S is for Sets

Both from Christmas crackers, and both quite recent I think...well I sort of know, but I'll explain, I tend not to keep these in their sets...no, that's a lie; I was keeping them in their sets until the big lot came in, at which point I photographed them for posterity - er...this article - and broke them into the 'new' classification bags that resulted from the big sorting and bringing-together of the accumulated tat, kak, shite!

The upper four came together a few years ago at - I seem to recall - a works 'do', where cheap crackers are pretty-much guaranteed! The lower shot group were in the big lot of the autumn, The blue plastic and moulding style (3D relief with flat-edged, hollow undersides) tie them together well.

The ship is an old favourite as a cracker toy, although somewhere I have a bag full of them in red and blue with cavity bases from the Lucky Bag depot fire, insurance clear-out I did back in the 1990's. I keep expecting to find the original in one of the many sets of flat premiums from France, but which appeared all over as food freebies, but they tend to be better detailed, so I think maybe 'just' a cracker/novelty sculpt?

These were in those small tree-decoration crackers a few years ago, but I can't remember where, they were either in Tesco's about 2005/6 or Sainsbury's c.2009/10? or 2013? Anyway, we can be pretty sure there were other items and that they were all available in both colours.

Pretty crude; the highlight for me is the scale-down of the Kellogg's 'Tony the Tiger' keyring...someone in HK must have the original mould or master sculpt, 30/40-odd years after the original last plopped onto the breakfast table.

The rook was seemingly the only chess piece? I have a similar knight from the 70's...why not do a whole set with one of the paper boards we looked at a post or two below? Missed opportunity...set of 16 budget cracker with one back row and one front row piece in each cracker, board printed on the box...Bob's your uncle!

There's a hear-no-evil  monkey charm, so the other two may have existed? the rest is typical old gum-ball/cracker fare. Spinners aren't even numbered. The banana is a dolphin!

E is for Eye Glass

A great favourite with novelty shite producers and issuers, it works; vaguely, and kids love them, where/why the common key motif though, is a mystery to me, sometimes the multiple sets have actually got different levels of magnification, sometimes it's a stack of identical glasses!

That's it really: novelty magnifying glasses in different shapes, plastic, tat!

N is for Novelty Board Games

The rest of the games, these are all from Christmas crackers, although some of them will be found in capsule/gum-ball dispensers, while the tube of dice is the sort of thing you'd also find in the pocket-money bins.

Little paper 'board' games, the one a copy of the other, it's not just figures they pirate, everything from brake-pads to Main Battle Tanks have been plagiarised by the Chinese in the last 70 years! Folded small and wrapped around a pack of black and white counters, one of them has a chess/draughts board printed on the other side.

Novelty dice can be very big, or a bit small, but practical sized dice will be found either with the game or in one of the other crackers in a set that includes the paper boards above. This is why you need to pull all the crackers in the box...even if it's just the two of you! Then you get to stack hats, making the 'last one wearing' game all the more exciting...not!

Seen before; these will either be with the game, or a cup (for tiddlywinks) in another cracker from the set. The bag to the left would have come stuffed into a little plastic cup, for playing tiddlywinks, the larger 'thumb' discs used to flick the smaller ones, while the set of all-small ones are for the Snakes & Ladders.

T is for Tossing Tossers!

Found the Jacks! And a few more came in, more of a cracker thing, but they are in larger capsule machines and were always one of the items in the pocket-money bins...

...like the ones in the long tube to the right here. The chrome silver loner may well become the new radar-gizmo on the X-30 Spaceship I was pondering on mending a while ago.

The clay ones came from a little gift shop in Saffron Walden 40-odd years ago and while washed-out by the flash, are nice pastel ice-cream shades, while the wooden one my be a building block or game-playing piece, not a jack at all?

Ring toss and tiddlywinks, classic Christmas cracker fare, the tiddlywinks doubling-up as counters for the paper board games sometimes found in the same sets. Some ring-tossers are scale-downs of garden quoits, the others are enclosed dexterity puzzles.

G is for Getting There!

We've still got a few animals to cover, but these are the last of the figural sculpts, although...mostly animals, but in the cartoon or caricature styles of semi-human anthropomorphous!

When trolls get too small for hair! I think I have some of these very small ones in storage WITH hair, but these have eschewed hair for charm loops. The mouse has painted eyes, and is another common 'trope' with capsule toys at the cheap end of the market.

The capsule market has two parameters, first the size of the capsule which used to be in inches (1", 2" and 3" etc...) but is now in mm's with 30mm equating to the old 1" capsules and so on. The second variable is the target price, even now they start at 20p here in the UK (approximately E0.30 or ¢), so something as cheap as these would be in a 1"/20p mixture.

Long, long before Kinder did their little families or sets of catoonish animals, these had come out of both Hong Kong and Japan, carded in sets as well as singly from gum-ball machines, and other sets included dogs, pandas, brown bears etc... These cats are loosely referential toward earlier cats in animation such as Felix, Fritz and Figaro.

Couple of complete Res Plastics (RP) / Kinder figures and one of the most copied of all figures ever, the Britains farm hand, I have this figure in a dozen or more sizes and herds of versions.

Animated playthings, Marx had a set of Disney characters in this style and Britains briefly had the Twizzle Town figures, who's were first I couldn't say, but the bear on the left still turns up in cheap crackers, while the elephant-headed Mickey mouse (gloves/boots?) is from the 1970's and probably based on the Marx set. Kinder have produced similar 'anima[not]tronics'!

J is for Jewellery

The last of the real kak - if you're a male figure collector - but there will be a bit in the final round-up, I was actually looking at crackers in town today, and there are some things that haven't been covered at all, simply because there weren't any in the big purchase, nor any kicking around....tape measures spring to mind, but now'; it's badges and the rest of the Jewellery samples.

Butterfly broach: already converted to a fridge magnet and added to someone else's collection. More badges and broaches top left, necklace/wrist/ankle-chains and the like to their right and a fetching selection of polyethylene earrings in the bottom corner!

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.