T is for Tops

Spinners, spinning tops, tops, scorers, spinning dice, diablos...

The large red one with the clip-in clear dome is heading for the unknown space-ships tub eventually. Round spinners are a pain if they 'fall' or stop between numbers, the pale one is only marked 1-4 which makes it a bit easier and suggests it is from an actual board game which only required low numbers?

Likewise the gold one which has nine sides but only 3 scores: 1, 2 and X. It also seems to be missing a grab-point which must push into the recess? The rest are standard gum-ball or cracker fare. The packeted one is a proper diablo with a draw-string and launching handle.

T is for Trains and Boats and Planes

"Trains and boats and planes are passing by, they mean a trip to Paris or Rome, to someone else but not for me. The trains and boats and planes took you away, away from me."

I'm not a great fan of regular 'pop' but some can give you the same nostalgia-hit as old toys, especially at this time of year...cheers Burt!

Again, in storage I have a lot of this stuff, in various sizes, and a whole tub of Kinder railway bits, but this is what's cone-in in the last couple of years. The three little ones at the front are from a Noddy board game and a green one is missing, while the Kinder loco with pantographs is missing a set of horns.

Veering away from thoroughbred cracker and capsule stuff I happen to have these two carded sets kicking about, both The Round House and the Grace Toys brands being made-up-names, I'm guessing; hooks to hang cheap generics on - like Grandmother Stover's, SSCO or Interesting Toy?

Because we've done both micro-vessels and micro-planes to death, there are only a half a handful to look at, and these are they! Kinder airliner, a polyethylene, hollow-underside version of the catapult planes for the dime-store aircraft carrier we looked at a while ago, a micro-ship from mini/decorative tree crackers (maroon), two pleasure cruisers (there are a few in this chaos!) which are cracker toys but were also sold as carded set 'bath toys', along with a modern tug in propylene, similar to the Giodi/Bruder stuff, but unmarked and only two pieces.

L is for Lorries...

...or 'Trucks'

Back left to front right:

A Blue Box copy of a Matchbox 1-75 wrecker with the boom broken-off, an even smaller ethylene copy of same without boom, two ethylene drop-side, flat-beds or vaguely original HK design, two Kinder (middle row), both probably polypropylene, but the cement mixer may be styrene, while the front row are three US dime-store types and a mini gum-ball toy.

The little yellow one in front is from the wharves of the plastic copies of the Tri-ang Minic 'waterline' ships range the vessels for which we've looked at before...as far as I am aware, the die-cast originals didn't have little vehicles, but the piracies do have them parked (with glue) in rows by the warehouses. There's a pantechnicon, an articulated (semi) lorry and this thing which looks like a White's scout car!

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 Skittles

Actually one of my favourite Christmas cracker novelties, for no particular reason, I guess I just like little pieces of coloured plastic...who'd have guessed!

Skittles...er...that's it - Skittles. The big green one is actually a rattle and should have been with the musical instruments back at the start of the odyssey through polymer shite, but is another cross-over when it comes to classification!

R is for Rings

Another lot to be quickly moved over! Actually in their attempts to render the contents of the vending machines of crackers 'unisex', there are some 'masculine' subjects among these, but really this is another corner of the novelty kak universe aimed at the fairer sex.

These were photographed for posterity with the capsule they came with - a time wasting exercise in the main, as the research I've done over the last few weeks would suggest that novelty and capsule are often brought together by wholesaler, sometimes by supplier and there is no firm relationship between the two...however the two top right are 'container specific'.

A decent enough sample, heavy steel rings (with age) at the far left (one, tray like, filled with green glass/enamel), down to a small piece of day-glo tat bottom right. In between there are styrene and ethylene plastics, lightweight aluminium alloys, tin-plate, a lenticular picture-changer, and a couple of daft animal rings (both damaged) along with a pencil-top fruit knock-off!

A close-up of the container specific rings with their locking mechanism, the outer curve of the ring sitting in the slots of a single-piece 'capsule' until prised-out by a fingernail.

News, Views Etc...Abandoned Mind Games

Mario Zecca has provided an update on his projects, remaining miniatures and how to get them &etc. With links.

Abandoned Mind Games

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!

K is for Key: Ring, Chain, Fob

I have a load of these in my storage unit in Basingrad, and more de-looped in the various 'unknown' boxes, both here and in storage, so these are pretty much what came in the the recent purchase, a small sample but they give a flavour of what has been available...

...in Gum ball dispensers, Christmas crackers and as carded rack toys of the 'take one' point-of-sale type. The fish I remember from my childhood, they came in silver as well, and in several sizes, my mother had a huge silver neff one, I'll see if she's still got it, that would make a nice post.

The rubber foot is total shite: tuppence worth of material with no practical or play-value at all? The beer stein is really a charm and too small for a key-ring, you'd feel disappointed by that, while the tin football also came printed as a map globe, basket-ball, tennis ball etc...

Figural chains include all the favourites; elephants and dogs here. A pair of poodles, how nasty! The plastic rings are not practical, but the metal ones are usually to 'shop' quality.

H is for Hair Accessories

Girls get their own plastic shite, unfortunately, when it comes to Christmas crackers; randomly hidden among the useful stuff!

Folding rain-scarf, fortunately granny or mum would always swap you this for whatever they'd one, or just take it and tell you to pull another one with yourself to be sure of winning! The handbags and glove-compartments of several million cars contain at least one of these 'for emergencies'!

Hair brushes, hair-ties, hair-combs, hair-clips and those hair-rake-clip things? If you think this is a hairy post, we've got rings and jewellery to get through yet! But I'm burying them in other stuff!

B is for Bogus Body Bits

From the joke dept. Fake lips, lost teeth, eye patches, nails through figers, even - at larger sizes - arrows through heads! Kids love these, adults pretend to be taken in, expressing levels of suprise that do them credit since they've been expecting the trick since it flew from the cracker a houre or two ago!

Hillbilly teeth and vampire fangs join the solo dentoids (spell-check says; you made that word up), 'witches fingers' and moustaches were another favourite, the clips too small for adults - who were nonetheless made to try them!

We actually had that cat-mask (in black) as kids, it hung around for years, each time it appeared it was missing another whisker!

E is for Hephalumps

I said we'd come back to charms when we looked at elephants, so lets do that and get them out of the way...

These charms are so common, there are lots of variations and they are based on older phenolic 'ivorene' ones, themselves based on ivory originals. The red one appears to be a bottle (missing its top) which may be a soy-sauce dispenser from take-away food? The red and yellow capsule toy is in two parts, the head plugging into the body.

T is for Teeny Tiny Trucks

Looked at these before in depth, so just a quick image of mixed vehicles for the plastic shite season! If you click/follow the 1 Ton Humber Mini Truck tag, you'll get the page with all related articles on these; another favourite of mine.

And more civilian ones than in the original articles, however I have had lots of these come in in the last two years, and after a wash they have mostly now been added to the original articles - I didn't go with the 'pink additions' thing, they are messy enough already.

G is for Ghoulish Gothic Gizmos

Skulls and skeletons are great favourites in the world of cheap plastic tat and while you can see it being a Halloween thing, why would anyone imagine you'd want one in a Christmas cracker? But imagine that they do, and act on it...a budget set of 12 crackers will inevitably contain one of these...

...one is dressed-up as a knot puzzle, but basically they are models of flesh-stripped bodies/body parts!

 More Here at Moonbase.

Their most useful job was to decorate my 'Greebo' cut-off as a teenager! It's not clear, but there are three heads on the left pocket-button including one with flourescent orange eyes and a metallic blue one, with another one on the right, he has green 'jewelled' eyes!

[Harley-D and Honda...on the same denim!]

W is for Water Weapons

That's it, it's all in the title...one of them looks like a small blue penis! Wayne Bobbit?