V is for Visit, Spring Visit . . .

. . . to The Works, which proved fruitful, if only to add more ephemeral polymer shite to the stash!

So this was 6-quids-worth of plunder, booty or barrel scrapings - depending upon your point of view! A Dorling Kindersley tome on Kiddybricks-call-me-Lego [do you know; I sometimes spell that ...bricks, sometimes ...briks and sometimes ...brix, yet I have all the notes on a dongle less than two meters away, the only thing preventing me from correcting myself is fucking laziness, and the fact that I know the Tag's right!], a pack of chinosaur dinorasers and a rather nice little Ankylosaurus.

They made a Fergie! I may not know much about anything, but I know that's an MF 135/165 body-shape or my name's Serwin 'Eell! Other than a picture of my old steed, the book is crap, being yet another DK-Lego  inspired marketing exercise in saying nothing with lots of pictures, and most of them are of pretty common fish, still at four-pounds it will add some colour to the bookshelf!

Branded to the same 'Fun Workz' as those risible, n'th-generation copy, propylene, hidiosities we looked at a week or two ago, these are a bit better - imported by TWSL (The Works Stores Limited?) - more erasers; it seems everyone has a set of dinosaur rubbers at the moment, it's the third or forth set we've looked at in less than 12 months! And they had both my favorite greens (apple and puke or is it grass and camel-dung?!!) in one bag - bargain!

The rear of the Ankylosaurus card shows six sculpts, well . . . I saw three of the others and while the Triceratops is worth a punt if they've still got some next time I'm passing and feeling pound-flush, the other two (top right and bottom centre) were disappointing lumps of wasted polymer in the flesh; so I doubt I'll be adding them to the pile - until they turn-up in a cheepie lot a few years hence!

However the Kandytoys model of an Ankylosaurus is a nice little sculpt, about in-scale with Airfix Tarzan figures should you be going down the 'Lost World/Centre of the Earth' path, and you can see how the design of the erasers is semi-flat, even though they are fully round, with the legs sort of welded into one!

J is Just for Fun!

How small is the Smallscaleworld?

Well, we can make it 10-pixels-by-ten-pixels and using an external hard drive could put up to what . . . twenty terabytes . . . fifty terabytes in the single folder? I've got about 45-50 gigabytes at the moment, but a lot of that is 9 years-worth of blog images!

We can of course reduce the title considerably, and throw the folder into space to make it look even smaller! But the Icon is now 18x18 pixels . . . it's grown - Doh!

Ooh, what's this tool here? . . . OK, 9 pixels by 9 pixels; that's better!

Let's reduce the folder title to the minimum and camouflage it!

In fact, why bother with a title? Let's just point at it; now it's hard to see! That's about as small as I could make the Smallscaleworld without Microsoft coming up with new icons!

Or . . .

. . . we can go the Fontanini route and decide the Smallscaleword's over 800mm! Yes, that's nearly a meter!

Of which -  two inches are the base-lump of Italian Carrara marble which caused the behemoth of a figure to come into being. I shot these at the PW show a couple of years ago, it's some show wot 'appens sometimes, don't know when the next one is - probably missed it!

Sold as mantle-pairs, there were 8 sculpts (and a pair of mounted figures with lovely relaxed horses) in the smaller sizes (Fontanini produced these in many sizes from 60mm upwards and many finishes), but I don't know if more than one pair were pantographed-up to this size. You can see some of the 8-inch figures bottom left in the shot.

The Carrara marble gift shops had/have tons of this stuff, and the bases utilised the 'flawed' marble off-cuts, the prime building-material and/or sculpting marble being prized for its pale grey hews; polishing to a lightly striated white, not the dark grey with white bacon-streaks (marbeling!) of most of the bases you find on the Fontanini-supplied figurines.

There is a single figure of the right-hand pose on Etsy at the moment for 103-quid (an odd number, but presumably dollars-into-pounds? I didn't study it too closely!) which is as much as you'd want to pay for a Capodimonte porcelain one, but to be honest, if you keep an eye on charity shops or local auction houses, you can pick these up for £15/20, or only a few quid for the smaller ones; I recently picked-up a couple of the Rococo 'gentry' for 6-quid the pair, and saw a set of six of the chinoisery figures for a pony*!

* That's £25 for the overseas readers . . . £20 is a score, a monkey is £500 and a donkey is a dog is a lemon is a shed is an old car!

S is for See; Told You So!

Also available in blue!

It would be a bit crap if I left it there wouldn't it, a simple display of my ability to predict what I saw in the shop! Tobar for Hawkins Bazaar and others, as I said the other day when we looked at the red one, they were also in blue, but there may be other colours elsewhere, I suspect not, but there may be! Anyway; I was passing, I had the prerequisite 99p on me and I heard him calling!

As we were looking at larger figures the other day and these have been in the folder for too long waiting for a superhero post, courtesy of Brian Berke (you knew that - his 'berserker' is showing the true size of these 6" behemoths!) are these two Marx 1:12th scale Marvel characters; Spiderman and Captain America, also in blue, so filling-out a neat post - if I say so myself! Only 29¢ - those were the days huh?

P is for Paramount

Another box-ticker from Picasa, but a nice clean sample; Paramount cowboys and Indians . . . or Indian!

I'm guessing the one on the left is a later one (unpainted), but he could just have escaped the out-painter? Based on or direct piracies of Britains-Herald the double-gunslinger is the least like the donor pose with his more upright stance, fringed shirt and ten-gallon hat!

15-05-2017 - Paul Morehead at PW reminded me at the show this weekend that Replicants obtained the Paramount moulds, so the left-hand one is probably from Peter Coal as a re-issue.

B is still for Baseball!

These were donated to the Blog by Brian Berke and they are fun! Imported into the US by JPW, they're probably a bit harder to find this side of the pond, but you might try the big craft superstores, where they may be sitting with Wilton's stuff in the cake decorating sector?

Two teams, red and blue, it's almost like war-gaming! Indeed - I'm sure an enterprising cove from that branch of grownups-and-toys (they all seem to call each other 'cove'!) could fix-up some dice-based rules? There used to be pocket cricket, after all, if you can game cricket with a rolling brass hex/drum and stub of pencil, you should be able to sort something out with these chaps!

Each figure is unique due to a number on their shirt-back, although the three fielders are basically the same pose. And I'm afraid the catcher is one of those surprisingly common - within the hobby - poses that begs the ear-worm . . .  ♫ Maaah Maaa-aham-meiiiiii♫

Thanks Brian!

B is for Baseball

It's a sort of glorified Rounders, that takes all afternoon but scores lower!

This is one of the odder things that came out of Galoob Towers in the later period of that company's Micro Machine range. As there was only ever the one set, we have to assume it was a toe-dipping exercise, which, upon poor sales was given the chop!

A shame really, as the concept is a good one, and were it to be extended to other sports or 'Track & Field' there would be literally an endless supply of names to collect. What's ironic though is that there is probably more collectability in the accompanying busts, which are very similar to the old cereal and coffee premium busts of people like Kellogg's (historical characters and Indian chiefs) and Quaker (military heroes of the sea, and land) or turntable centrepieces of Y'Bon and Banania (French pop stars).

It's like the recent failures of Hasbro's 54mm Star Wars Command range or World's Apart's short-lived Horrible Histories figures, the modern toy industry doesn't allow enough time for things to grow, an idea is had, a budget is agreed, a production schedule and marketing campaign are then squeezed into (or out of?!!) that budget, and if after a cut-off point, the profit margin hasn't reached a pre-agreed level - it curtains, folks!

So we have just the four 'microverse' figures and four busts, most still sold like this - MIP! - on evilBay and 'microplay' actually hit a dud!

D is for Dulcop Spacemen

Being EC's look at Italian-produced plastic space figures; Part 1, over to Ervino . . .

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DULCOP

The Dulcop company produced toy soldiers from the late '60's to early '80's, and it is still active today as a producer of soap bubbles. In the '70's it produced a range of all original design 1/32 scaled toy soldier figures sets and accessories (vehicles, etc.), rivalling for its diversity with the Airfix or Marx ones, with subjects spacing from Napoleonic to America Civil War, from Western to Robin Hood, from Medieval Warriors to Tarzan, from a nice licensed set from the '57 Walt Disney'Zorro' TV series to Spacemen.

The Dulcop figures were sold initially company-painted in diorama boxed sets, and later undecorated on bubbled cards. Many of the figures, especially those of the late unpainted production, are easy to find in good condition, with a few exceptions, e.g. some on the figures of the Spacemen set.

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The Spacemen set is composed of six figures in different poses (see images), two of which (the so called 'weight-lifter' and 'flag-bearer') are very difficult to find intact, considering how fragile are some of their parts. The figures are approximately 6 cm high from feet-to-head, made of soft white plastic, with the rectangular bases with cut-off corners (very Battlestar Galactica... :-) ) typical of many of the Dulcop figures. On the bases of the figures; in front of the feet of the figures, there is an elevated writing saying "DULCOP – MADE IN ITALY”.

Considering that one of the figures that I have has some painted parts, and that I saw in the years painted versions of some of the other figures too, it is possible that this spacemen set too was commercialized in some form of 'diorama-box', but personally I have never seen it.

The figures don't appear to have identifying numbers. The design of the spacemen's suit doesn't seem derived from a specific 'real' space suit (as it were, e.g., for the Marx Gemini or Apollo-suited spacemen figures), but some elements of its look (especially the helmet) IMO have a certain resemblance with the USSR Cosmonauts 'Sokol' space suit.

I is for Introduction and Italian - Space Figures

I am delighted to announce a series of guest posts sent in by Ervino (otherwise 'EC') from Italy on his country's output of plastic space toys including astronaut/cosmonaut types, proper spacemen (armed!) and various aliens and other beings.

My only input has been to stitch the various eMailed parts together and run a hardly needed spell-check,; all text and images, links and general layout is Ervino's and I thank him for these needed posts on a popular subject within the hobby. Over to EC . . .

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Size Comparison

Italian Space Figures – Legend:

1 - ALPIA

2 - CO-MA

3 - BARAVELLI

4 - DULCOP

5 - APS / POLITOYS

6 - TORGANO

7 - ATLANTIC

8 - UNKNOWN

Italian Space Toy figures from the '50 to the '80

Starting from the years after the WWII, the recovering Italian toys industry produced a really great variety of various scaled toy soldier figures, employing in their production a wide range of materials: from 'metal-reinforced' plaster to composite rubber mixtures, from early hard plastics (Bakelite and Vinyl-acetate) to more modern soft plastic Polyethylene and PVC's, so greatly expanding the somewhat limited range of products previously available between the two WWs.

Equally wide was the range of themes covered in the production, spacing from historical and 'modern' military to Wild West, from Pirates to Medieval Knights, from Vikings to Spacemen & Aliens. Moreover, almost all of the figures produced in those years were of original design and moulded and produced directly in Italy.

My personal collecting focus is limited to the 'Space' theme, and so, in this series of posts, I will try to give at least a general overview of the main companies active in the field during these 'Golden Age' years of the Italian Space Toy soldier figures, and of their production.

For this 'Post Zero', I will begin with a list of the main manufacturers of Italian toy soldiers and figures that produced space themed ones, with a brief note for each of them about their specific space-oriented production.

In following instalments of the series I will post more info and images from the pieces in my collection about the products of each company.

Beware that neither the companies nor the product lists have the pretension of being exhaustive, as, even for the most famous of them, every then and now it appears on the collector scene a new variation or an entirely unknown figure or set of figures, or even a never heard before manufacturer.

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Bibliography – FWIK, a specific book doesn't exist focused specifically on the Italian Space Toys & Figures production. There exist anyway at least two books dedicated to the general Italian Toy Figures production:

·         ITALIAN TOY SOLDIERS - Composition and Plastic Production from 1930 to 1970” - Orazio di Mauro/Franco Paoletti - Edizioni Lazzaro, 1994

·         ITALIAN TOYSOLDIERS & CRIBS FIGURES - Mauro and Orazio di Mauro - Self-produced

Both have many wonderful images and descriptions with text both in Italian and English.

Moreover, there are some web sites and books dedicated to one or more specific company, sites at which I will refer to in the posts dedicated to every/each specific company.

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NB: The years span in the brackets refers to the named companies toy soldiers main production. Some of the companies existed before and after they started/ended their 'adventure' in the TS field: e.g. the COMA company, that started its activity as a supplier of plastic pharmaceutical and stationery implements in the early '50's and closed in the late '80's as an early childhood toys producer/distributor.

ALPIA (mainly '50's) - Produced a set of eight Spacemen, a firing 'Bazooka-Man' (in 3 or 4 variations) and four 'B.E.M.' Aliens, plus at least one space vehicle.

APS-POLITOYS-TEXAS-ASTRAL BUBBLEGUM (from middle '50's) - Produced two series of semi-flat soft plastic figures, one of Spacemen and one of Aliens, plus some vehicles.

ATLANTIC (from '70's to early '80's) – In the huge production of toy soldiers and other items from this famous company, there were three lines of items dedicated to the Space theme: the Legionari Spaziali (1/32(ish) power-armoured troopers & their 'B.E.M.' foes, plus a couple of vehicles), the 'Anime' series (from the Harlock & Goldrake/Goldorak animes) and the Galaxy Series (really more 'action figure'-scaled items than toy soldiers, but IMO too peculiar to be left out! :-) )

BARAVELLI (mainly from '60's to '70's)  – Produced some (probably bootleg) 'Gemini-suited' Marx 1/32 astronauts copies, plus a series inspired by the 'Apollo-suited' Marx figures, and a series of six boxes of 1/72(ish) Airfix 'blue-box'-inspired Spacemen and vehicles boxes, with gorgeous original graphic (and cheap mainly Giant-type HK figures... :-/ )

CO-MA (mainly from early '50's to early '80's) – Produced various series of Spacemen and Aliens in 1/32 and 1/72 (ish) scale, with colour-coordinated water pistols and a couple of vehicles.

DULCOP (mainly from late '60's to '80's) – In the context of a wide range of 1/32 military figures, this company produced a single set of 6 poses figures with cosmonaut-style suits.

ISAS (mainly '50's) – Produced a set of 70 mm spacemen, in the late '50, made of a mixture of rubber, latex and plaster.

ROVELLO-PORRO (mainly '50's) – Produced a series of plaster 'Martian' figures inspired by George Pal's 'War of the Worlds' movie.

TORGANO (mainly '50's) – Produced 'Bakelite-like' figures of various kind (semi-flat and full-round) and scale.

VARIOUS - Companies that produced only a casual few of space-themed items.

UNKNOWN - Some of the figures/series of Spacemen that I collected or have seen in the years, and that, even if I'm sure that they come from Italy, I haven't been able to associate to a particular company.


Next;  Part 1 - Dulcop

EC

L is for Little Chaps

Seems like synergy to follow yesterday's with today's smallies, another box-ticker as I have loads of these in storage, different sizes, colours, plastic &etc. as while all the purists were sticking with hollow-casts or 54mm, I was hoovering-up these sub-scales! Anyway we will look at them properly another day, for now these are recent incomers, I still pick them up when I can as the Saracens are hard to find intact!

 Cherilea - 45/50mm

Spear-man suffering from some 're-paint'!

Comparison with two Hilco 'stand'ee-up'ees' and one other Hill

All the above from hollow-cast moulds, yesterdays sizes were out by two inches, I've corrected!

B is is for Big Buggers

Yes, you are right; we a in a phase of lazy-posts! This is due to technical issues with Hotmail-call-me-Outlook which is currently being addressed by Gmail! In the meantime I'm just throwing stuff up here in the hope it sticks!

A random sample of larger or 'over-scale' figures in a variety of formats and from various sources; left (4-inches) to right (8-inches):

• Poured-resin Egyptian god, from a charity shop, I bought six about twelve years ago and then found dozens of other sculpts on evilBay - possibly a part-work thing? But equally likely to be just tourist tat.
• Large Fireman, he looks vaguely French or German, but the helmet is wrong for both (given the era he was likely made in) so I suspect a Japanese tin-plate or Hong Kong plastic toy with their take on a British fireman?
• The HK blow-moulded GI we looked at last year.
• Russian blow-mould (actually I think 'rotational moulding' he's far more substantial) also been seen here recently, he's the larger of the sizes they issued these in.
• Hong Kong polystyrene statuette of a larger Greco-Roman marble original, mirroring and possibly a direct copy of Fontanini
• Carrara-marble sample with the aforementioned Fontanini's 'Rocco' or Regency lady atop it, polyethylene with colour-washes.
• Branded to Noki (www.nokiware.com) and imported by Paladone (www.paladone.com), this guardsman washing-up sponge is - lets face it - in design parameters; no more than a Roman arse-wipe! Like the fireman he's two halves of polystyrene moulding heat-welded together. Both the website Addresses seem to have been amalgamated. and there's disco-divas and a lovely egg-set with guardsman toast-cutter still on their books.

FFL is for Foreign 'French' Lot!

A quick post today and a box ticker at that! More from the hiding folder, bit of old, bit of not so old and should be familiar to you but it gets them in the tag-list!

Timpo 'solid' French Foreign Legion, first type above; with factory paint, second type below; with (I'm pretty sure?) two plastic-colour variants from the Action Packs on the left and two from Toyway on the right - but it was about 11 years ago I took these?

B is for Bookiewook!

Or is it Booky Wook? Cheers; whatsyername-vote/don't-vote-labor-pop-star-bloke! I had nothing loaded for today, so a quick chuck it up here with a look at some recent additions to the library, some new (or newish!) some old, and while not that useful for the day to day stuff; all helpful titles none the less.

The Britain's Toy Car Wars book is a pleasant look at our die-cast toy car production, from the early years of the 1940's to the cataclysmic 1980's and the brand-moves to Hong Kong owners. It's an episodic history, the author (Giles Chapman) jumping between potted histories of the separate companies, comparison pieces, general stuff and drier fiscal reports.

I suspect it's a stitching together of magazine articles (Die Cast Collector perhaps?), so it's not that useful for looking up specific things in a hurry, but it is a lovely book to dip into, or read front-to-back as a 'read' if you know what I mean. Currently 3-5 quid in discount book sellers including The Works.

Making Victorian Dolls' House Furniture by Patricia King was a library sell-off for a pound, It's got lots of good ideas for modelling with household goods, found objects and chuck-outs, many of which will carry across to military modelling, especially dioramas.

The Steiff book is lovely, a Christmas present so I don't know what it cost, but it's brand new although marked 2003, so probably another remaindered title worth keeping an eye out for, but it seems to be the last word on the subject, profusely illustrated; apparently with direct access to the Stiff family archives, it also has tons of data tables, anecdotes, historical details and Bears, lots of Bears!

It also has much on the origins of the phrase/moniker 'Teddy Bear', writer Günther Pfeiffer putting a lot of old myths to bed whilst confirming others with first-hand witness accounts of what actually happened, when, why and to/by whom!

Toy Instruments, penned by Eric Schneider is well off the beaten track, but actually contains a lot of very useful stuff from a wing of the hobby I knew nothing about. It's a slightly misleading title as it really only deals with battery or mains-powered electronic instruments, so all those early plastic guitars and drum-kits are missing as are the plethora of whistles, pan-pipes, novelty horns and party blowers!

But the information on Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies is much needed while similar products in different packages help ID some contract-manufacturers and/or their customers! A clearance-buy for a couple of quid.

Brick Wonders (another discounted book) is the second volume from Warren Elsmore, and to be honest, the first (Brick City; also discounted a couple of years ago - once you hit the profit target you just shift the 'remainder' to a wholesale warehouse!) was better, this is rather an exercise in dead-horse beating, but there's such a market for Lego titles; if you can . . .do! And some of the ideas are clever, especially the very little ones; using a few small bricks to make something instantly recognisable - the little camel is superb!

The other two are even more left field, but I always get Shire titles if they look vaguely useful and when they get to look like these they can be as little as 30/50p in old bookshops, this pair both came from the shop in Alton.

RC Bell's Dice and Dominos is more about the history of and rules for the various games, but one can always learn something . . . the dots on dominos are called 'pips'! Ships' Figureheads by MK Stammers was purchased because the subjects are figural - of course!