A is for Army Men!

You can't beat a bag of cheap 'n nasty HK pirates of better figures, to beat-up in the sand-pit and the bigger the better! These are currently in 99p Stores for err...ninety-nine pee!

Four inch (120mm) figures, four of 'em. Made of the new hybrid ethylene which is best described as 'sandy', they are pretty crude, far cruder than the Blue Box Romans we looked at earlier today. But; 99p! That's 24.75pence each.

One of them is based on the old Tim Mee chap who in his original guise was encouraging his mates to attack, but here seems to have given-up fighting in favour of standing, looking rather stunned! Another is paying a vague homage to the Airfix German running, while the the other two are lifted from a couple of commonly-copied Matchbox figures, even to the strange pouches on the grenadier.

But pose is as close as it gets, they are wooden in articulation, the heads/helmets are poor, cartoonish sculpting and the boots look like Playmobile plaster-casts - if you know what they look like!

There are a set of Emergency personnel as well (in blue or red plastic), but I left them on the rack...I may weaken (for the blog) but do I need eight large-scale civilians?

V is for Vinyl Villains

I had a bunch of stuff to publish between Christmas and the New Year, but decided to have a few days off, I hope everyone has had a good holiday, the weather would suggest the [absolutely happening] climate-change models will need tweaking in the new year, my thoughts with those wet souls in the North, along with the victims of fires in Australia and California, unseasonal - in severity - tornadoes in the South-west States (and snow in Mexico!??) along with anyone trying to find the melted North Pole...Happy weird New Year!

Perhaps - with the Paris agreement now dry - 2016 will be the year people finally understand the Hippies were right all those years ago, and big business has got away with another 50 years of unregulated damage-making...still, we buy their shit, and elect their overseers, so we can only blame ourselves! Trump for President of the end of the world!

Spotted in Poundland in the lead-up to Christmas. Dressed in the in-house Funtastic branding, these seem to be re-badged BBi (Blue Box International) Elite Force copies of the Schleich for Revell 'Epix' figures of a few years ago, same poses but cruder castings and much cruder paint!

These appeared about three weeks before Christmas, and I never managed to get the standard bearer before they sold out, whether they will be restocked in the new year remains to be seen, but worth looking-out for over the coming months.

The crudity of the copies is soothed somewhat by the fact that they are a pound each, while both Revell originals and BBi branded copies (which can still be found about the web) are between £5.99 and £7.99 or thereabouts, while a skilled painter can soon enhance these.

One shouldn't condone blatant piracy, but if companies as big as Schliech or Revell don't prosecute a company as established as Blue Box, then it's left to us to exploit the situation! 8 poses at the moment; three knights, four legionaries and a gladiator, I think this may be the same story for the similar large pirate/buccaneer figures issued in the same stores a year or two ago?

H is for Heudebert'y Christmas!

It's bad isn't it...hopefully it's as bad as a cracker joke! Well...stuffed (or well-stuffed) to the gunnel on roast duck and tangerine sauce, started on the liqueurs, saved this - from the flats Brian practically gave me in May - for today!

There are a couple of pieces missing from the set, an angel, another camel and a donkey I think, and they didn't photograph well, but it's a seasonal post, so there it is! Makes you wonder why no one does this sort of stuff now, electronic toys, the Internet and smart-fones might have replace elder kids toys, but I'm sure younger kids would collect something like this if it was in their favourite cereal, sweet or biscuit brand in the run-up to Christmas?

H is for Highlander Toy And Miniature Military Hobbies, Inc.

I don't know if matey ever got his answer, but the missing SPG turned-up! Still sealed from the day it left Boca Raton, why not celebrate the season with a chunk of self-propelled artillery! It's stated as being an M110 8" Self-propelled Howitzer, I wonder if they did the 'Long' version (M107 175 mm) as well?

In the packing, carded with a hole for a rack-hook, the shrink wrapping is slowly pulling the card in on itself as the plastic tries to return to a molten blob - exercising the 'shape memory of thermoplastics - so I've whipped it off the card and I think I'll try and get a plaster-cast of it in the new year...add a bit of concrete hardener, clean it up with a mini-drill and paint in detail...it might work?

Not a bad little model, 7 pieces, with the running-gear just pinned and glued to the sides of the AFV. The lack of a crew compartment is a major over-simplification, although that's offset by the fact that the tracks are a cut above the usual 'ready-made' efforts, even some contemporary models. As you can see: the gun elevates and the cradle rotates through 360º (more than the 'real life' service vehicle!) but the recoil spade is a fixed element of the body-moulding.

L is for Loose Ends

This was loaded two days ago and I meant to publish it yesterday, but Vodafone (the princes of digital-darkness) had other ideas and an Internet Interregnum imposed itself on me for 24 hours...I swear Vodafone couldn't organise themselves out of an old paper bag with a sharpened, flaming, sledgehammer! But they'd still charge you!

The thing about this stuff we've been looking at for the last three weeks or so is that it's universal and never-ending. I popped round Mr. Morehead's yesterday (bit of in-hobby name dropping never hurt!) to pick-up the Hilco special which is available agian after selling-out at the show back in May, and he gave me a bag of bits with some flat charms (same source, three sets) I could add here, or use as a follow-up and that was just after I'd picked up a rubber alien catapult (you can't make it up when novelty shite's involved!) a few minutes earlier for a pound at a charity shop. It just never stops.

But there will be plenty of time to return to Aliens, flats, charms and etcetera! We haven't looked at the mass of Little Rubber guys who come in Gum Ball machines, larger animals, Ninja's, sea creatures, we've looked at some of what's out there, and rather than follow-ups, we'll look at the few bits I've got ready here and call it a day on these for now.

Musical instruments that don't play, one blow-moulded the other styrene, a mini whoopee-cushion, lucky horse-shoes (useful if GI Joe/Action Man is thinking of retraining as a blacksmith!), another chess piece, again - appearing without any of the other pieces - needed to make a game - having ever turning up!

Mirror, yo-yos, another rattle, soft plastic version of the metal wire-puzzles and soft plastic scissors! A magnet...another 'theme' we've not covered in these 50-odd posts, but we've looked at them elsewhere on the blog in the past.

The Quantas suitcase is interesting as presumably it was a re-packed rack-toy of dolls stuff re-branded to Quantas, given to kids to amuse them on long flights? Without the sticker it's just a cheap novelty suitcase, with the sticker it's a branded premium/giveaway!

More plastic tat, more rattles, another lenticular; this time just a very small picture - it's neither a badge nor a charm. A Britains flower-pot: plagurised, a polyethylene bat/gargoyle ring, more charms...The woodpecker toy, which normally comes as a finished toy with a stand and wooden pole was a gum-ball givaway..without instuctions or a  pole, but is made to fit a pencil!

A tourist item, really outside the scope of these articles, but it was in the big lot and is a source of a plastic figure that - without it's die-cast mazak base - is just another piece of plastic kak. It must be quite common as it's the second one into the collection now, which is useful as I always hoped to get a second, so I could remove the figure and use it in some Ray Harryhausen type setting with some Greek Hoplites or a skeleton warrior? Statue of Liberty.

[Later the same day - Andrew Boyce suggested it might be from the Triang-Minic waterline ship range, and it is, so it doesn't really belong in these posts at all! But it's the second one I've seen displayed or sold as an ornament, so that's clearly it's fate...to be unrecognised as a toy, and written-off as a keepsake! I does however mean it's quite common and track-downable!]

Award cups...again we haven't looked at the various 'collectable' sets you could get, [American] football helmets, miniature baseball pennants and the like, I'm sure these come with lots of messages (here; 'golfer' and 'father'), and similar objets existed, but that'll do for tat, shite, caca for a while!

Well...for a day or two! I picked-up some nice figures in the 99p store the other day coming to a blog not a million miles from here in the next few days! Also got some contributions to come, some news, some follow-ups, a PW review, still got those bloody French articles in 'edit' and still got thousands of shots in Picasa, which I seem to add to quicker than I clear! And my 8-gig 'unknown' dongle has red-lined as I file these novelty images, so I need a 16-gig before I can clear the desk-top!

I had plans for a premium article with contributions for tomorrow, but Vodafone's upset the plan (like I ever have a 'plan'!), so we'll see, if I have a day or two off: may I extend my wishes for you to have a happy Christmas and thanks for watching! Now I'm a TV announcer!

You want more? Here's more!

M is for Micro Menagerie

As we saw with the supermarket set the other day, the mini tree crackers sometimes contain mini-novelties, and animals are one of the tropes that go way back to the little Scottie-dogs, poodles and black cats.

Top - Rockers, you get an animal, and a rocker, two-for-one and it came 'free' in a cheap cracker...bargain! Although you may remember when we looked at the dogs the other day, there was a rocker, that was an animal AND a charm, rendering these a bit of a swizz! Britians piracies for the most part?

Middle - With the exception of the yellow running horse and blue zebra-looking thing, these all seem to be Marx sculpts, from the various Miniature Masterpiece play sets with one of the 101 Dalmatians we looked at about a month ago.

Bottom - a few baksheesh ones, the sea-lion is a particularly good sculpt. The duck (with capsule) is also good - for Hong Kong.

Upper - A couple of Nosco or Nosco-knock-offs in a larger size bracket with a reasonable camel in a fetching pink polymer, the camels ethylene (as per all the previous), while the other two are styrene

Median - Mice

Lower - Cats, big cats. in different scales. The Sabre-tooth is a hollow moulding in the style of Hong Kong horses of the distinctive type that came with small-scale Cowboys & Indians, I have a Dimetrodon and a 'monster' in the same style somewhere. The orange one is another - albeit larger - Britains copy.

P is for Practical Prize!

Yhep...practical! Who the hell wants something useful in their Christmas cracker? You want a frivolous piece of plastic tat to take the mickey out of, don't you? Some people!

Fish pen-knives were very common when I was a kid, and I think they still appear in mid-budget-range crackers, while the little yellow one is more of a novelty or blunt letter-opener! The tyre-compass is an unbranded scale-down of the branded ash-trays actual tyre manufacturers used to give out as promotional items, although this one's lost it's magnetism!

Nail clippers and nail files, still available in a box of crackers near you in the next week! The mini stacking-tower infant toy is here by default; it should be in one of the other posts, but got left out!

A is for "Are We Nearly There Yet?"

Yes! Knowing that some of the stuff in this run-up to Christmas was really kak-caca and shity-shite from Tatty-tat Tattington, I tried to break the vehicles, figures and animals up into packages, to intersperse with the less interesting bits and bobs and tonight we reach the end of the automotive road as it where; with the last of the cars.

These are the 'mini's as opposed to the 'micro's and are a right old mix...as with the lorries there are more to look at another day, so just a brief flypast tonight. The green one is a common Hong Kong copy of the MPC Minis car, and I suspect the two open tops are as well?

The Citroen is marked 'France', and the other red one seems to go with the mini-truck fire-engines...it has the same wheels! We'll look at them all again!

Front is probably Blue Box, a hard polystyrene copy of Matchbox while the VW Beetle Coupé is early Manurba I think, one missing it's chassis and wheels may be a latter one by the same company or something completely different?

The red ones are three of ten from Kellogg's Cornflakes, issued in 1958, they were all British Motor Corporation (BMC) the post amalgamation, state-owned concern that would would become the dreaded British Leyland (BL), and ultimately the Rover Group. Full Set here. These are an MGA at the back, with a Morris Oxford and Austin Healey sports car.

S is for Stationery

I fear we've had that title before, hey-ho!. Small sample here today, if only because the various elements of stationery-related stuff gets sorted into other areas of the collection, and are mostly in storage.

Nevertheless - there are a few interesting items in this little lot, the carded rubber pencil, small enough for the cavity of a Christmas cracker, the early Gameboy style electronic game with lenticular artwork (which is almost as effective as the graphics in those early games!), the cassette-tape and record player erasers are also rather good, but both are marked Japan, not Hong Kong, which makes all the difference for the era we're looking at here.

I don't really get the key/pen/Biro, but then given some of the novelty pens we got in our Christmas stockings: it's par for the course! The T-shirt eraser is in a very fine rendition of an Ariel box, which would go well in a dolls house and raises the problem of do you 'file' it with the erasers, or the Ariel premiums, or the bag of doll-sized bits!

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!