F is for Follow-up - Charms

So....I'm opperating out of the libray for a week or two, so no spellchecker (or caps checker!), and while I'm loading lots of articles I'm waiting until I can edit them properly befor I publish, so 30-odd to come, but likely to be the second half of February!

When I popped-in to see Paul (of Plastic Warrior) before Christmas he thrust a bag of bits at me, and a few of them came just a day or two late for the charms post i did in the fluffy, plastic, tat run-up th Christmas! So here is an up-date/addtion to that post.

From the same source as each other but different subjects/scales, these figures seem to be based quite recent and turn-up on evilBay quite a bit, there were some yellow dancers on these last week!. The bandsmen seem to be based on old composition figures?

Added 21-08-2016 Cake Decoration versions now here

The same sculpts as last time but different colours, it would seem they were issued probably as a set of six, with six unrelated items in a set of 12 crackers?



 

I'm building quite a fleet of these now! A couple of them were in Pauls bag, and I dug mine out for the mass 'Dunkirque' effect! And to make myself realise that the one with a blue clothes-tag looking thing has - in fact - got a clothes-tag looking thing, not some weird simplified boatman!

 

Cheers Paul!



News, Views etc...Plastic Warrior 161

So, a week later than I intended...getting better!

Plastic Warrior's last issue is a bit of a Christmas cracker! Issue 161;

Covers are Cherilea front and Replicants back, with help from Ruth Martin, Dan Morgan and Eric Keggans

* The issue kicks-off with a fascinating article from Peter Evans on wannabe sets which definitely aren't Timpo, Britains or Charbens.
* Andreas Dittmann and Paul Stadinger examine a figure which turns out to be a Tiawanese plastic version of a metal figure based on a US composition figure of....subscribe!
* Expeditionary Force's Greeks come under the skilled knife of Tom Stark.
* Igor explains the history behind (his) Engineer Basevich, giving a potted history of Russian 'boys toys' in the Soviet era at the same time.
* What the !&*$? is choc-full of stuff in this issue, one quickly ID'ed by the Ed; Giampiero Larizza's Dulcop GI, Barney Brown has an interesting variant of...subscribe! Joe Bellis gets me jealous with some lovely 54mm 'khaki infantry' grenade-thrower variations, a Bren-gunner from Hilco and a Highlander.
* 'From the Archives' brings us up to speed on the sub-scale mounted figures of Lone Star.
* Alwyn Brice's back to Elastolin in 40mm.
* 'Monty' gets restored by Eric Keggans who then paints-up the rest of the set - Cherilea 8th Army.
* While Les White converts Star Wars Command figures.
* And 'Herald Notes and Queries' reaches the end of its run (?) with a round up of various items of interest/late entries, as Daniel Morgan shows us some treasures in part 9...Odds and Ends and eBay Finds.

* 'What's New' inspects recent product releases from:

• - Armies in Plastic (AIP) - Camel Corps
• - Publius (who've now adopted the 'u's I've used all along, oh come-on; it was hideously pretentious! "Puvooblivoos") - Crusaders and Saracens
• - Engineer Basevich - Yogolavian Partisans of WWII
• - Paragon Scenics - Charging ACW with bayonets (available in Union blue and Confederate grey)
• - LOD Enterprises - Trojans and Greeks

*  Readers letters this month include

• - James Opie's news of a move to C&T Auctions
• - Memories of carded versions of what sound like Kellogg's divers from Richard Blezard
• - eBay's Confederate-flag idiocy from Peter Rushton (the idiocy being eBay's not Peter's I hasten to add!)
  
• - James Peter Young poses a bit of a What the !&*$? re. some ACW figures spotted in a movie
• - Peter Evans muses some points on Hilco-Starlux figures/poses
• - and there's room for a mini-article from Dan Morgan on Britains conversions

* Plus all the usual small-ads.
* 'News and Views and other stuff' asks about some Ukrainian/Russian looking new production in the issues third What the !&*$? (actually 'first' but you know what I mean), the Obabma portrait by Joe Black 'painted' in toy soldiers we looked at here a few years ago sells for...Subscribe! Eurofigurines latest issue gets a hat tipped, and the news from James Opie is fleshed-out.

It's been out for five weeks now, which means a new one (162) in about seven weeks time!

Plastic warrior is now on-line here;
Website
Facebook
Blogger
eMail; pw.editor@ntlworld.com

And they are on Paypal.

Spellcheck didn't like Bren-gunner but is happy to accept any of the above!

M is for Margarine Menagerie

As the common cream coloured 'ivorene' margarine premiums these have been identified as being issued by Cleverstolz, Lowenbrink, Markt-Apotheque, Raulino, Sanella and Voss (among others), but the four sets represented by the small sample below remain more mysterious...to me!

The smaller ones are just the original premiums in new colours, with a second variant being in soft ethylene palstic (the right-hand column of blue ones in the main image), while larger versions exist in both hard polystyrene (lighter grey rhino) and soft polyethylene (dark grey horse), in which guise they have been linked with Jean and Manurba in the past, neither seem the right answer to me.

Thanks to Paul Morehead and Brian Carrick for most of these, I have the cream ones and a better sample of the larger ones in storage (with whites and browns), so hopefully we will return to them, by which time I may have a better idea on these - probably later - issues.

I is for It had to Happen!

3D-printed Action-figure and Mini's heads...your heads...

and, PR here...

My Modern Met (careful, I got pop-ups from the Etsy link!)

News View Etc..Stuff!

I've been a bit lazy for the last few days, I've got a bunch of stuff ready to go, but I know my Internet credit is running low, and I can't sort it out 'till next week so I'm rather husbanding it!

I did add a couple of images and text to the Mountain Troops post on the Airfix blog earlier tonight and will try to get some more texted-up over the next few days...it's a bit poor really, I think I've got more without text that with at the moment! I haven't done the links on that entry either but may return to it later tonight.

This is what's come in over the holiday period, arguably the three quietest weeks of the year for this sort of stuff! It's just never-ending...some of it from Paul, some from Mariya, some bought new, some from charity shops, some blogged already, some to be blogged soon, some to disappear for years before it gets its five minutes of fame here...and some bits have already been put away; the Funtastic Romans and some more capsule stuff!

It's a month today since the paratrooper post and you will see - front centre - a Tobar parachuting Penguin! 1-pound-somthing in Hawkins Bazaar, not worth a follow-up post yet, he'll go in the box until I get the others out of storage. The half-size Britains tiger copy will probably end-up on the STS Animal Forum where tigers have just been voted show-and-tell of the month, while the two additional Deadstone Valley figures are waiting for the possibility of more additions next week.

So...more serious posting in a week or so, in the meantime I'll try and get the PW 161 review up in a day or two and I have a single collage 'flats' article ready which I will risk on Friday if I'm still on-line!

L is for Lederfett

Which Bablefish assures me is leather-grease...I'm guessing some kind of neutral feed/water-proofer for leather like dubbin? Found (re-found!) whilst preparing an article on the cereal premium kits...

...this red four-engined 'plane - a windowed airliner -  probably dates from the 1950's and was given away as a premium with Solitär lederfett. The company is still going, but the name has been Anglicised to Solitaire (for a wider market?). The white wheels point to early Manurba, but it could just as easily be a Siku moulding or any one of a half-dozen others and I don't know which, yet.

The red Solitär model is all hard polystyrene with a casually applied sticker, the yellow one is all soft polyethylene and probably appeared as a more generic 'freebie' in 'lucky' bags of sweets and novelties in the 1970's.

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!