ZZ is for Hawkin's Bazzar, Ingo Roggaz, Schilling and/or Tobar!

We've looked at them before, Hawkin's have gone under for a final time since Chris supplied his potted-history and the connection with Schilling was proven at a toy fair, but there was one item I really wanted, and another I quite fancied from the tinplate range, and both have been secured since January, so that's what we're looking at here!

The best! Only because I can't really afford those beautiful old French or German ones when they come up occasionally! Vaguely Prussian or Austrian (even Italian or French) cavalryman of that 'colonial' period 1840-1914 so beloved of figure painters (and print artists) for the colours of the splendor of often quite OTT uniforms, many - well 'a few' - of which survive, simplified, as ceremonial uniforms to this day.

The reigns serving as the gilded tree-hanger, and the whole being three sheets of die-cut tin-plate, pressed to shape and assembled with bent ears/tabs in the traditional way.

My line-up now looks like this, with the fictional Vomag (Vogtland Maschinenfabrik AG, actually subsumed under communism and surviving as IFA - Industrieverband Fahrzeugbau) fire-wagon/ladder-truck as the other 'newbie'.

When we looked at these last time I marked some up as not by Hawkin's or Tobar, as they weren't in the catalogues to hand, but they all seem common enough here in the UK for an assumption that all three importers (Schilling [USA], Tobar [UK] and ^Z_Z /Roggaz [BRD]) carried the full range in one catalogue or another, one year or another.

Really a generic fire fighting vehicle with lines that are more American (showing the input Schilling had from the beginning of this ^Z_Z-branded line?) than anything else, the overly complicated bar the ladder is fixed to obviously doubling as pipe-work for interest/external detailing.

Couple more shots of the additions, the ^Z_Z mark being something I've never managed to do justice to within the font limitations of Word-for-Windows! And Dinky's Centurion again shows how small these little tree-hangers are.

There must be loads in people's attics, cellars, sheds and under-stair cupboards, coming out every year and going back on the tree? And they are perfect to take off the tree as presents for sudden, little visitors . . . my late mother always had a few spare bags of chocolate-coins hidden in the center of the tree - on the fat-ends of the branches - for little people to search for, something she was still doing two years ago when the new neighbours brought round their daughter, and a tradition I will continue when I get to wherever I'm going-to.

ABC is for Another Beauty Catalogued!

I received some lovely 'might be/probably' ABC figures from Chris Smith a few days/weeks ago, which are in a future 'H is for How . . . ' post (and which I have posted elsewhere recently for those who saw them), but I've also managed to track this down;

It's starting to lose its bonnet-graphics and is missing a spare-wheel (which may turn-up in the spares box), but is otherwise in good nick for something which probably dates from the late 1950's or very early 1960's. The next question is whether it goes with the green figures we've seen here before, or one of the various iterations of Monogram copy - we've also seen, and I suspect the later, so will be looking at them more closely when they come out of storage, but for now - new Jeep!

V is for Versus . . . Plants!

One single trope seems to connect the most of all the Zombie sets, the 'Zombies versus Someone', or 'Someone versus Zombies' title or set theme, usually as a 'vs' or simple 'v'. And these are no exception, despite my knowing slightly more than nothing about them.

Plants versus Zombies, I picked these up a while ago as they were going dirt cheap, and I haven't got the time to look into them right now, but I'll give them more time in a year or two and we'll return to them here with a full picture.

What little I've gathered from a few minutes on evilBay/Google is that they are quite a big thing, or recently were, possibly among the 5-10 age group, or 8-15's? Related to a computer game and dating back to around 2006 (game) / 2008 (toy licenses?) and the figures are made by Jazwares/The Zoofy Group (I think!).

Also there seem to be loads of them in various sizes of sets, with some commoner figures (most of the above ten?), and seem to have been around for five, maybe ten years? Fun things anyway, and although sculpted in a heavier style, and with some cartoonishness, are otherwise - at around 70mm - about the right size for the Accoutrements and Safari sets in the previous post.

I don't know if this chap goes with them but I think he does [no he doesn't - see comments], I thought he was a gardener, but he has three spanners hidden in his hair and another in his hand, so maybe the plants need the odd tune-up before they go hunting Zombies.

Also totally forgot Jan had looked at them a while ago; https://site-of-curiosities.blogspot.com/2017/07/plants-verses-zombies-toy-miniatures.html 

F is for Flesh-eating . . . Zombies . . .

. . . are there any other kind? Actually it should be T is for Two - Zombies, as the post rather grew somewhat!

The Glow-in-the-Dark Flesh Eating Zombies Playset from Archie McPhee's mate Accoutrements!

I've been after these for a while and when this one with a sun-fogged case/blister came-up cheap, it seemed like a good excuse to buy one I could open and scan etcetera, so that's what I did, would have been rude not to!

Nine figures at the larger end of the range (75-80mm'ish) and as well sculpted as any other Accoutrements' sets, with all the tropes we've seen since I started looking harder for these zombie figures a few years ago - devil-dog, fat bloke, rising grave-contents (why would they come to life if they haven't been bitten - the rising dead is another movie!), dressing-gown lady, holding his own limb bloke . . . boxes ticked!

All nine, they are made out of a phosphorescent polymer, the amount of painting dictates how much glows and both fat-bloke and dressing-gown lady score low, their eyes are painted-in bright-green fluorescent paint, so appear manic in bright light, or black in the dark which gives them a sinister look, either way!

Compared with the similar sized (some closer to 70mm), but not glowing Safari Tube figures, and again' rising bodies, fat bloke and crawling pose are all mirrored, along with a bunch of undead Karan's! The Safari figures also have the 'emergency green' fluorescent eyes.

This is where I pulled back one of the boo-boo's as I had not fully photographed the Safari, beyond the Accoutrements comparisons, but I managed to find them this week and brought them back, to take a few more shots and make the full T is for Two...!

I thought the grave/s in the previous images looked like they were in two pieces, so shot them again to prove the single moulding. Along with a group shot of the low-hanging fruit!

The eight upright poses are fifty-fifty male and female, with fat-bloke being so fat he doesn't need a base . . . some subtle social profiling there Archie'ments? Also while the two grave-risers are pink, the other ten poses are equally split between bruised purplish-pink and a dead-for-a-while greeny-grey.

The sales image from Amazon with the square 'Toob' (actually a prism . . . or a block!)* as I seem to have forgotten to scan the insert cards, although I know I've got them somewhere and will do another day - probably for the A-Z entry . . . when I get to it!

And did I say the Accoutrements glow in the dark!

 

* It's a rod isn't it, a rod with square-section! Comes to something when a graphic designer can't remember basic geometrical terminology!

BOZ is for Box O' Zombies

"Box O Zombies is owned by Immersive Realms, Inc. founded and operated by Shawn Recinto. The figures and artwork are created by a few Chicago artists who have a passion for zombies, figures, and just making things awesome."

A sadly short-lived project, which seems to have been half-garage or 'art toy' (in concept) and half-commercial (in execution), but for which/whom the website is dead and the Faceplant/Twittsphear pages have seen no meaningful traffic since 2014/15.

But it highlights the fragmentation of the hobby; with 3D printing at home or via commercial printers, up-scaling and down-scaling of existing figures by pirates (as we saw with the Chinese Army plundering Caesar the other day), the Russian/Ukrainian Co-Op's and home-design-&-print, or home scan-&-print it's getting so no one can follow all of it, let alone collect it!

And, while I said this morning that I'd corrected a few boo-boo's in the Halloween posts system, I failed with these! Although in the last few minutes I've pulled it back by finding the original images on the WayBackMachine! But this is here, so, it’s a reuse of a picture already seen here and elsewhere, but you get the idea, BOZ figures being herded by slightly larger Bonux spacemen!

Basically, although I scanned the box and managed to take this size-confirmer and pose the shot with the Bonux figures, I never took full set shots of the figures, except there may have been a couple more in the Bonux sequence, I must have deleted them . . . Doh!

The trade images from the dead website; they were available in puke green and a pale-purple which - going from my sample - are a very pale lilac-gray shade. There were plans for other figures (some nice humans in tan-brown seem to have got to master-sculpt stage) and if you go down the Google rabbit-hole, you will find all sorts of stuff (concept drawings, CAD renders etc) on the various sites once associated with them.

In the searching for info on the Box O's, I also found these from Spherewerx, they aren't findable at the moment (this is the old Amazon listing image, but there are a couple of dozen other Zombie-related items from Spherewerx or Previews Exclusive (the same people who did the WWII Zombies) in feebleBay, so they'll come around second-hand at some point, maybe for next year?

WD is for Wicked Duals

A double joke as they are both two sides in a fight (duelling), and two colour-ways (duel), and seem to be running alongside the more standard boxed version such as that seen in the previous post . . . we arrive at the fourth set (of six?) from SCS Direct, and while not really that Halloweeny, being technically Sci-fi, you will see there is a nightmare element to some of the Aliens!

When I first looked into these I got the impression the tubes/'toobs' were older, and the boxes newer (and either that, or the opposite, may be the case, as far as original production went), but last year's offerings were one of each (zombies in a tube, fantasy animals in a box) and the same is true for this year (fantasy: box, sci-fi: tube), but you can find some of them the other way and with a gap between last year's and this year's listings on both feeBay and Amazon, the circumstantial evidence is that there's a warehouse or two somewhere with healthy stocks of both, released each late-summer for the Halloween season?

As with last year's, the tube arrived broken, and while I don't think it contributed to the short-count (again! Four-out-of-four short-counts!), it's clearly a problem with the gauge of plastic used, against the weight of the PVC-like material!

I didn't do a table for these, and re-distributed them to the other two guys before I took note, but it was short (98 again I think) and there were anomalies with the contents against a straight split, or 'fair' distribution.

However, because these are slightly different from the three previously-seen sets, in having one side in light-grey (the humans) and one in dark (aliens), there were at least three of each and I think everyone got a full set with a couple of handfuls in the 'spares' box.

Top-left is an Imp or Gremlin-like alien; it certainly doesn't look terribly friendly! To its right is the closest to a movie-alien, in being humanoid and carrying sophisticated technology/weaponry in an 'atmosphere' suit!

Bottom-left gives us a Cthulhu-Turtle thing! While the figure bottom right is a sort of elemental; I can see people painting-it-up as fire, water, lava or even a plant-like finish would work?

Top-left is the Dragon we saw in the previous post, it's actually quite sweet, more of a baby dragon than anything else, sitting in a nest of planks! Bellow the Dragon we find the Arse-faced, Flame-haired, Seal-pig . . . very rare I can tell you - due to their tendency to combust when they fart.

Next to that Arse-pig as they are known locally (and from the same planetary system) is the Arse-faced, Shaggy Octo-Gute, very tasty! And in the top-right-hand corner is the Squid-headed Scooby-swine, a useful tracking animal. You know when you are near the tracked pray as the Scooby-swine either bolts and runs away or jumps into your arms and slobbers all over you with its many slimy tentacles, so PPE required!

With the humans we get a mixed bunch of figures which are quite useful in various settings/scenarios, on the left a gang of vigilante survivors who have armed themselves for a fight, the girl on the right is sculpted as a child, but bigger than all the rest, weather she is supposed to be a giantess or something I don't know, but she's in 'Human' coloured plastic!

The other pair are more tremulous citizens, clearly not dealing with an alien invasion in quite such a focused and determined manner as the first three!

The final trio include a pair of 1950's pulp spacefarers, who look more like kids in Halloween costumes, or scientists on Horsell Common - where my Brother and I played a lot as kids - swampy mass of mosquito-breeding, elephant grass puddles, orange-algae poisoned drainage ditches and struggling juvenile fir stands! And there's a comedy sketch in there - "Try it now, it should work?"!

To whom is added (several years before BMC) a Rosie the Riveter! She's posed here with the Auto-Union DKW 'Munga' from Injectaplastic, showing the 1:48th/40mm range of this set, although the aliens and Dragon can be any scale you choose! Rosie, and the uniforms, are clearly placing this lot in that 1940/50's realm of black & white matinee movies about bug-eyed lumps of glowing jelly from that dying, red, militaristic, swamp-planet beyond the stars!

A comparison between the two Dragons we've seen this year, remember last year's sets contained a man-bat and a Dragon which was more like a chess-piece, while this year we get one seemingly from D&D and a heraldic Dragon, so SCS've ticked all the boxes on leather-winged beasts!

SCS is for Scary Creature Set!

I could have used that last year . . . oh; I almost did! Having explained - last year - how I bought the Fantasy Creatures Set II from SCS Direct because it was less numerous in the Amazon listings, and that I was hoping to get Set I in the Autumn, when I went back for it, it had totally disappeared (along with all other SCS listings on both Amazon and evilBay), and it wasn't until July/August of this year that it reappeared, but it did and I nabbed one!

Packaging art-work and contents, the contents - like the two sets we looked at last year - are not equally divided between the two colours/'armies' with dark grey suffering severely from outnumbering, nor do they come to the advertised total of 100 pieces.

As seen here, there are four each of the light grey and only three each of the dark grey, except with the Minotaur, but that small victory for darkness is lost to the missing Knight, who's gone AWOL, with his head, so not even biting people to death!

The sculpts; the upper shot shows two which wouldn't look out of place in a ray Harryhausen movie, the Serpent-lady is a vast improvement on the old DFC/Toyco ones, while the lower shots are more heraldic, with a Griffon and a lovely 'Welsh' dragon.

The figures are manufactured in a quite soft, modern, substitute-PVC, and tend to distortion in the packaging/shipping, so I've posed a few Unicorns, they are all the same pose which should - I suspect - look like the dark grey one.

The lower shots have two roman skeletons as they should look (left) and a couple of quite different ones which I'll hang-on to as they are - these sets get split and shared with two other collectors once I've done the images - on the right.

Wizard, Knight, Minotaur and an rather nice Elvin Huntress, the Minotaur would make a lovely foil for a few 20/25mm Greeks in a little vignette, the Wizard is a bit LotR's Gandalf or Asterix druid in execution and the Knight is the weakest pose; he looks like one of Monty Python's round-table questors - hence the reference above!

Ogre/Ork types with one or two heads, a Dwarf and a vastly oversized Fairy/Pixy! The Dwarf suffers from short-shot'ing on his helmet horns, and the Fairy is rather out of place against the others, but they are all nice sculpts.

Brain has started painting his, they are still on the work-table and he pointed out that the camera-flash is a harsh critic, something I've noticed/suffered from in the past, but it gives an idea of how they'll take paint, and if you’re pondering on who/what that dragon is, he's an Alien . . . coming in the next ['newer'] post, in a short-while!

P is for Putrid Pirates Pal-up with Perennial Packs of Plastic Playthings

Brain again! Sent me these a couple of weeks ago, as it happened I had sourced a set on feebleBay, but didn't know if they'd get here in time (they did - just), so we'll run with Brian's for this year, and then next year maybe look at them all again, as we've had four or five iterations of these now, in four or five years.

Previously branded to Dolgen Corp. (Dollar General), this year they are credited to an Old East Main Co., but still found in Dollar General, and while for the last few years it's been two sets (mummies and skeletons), this year we have a new set, Zombie Pirate Army!

Like the other two sets a bit cartoony, but they can be used to fill the ranks of the Blue Box mob from a few years ago, being the same size and a very similar plastic colour! Eight figures in eight poses, again as the other sets, although I seem to recall one of them was ten-figures for the first couple of years . . . skeletons?

Skeleton army; seen before, so just confirmation of the new packaging variant!

Mine, like I say there have been three or four card variations now, figure-count anomalies, and this third set, so in a year or two, when there's less to post on the day, I'll try to return to them for a more comprehensive pulling-together/overview, yet we may see them again next year, as we've seen them for five-years on-the-trot now!

Many thanks to Brian for the images, I'll try to remember to open my Pirate set for next year whatever else happens!

M is for Monsters vs. Military

Another box-ticker, and another intermediate set of 40-mil odd's, these being Monsters vs. Military from Blip Toys LLC, and while my Halloween posts can veer toward the fantasy or medieval, they can also veer toward the sci-fi, and that's rather the case with these!

How they arrived; they had been undercoated with an aerosol spray-paint which was the devil to get off, I don't know what it was, but suspect something like Crylon or even Rustoleum, it was a three-dip job in the end, over two days, and some finishing with a toothpick to get two sets clean!

We get a right old mix here, which from the left are: an Eagle-man, an Alien knock-off Xenomorph, a Shark-man, something equating to Dr. Frankenstein's [cartoon] Monster, a real alien-alien (sort of eye-head cyclopean) and a bog standard Zombie with the prerequisite own severed-limb being waved about! And it's only the three (Eagle, C19th Monster and Zombie) out of twelve sculpts which got them in/on the list today!

The 'Space-Marines' lean equally heavily on both the Alien and Halo franchises, I think, although the prone MG-gunner could pass for a current GI! As would both the kneeling and - otherwise unarmed - grenade throwing chaps; with a bit of paint, the other three have pretty obvious 'space' weapons.

My favorite is actually the shark-man, who would go really well with the similar 40mm shark-man figure from Papo's homage to the Pirates of the Caribbean. He's even in simple shorts and riggers boots, so would look quite at home on a pirate-ship's deck!

The Frankenstein's Monster pose is very cartoony, and with his arms raised in a threatening 'lurch', has covered the 'Hollywood' bolts in his neck, so they put one in his elbow, so we'd not fail to work out who he's supposed to be!

I is for Imperial Zombies

Just a box-ticking quickie, these came in several playsets including a very good knock-off from Walmart which you can see on Sean's Blog here.

But as mine only came in the six Imperial poses and seem to have better sculpting, I'm guessing for now (in the absence of others), that they are the Imperial's.

They - as Imperial - were issued in a larger set as Zombie Apocalypse with Tim-Mee knock-off AFV's, a 'toob' and a smaller twin set which was called Zombie Responders vs Zombies; we saw them here courtesy of Mr Berke back in 2018, and they do still turn-up on evilBay from time to time! The responders in blue plastic . . . the Zombies having a tank in the larger set!

 

I have one in a slightly different colour with a stock control mark printed down his body!

W is for a Wicked Witch of the Woods and her Whacky Wonky Waffle-hovel!

But she got hers!

I try not to ask for stuff for the Blog, I get plenty sent voluntarily and this year of all years haven't had the time to keep up with anything, but I did drop a line to Brian Berke in New York the other day just to see if Scully & Scully were going to 'deliver the goods' this year, and he kindly popped down the next day to check - and has been back subsequently.

Sadly all they had was this quite large-scale table centre-piece, and Brian wondered if maybe they had been caught-up in the global logistics foul-up and failed to get a new stock from Germany, which is likely, but anyway, no blurb needed as we're familiar with them now . . . Hansel and Gretel;

And many thanks to Brain for going the extra-mile; cheers Brian!