project of it...It's a load of junk but it was free - which is always nice - and it just came out of the ground - which is nicer still!

If this was a movie; Someone (Guy in yellow tee #3) would be throwing his safety-helmet in the air, jumping up and down, grinning like a madman and shouting;

"Broken Plastic! Boss - We've hit broken PLASTIC!"

T is for Tops...on Pencils!

I know! But now that I've combined this page with the 'Other Collectables' page you'll just have to bare with it on the odd piece-of-shite posting!! They do after all have their place in the cultural history of toys and things...what '70's child didn't have at least one Munch Bunch?

The Kellogg's super-hero Snap, Crackle and Pop are actually more recent, being mid-80's of thereabouts (I don't have my 'Cluck' at the moment), and I'm missing one pose of Crackle, they only came in the four colours shown and seem to be Ashford Mouldings products, there were other sets in the same style - but not Pencil Tops - involving both these guys and other characters from the Kellogg's universe (Coco monkey, Tony tiger etc...).

Next to them are two sets of Paddington Bear figurines, the top row being a soft silicon rubber with red or blue plug-in hats (the black one was stolen from a spare hard vinyl one for the photo-shoot!) and below them the harder/more rigid PVC figures with red or black hats just mentioned.

Odds and sods. the Wonder Woman is - again - a more recent product, I think it came from Tesco's about ten years ago, and is technically a 'Dangler' not a 'Top'. The big silver monster (Minator?) is the only one with a mark; CH.

Danger Mouse sort of completes the Super-heroes, while how many Highland Pipers based on the Zang/Herald/Britains figure can a man have in a collection?! I must have a couple of dozen now from the Zang original through various Herald and HK-for-Herald,to other UK company's copies, Hong Kong pirates, key-rings, whiskey mascots, and this topper.

Like the upper row of Paddingtons, the two figures bottom left are made from a silicon rubber and bare more than a passing resemblance to the Poopa-Troopers that used to come with little parachutes.

The last shot is just a few odds, I'd like to find a Jerry to go with my Tom, the dinosaur is flocked, and the green parrot/penguin will give succour to 'Folgor' the idiot Italian who once accused me of "...Collecting little ducks and things..." on a forum!

The Munch Bunch...or are they Fruit Salads...or Mr Fruity? They are all three (and probably more beside?) I don't know how many of these there were altogether, I remember as a kid having a purple blackberry, red strawberry and tomato and a rather sickly creamy-white onion, while among others not shown here there was a black something (version of the green pepper above?) and another corn - with the leaves as a jacket? Green apples, oranges and orange pears, a yellow gourd...

Shown here are at least six types;

*Plug-in hat - long legs
*Moulded-on hat - short legs
*Plug-in 'greenery' - long legs
*Moulded-on greenery - short legs
*Moulded-on greenery with key-ring/charm bracelet loop - short legs
*Nothing on the top, nor hole for anything - long legs

I'm guessing the blue 'Pineapple Pol' (the only one who's name I can remember) is a more modern/recent version in a non-realistic colour...and I hope the brown one is a sausage of some kind?

Someone with limited space and limited budget, looking for a hobby could do worse than to collect these alone, it would take a year or two to track down a good example of every version and you'd need a side-collection of pencils to display them!!

WWW is for Wibbly Wobbly Way

More Toy-Soldiery stuff on that there Inter-web thingy...

Armyman by Tim Rietenbach.

Deployment - in the name of art I think!?

Murder Silhouette Greyscale's Coriolanus.

World War by Valerie Leonard, click on 'Fine Art Gallery' for more

T-Shirt I Want one!

Kris Kuksi Exhibition - The guy responsible for the big 'Cathedral Tank' that did the rounds a year or three ago is back...

S is for Shrubbery! "We are no longer the Knights who like to say 'Ni'..."

As well as collecting things some might be embarrassed to have in their collections, I have always picked-up and added to my own collection scenic items that 'fit' or which were issued by the companies that make the figures. Starlux being a case in point, with the added bonus that as most of their scenics are flat or semi-flat they make for good background pieces with shelf-displays.

Trees and shrubs. As I pointed out the other day; I'm not 100% sure on the origin of the stand of fir trees in the centre of this shot, under the paint it's a semi-translucent orangey-yellow polymer, possibly an earlier cellulose-acetate, and is quite unlike the other plants which are A) flat colours under the paint, and B) stand-alone items.

The rock formations

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?