T is for Two - H is for Hong Kong Hovercraft

We haven't had as many hovercraft as we should have done, given their box was in the attic this last 11 years, so I'll have to redress that when I get to final [alive] resting place, but I can make a start here with two bog-standard rack-toy brands, one in Picasa for a while, the other sourced off feebleBay a week or so ago.

Woolbro's Hovercraft with Friction, is more of a whacky Intergalactic US Space Marines space-car, although with the body entirely filled with two large turbines, of limited use beyound getting two humans from A-to-B in a uncomfortably noisy fashion!

I actually have the Jane's Surface Skimmers and Hovercraft tome (and a tome it is, good for bodybuilding) and it is amazing to see how quickly Hovercraft went from British post-war excentricity in the 1950's to hundreds of designs all over the world by the 1970's (I think I have the '72 edition), and some of them do look a bit like this I think, but the forward perambulation isn't clear and the book's currently buried!

Carpet wheels aren't part of a real hovercraft which would have a hollow-belly to fill with pressurised air! Branded to an MMF and numbered 812, mine is obviously missing an ariel, but I will look out for another, better one as it also has that yellowish staining on the starboard side.

Learning something every day; although it sounds like the sort of thing Mum would have told us as kids, I learnt the other day that before 1844 it was Larboard and Starboard, but the Roayl Navy changed what was an obviously confusing (under fire/in a storm) convention, in that year.

The other reason to look out for another one is that the box on this one is shot to bits. The Woolbro stamp looks like the kind of overprint a few of their earlier sets carry, so there may be a generic version of this out there somewhere?

On safer ground with the SRN6 (Saunders-Roe, Naval, Type Six), this is another regular rack-toy star; Clifford Toys, and would seem to be a copy of the Matchbox die-cast, in military colours (which Matchbox also did). The Royal Marines used these for years, and the Griffon's they use now are quite similar in design.

I have the die-cast black & white civil one in the under-visited box, and this copy must be a slight scale-up; because, although small; it wouldn’t fit in the standard 1-75 range's box? It's also all plastic and like the Woolbro/MMF one, mostly polystyrene.

M is for Maisto's Military Mystery - Cubeville Cary Cases

Fun one this, but a bit mysterious, I picked it up from a dealer in the market area at the Hop Farm, Beltring's big week-long combat-wombat shindig 'Trucks & Tracks' back in 2008, he only had these, but he had a mountain of them, like half a van-load, still in the outer, manila cartons.

The box shows three sets, but two of them come with the same truck, either tilted or tiltless! And I wouldn't exactly describe any of them as particularly inspiring? The feeling being that 'Military Cubeville' was a live market-test which sank with little trace!

The one I bought; Cubeville Outpost, there are elements of the much older (1970's) Monogram Pocet Force & Battle Link sets about this, but where they had a PVC or latex scenic base which squidges-up and folds away into a smaller case, the Maisto sets are larger due to the rigidity of the scenic diorama/vignette contained within.

Which - the scenic item - is a reasonable ruined dwelling with watch-tower, sandbag piles and a rather formal stack of bright-silver 'jerry' cans! I think the access ramp also has a secondary role of joining multiple units together but I might be wrong on that one?

This was placed above the carry case with a top/side right-angled window in the other side of the box (I didn't shoot it; I'll scan it sometime) and you get two quite nice figures in the 25/28mm bracket and a M2/M3 (I still don't know which is which; I think the difference is mostly on the inside?) Bradley IFV, and it's the early, pre-Gulf Wars upgrades version.

Close-up's of the two figures (it's a figure Blog!), the box isn't clear, but there seem to be six to collect, possibly seven, but it may only be four or five? ATGM looks like it might be an M41A7 Saber (improved BGM-71 TOW system), while the squad-commander with radio is pretty stanndard, post-Cold War fodder.

The mystery is they are hard to find on the Internet and there are none currently on evilBay, although other Maisto military are easier to locate, all small ranges (G.I. Joe, Military Force (upper shot), All Stars and Kid Connection), along with odd  military finished vehicles in the normal 'Matchbox' style range, most of the bottom row above.

Some, like the 'Electronic Warfare' truck above (or was it a fire appliance first!?) reappear in the other brand-marked ranges, in the truck's case as a fully camouflaged version in the G.I.Joe series . . .

. . . or even as Jurrasic Park knock-offs in the Dino Adventure line! Maisto also do military vehicles in other scales, including 1:35th and 1:16th, I think I saw a 1:48th one as well. But as to Cubeville, pulled quickly from the market I fear?

C25th is for Buck Rogers

Except I'd never actually seen a Buck eraser! To be fair, for a decade or two I've only had the 'trooper' and while I Knew Wilma and Twiki (the stupid kid/dog/little sister tea-time viewing-ruin character) existed, I did wonder as to the full extent of the set.

Still my favourite, and shot before the other's had been found, he's a generic space soldier, with little in the TV series I remember looking anything like him? But then I don't remember many of the space ships in the topper/eraser set being in the series either! He's really channeling the Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars and seems to have taken a space fire-hydrant up his jacksie!

I should state here that I watched the series . . . because - Sci-Fi . . . but it was shit, It was shit then and it's shittier now, it was worse than a bad Dr. Who story-line, it was cheap, it was a conveyor-belt for B-movie 'stars' heading down and wannabe stars heading-up, and there were no sweeping space-opera battles or anything, it was a naff, band-wagoning off-of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, without the budget or effects, it made the half-a-decade older Space 1999 look sophisticated.

It tried to be wordy and worthy, with Trekian morality lessons, or parables on life, but without the charm of Star Trek, and the lead (who's real name I can't even remember) was NO lead! But its run coincided with when we had our Bush colour TV and then moved here, so I watched it religiously hoping it would improve, or have at least one proper space battle!

The additions, for some reason I shot Wilma back-to front, more on that in a minute, but you can see she has the Imperial Toys markings on her back. Buck is to her left and that annoying little fucker 'Twiki' the ersatz K9-R2D2-Daggit thing is the blob of orange. the space craft are make-weights which seem to have been bought-in or - at least - added from another line.

Casting around for an image of Wilma the right way round (these are all in storage already) I found the original listing, of the lot I bought a while-ago . . . maybe a year-ago? Is still on Picclick! The whole box is on Pinterest, Worthpoint and at least one website, I used the Worthpoint one, but it's probably not the best.

The dumpy 'steampunk' dustbin ship (pink above, blue one in the post!) was previously part of a range of scented erasers (a trend which started in the 1970's but which had its heyday in the 1980's I think) in bubble-gum colours, and one of my two troopers (both the same green) is not marked Imperial, so there might have been a generic issue of some/all of the figures.

There's also a standing robot who looks more Diener and may be from another source, but whatever other issues they had, they were clearly interchangeable cavities and were run-together for the Imperial set - six figures (including two robots), six vessel. You can see one of the ships (yellow, bottom right) is vaguely a 'Thunderfighter' from the TV series.

Did I mention I can't stand Twiki . . . he grates on me like a Republican senator trying to talk on women's issues.

Now fully updated here.

C is for Carmine-Coloured Capsule-Cats

Love these! I only have four, I think there are about 12 from Kinder? Plus some solid, single-piece ones, but as a box ticker these four will do. I love them because I loved the cartoons, they were so chic, so stylish, it's like someone in the 1950's made some colour cartoons and hid them until the 1970's!

Although two of them have an almost uniquely British theme (bobby on the investigation and ceremonial guardsman) I believe they had a pan-European issue and aren't terribly rare, but are still among the more pricey Kinder items on evilBay, due to the very small stickers they need to be found with.

They are full-on 'Steckfiguren', but with the hands, feet, head, tail and legs all identical, there's no real 'swoppet' element, more 'push' or pop-together.

I like the little toe-beans on the underside of the feet, while the very-small looking red-component for the nose is actually a [hidden] larger component, so little fingers (perhaps with a parents help) can put them together. Note also; his rife is a pop-gun with a cork!

As well as the eyes, most models also have some other stick-ons, along with a  small sticker of the model for fridge, wardrobe door or bedstead/headboard . . . parents who don't allow a sticker agglomeration area aren't proper parents! That's it; Kinder, Pink Panthers - box ticked.

J is for Jumping Jazzberry Jaguar

I picked-up a nice mixed lot of jumpers a while ago, I think we've seen several now already, but there's a couple of 'jiggler' type monsters still to come, in the meantime and as a continuation of one of the side-collections, there was this Pink Panther.

Not a lot to add to the pictures, but you want to try and get three lines out of it to keep the Google-bots happy, so extra images for colour variation against different backgrounds and note he's wearing PE-kit of 'singlet & shorts' and looks happy anticipating his violent acceleration along a random trajectory with a 50/50 chance of landing on his head!

Marked-up to Hong Kong with a haloed globe and the letters HF (heliotrope feline!), I test fired him and he leapt about three feet . . . and landed on his head! Testing was in the interests of research of course, I'm a grown-up, I don't play!

This chap came in with a mixed lot at some point, I think. His natty jacket and hat also happen to match the sucker-pad on the one above, colour-wise, and I thought I might have him in the four we saw a while back, but he's new (there was one with a top-hat in that other set), and is probably from another set of four from the same source as last time.

OB (?) is for Toy Leader, Pioneer, Woolbro and probably Zita et al?

Those loyal readers who have followed the Blog for some time will know there's usually one or two posts in RTM which get bogged-down in the minutia of branding, phantom-brands and brand-marks without proving much beyond the fact the Chinese/Hong Kong/Jobber branding can be a nightmare!

This is sort of one of those, but it also adds a bit to the Pioneer story (mostly uncovered here) and gives us a couple of what I suspect are quite late (i.e. quite recent) Woolbro items.

A couple of different sets, credited to a Toy Leader and imported into the UK by Woolbro, we'll do the brand stuff at the end. Contents are similar to the Realtoy military sets, or the Peace Enforce set we saw last year? If you then click 'older post' you'll get the contemporaneous Woolbro set we also saw then.

One in temperate combat scheme, the other desert, are they post '90/91 Gulf War, or earlier, there's no clue on the packaging? The contents however are really quite interesting, with references to various other Asian toy-lines/Marques.

The figures, are they the same ones Stonegalleon carry, softer versions from the Realtoy tool, or straight Pioneer production . . . well, they are the larger size, so it would seem they are from the tooling used for the Realtoy (and other) sets, and it may be that the sharper, squarer based figures (last year's and the Zita set) are from the same tooling, but weren't commissioned by Realtoy (or whoever was behind Realtoy - Dacron, Smart, Supreme?), so don't turn-up in the harder vinyl with consecutive numbering.

The trolley I have loose in my collection, it's a darker green, and better engineered (I think, I'll have to compare them when all this shite is properly sorted) and I assumed it was someone like either Corgi (all those 1:48th 'planes in recent years) or New Ray, and the recoilless-rifle here looks ex-New Ray too, so it would seem we have a pattern emerging?

I think the trolley is some kind of air-force ground-equipment, a charger, tester, starter or something, while the AT weapon is looking a bit TOW-like so second-generation ATGM? I would add that the stadium/marshalling-yard lamp-stands were seen in that other 'group' of sets branded Supreme/Ackerman/Titan etc?

Neither picture is perfect I'm afraid, but two new poses (in these softer ranges), both known from the harder Realtoy sets; kneeling pointing in jungle-hat (boonie-hat)a nd the prone gunner.

Again, I think some of these have been seen in New Ray's superior (for rack toys) 54mm sets of ten-or-more years ago, namely; a four-crate, WWII German werfer of nebels and a US/NATO M252 Mortar, while the sandbag emplacement looks prety-much the same as the Realtoy ones.

The temperate set has a GS-bodied truck, while the dessert set has a lookie-MLRS-likey rocket launcher get up, which seems to fire the same 150mm Werfgranate as the crated infantry-support Nebelwerfer, from two side mounts with hinged covers.

The slogans on the trucks is interesting, they both have Aoutca Dnphentkul written on the cab-doors, which Google-translate identified as Hmong, an ethnicity from Laos, Vietnam and South Western China, allied to the US in the second Indochinese war, many now live in Thailand or the USA. There is no direct translation.

While the Myo Niutop Buti on the rear of the rocket launcher was tentatively ID'd as Pilipino, with a translation of something-something-'good'? Both also have a hawk or falcon with the English message 'Fighting Action'! The two odd messages point to a Hmong-staffed factory in the Southern Chinese Yunnan province, making stuff-up 'on the hoof'?

But the Vcuneld on the back of the GS truck gets no suggested language, so it could just be a random-word generation robot/algorithm, but these are probably 1990's and such things weren't common back then, especially in an Asian toy factory!

So, to my thoughts on the branding . . . obviously imported by Woolbro, and marked-up to 'Toy Leader' the logo can't possibly be made to represent TL, looking distinctly like an OB? It's how they roll out there, and why Lik Be are LB, not LP or IDL!

And on the other card, the logo has been covered (before the blister was applied) with what looks like part of an Easter-egg artwork (or something equally bright and cartoony?) sticker, suggesting even they (the factory or shipper/jobber in the Far East) realised the logo-type was daft!

There is a prominent consumer message in Greek on the back of the cards (along with various other nationalities) so, given previous posts here at Small Scale World, it may be that these could be found in Greece with Zita stickers, and I'll add them to the tags for completion, even if they weren't, the connections are all there!

I suspect this is Pioneer production, a generic, given a phantom-brand wash which hasn't helped, copying from New Ray's more original stuff, and rehashing some of the stuff they supplied to Realtoy, but in new colours and with the softer rubber-figures?

P is for Preserving Popeye's Poorly Packaging

Just a brief one, this is almost a re-run of a post I did with a similar box-frame from SAE of South Africa back at the start of the blog, but it may help someone somewhere fix something similar!

How the parcel in yesterday's post unpacked; the combined results of various postal services 'duty of care', coupled with the sellers decision to send an old and already torn carton in a heavy paper envelope with lose bubble-wrap and a sheet of card, the bubble-wrap rolled and bunched under the floating card and ripped the end of the box off!

Slide the contents out, unseal the glued flap and flatten out the carton, damp it and iron it flat, on the printed side I use a couple of sheets of printer paper (there's a change in my lifetime; 20-years ago I would have written 'typewriter paper' there!) between the work and the iron.

Bookbinder's licky-sticky adhesive paper-tape; Butterfly Brand is commonest, indeed, it might be the old one still extant, I don't know? Really it should come back as it's far more eco-friendly for parcels, if a bit messy!

Run the tape through the water so it gets quite wet, place it where required and then 'squeegee' it flat with dry cotton cloth or kitchen paper.

Cross-ply over particularly damaged areas, tares etc. And you need to cross the 'grain' of the tape, as it will help keep everything flat, over time the tape has a tendency to memory-curve back to the roll position, it's why you want to get it quite wet. Iron it dry, but with a lower heat, you don't want the tape popping-off, just consolidating flat.

Then cut back to any edges you've gone over, and here, I'm cutting the line of the original die-cutter, where Popeye overlaps the front as the material beside him folds down to make the frame-box. I use the fine No.11 blade from Swan Morton (No.3 handle)* as it has a very fine tip, and I use a new blade to get a sharp, instant cut with no snags. Obviously this is a posed shot, I would never use my left hand to do something requiring such accuracy and light touch.

* I have not been paid for this blatant commercial!

Apply a contact adhesive to one half of the previously sealed side. Allow it to go tacky. Bostik haven't offered any cash either!

Likewise with the opposite surface of the other flap of the join, watching for strings, all contact adhesives seem to veer toward stringiness, that's one of their properties!

Bring the two surfaces together, dropping the camera so you can line up the other end and get the whole thing straight! When you are sure it's all good, press them lightly together, you will have a nanosecond to change your mind and pull them apart again, or slide-squeeze them into line, then run you finger down the laminate with a little more pressure.

Finally I use a metal-edged designer's ruler to press the join heavily with a bit of back-and-forward 'sawing' action, getting into the two edge-folds to ensure a firm join. Again, you need to loose the camera, to hold both ends and press down, then 'saw' back and forward. You could use a piece of square-profile dowel or wood-strip, but you wouldn't get the required firmness in the middle.

The finished item can be seen in the previous post (forth image down), which will either be immediately below this post or can be found by left-clicking the 'older post' hot link below.

P is for Plastic Pastoral Play-sets

I think my enthusiasm for these was fully displayed last time we looked at them, following a  donation from Chris Smith, to which I was able to add a few which turned-out to be different, well, there are now three or four  types/sources and some additional components!

Also; reader 'jhnptrqn' if you are still following the blog, several clues to your quest follow . . .

So, I found this one first, from the hard, polystyrene cover/lid, and the full photo-graphics I think we are looking at a date around 1972-4? And I suspect it was probably commissioned by a department store, or big-store chain. "Up to 5 years of age" . . . caught red-handed, doh!

As I said last time; if it were found here (in he UK) I’d say Conran/Habitat or Heals, maybe Debenham's at a push . . . but it was found over the pond in the US where my knowledge of funky, modern stores of that era is zero! But it is an unbranded generic, of an overall quality you'd expect from a major departmental or mall-chain retailer, or maybe the 'big book' mail-order listers?

New this time - but seen in the feeBay image last time - is the dog, pine tree/fir, the twin-tower/gateway arrangement/thing and the picket fences I still think I may have a few of somewhere else. Also the two sizes of building. Still no pigs . . . wishful thinking!

Posed similar to the box-art; I seem to have the same 12 picket-fence pieces but one less of the two-bar fencing, maybe the fence-packer was having a bad day counting, however I suspect a loss!

Now, all this was happening about a year ago, and while I was taking mental notes I didn't write anything down, so I can't remember which set was the same as either mine (Hong Kong) or Chris's (unmarked), and I say 'which set' because another set turned-up a week or two later!

Also from the 'States, and clearly ascribed to Larami and their long-running visual-recognition line of Popeye brand-marked (but nearly always nothing to do with Popeye) rack-toys, is this set.

The postal services of evilBay (global shipping delay) and Roayl fail conspired to wreak the box, but that the seller put such a thing in a jiffy-bag didn't help! The next post will cover my fixing-it after a fashion!

Comparisons between the two show that the one is of a different class to the other (better box, rigid lid, twice the content-count), yet dimensions are similar so  one is based upon the other and both are probably - as I suggested last time - aping a Western product? Note: both Popeye and Popeye's are used.

As to that Western product . . . last time I suggested such luminaries as Galt, Hestair Kiddycraft or Triang Pedigree, to which you might add Pippin/Raphael Lipkin, or even the Design Centre in London who were behind a lot of modernist/post-modern toys, but I wonder if I/we shouldn't look further . . . Scandinavia, Germany maybe, Denmark? My British link was based upon the policeman we saw last time, but he's quite generic and some European countries had similar police helmets back in the day, if only for traffic direction or ceremonials? While 'jhnptrqn' remembered a possible French connection?

I don't know, but I remain on the hunt (if only to see if there are piggy-wiggies!), and finding out will be fun, which we will, one day, all this stuff is mass-produced and all survives somewhere.

Larami's set is on a blister held into an open frame by the fold-back sides, and the most notable difference (as I didn't record my notes on marks and release-pin dimples) is that some of the animals are in colours as leery as the packaging, with orange dog and horse and cows in pink and blue!

Combining the tower sections! "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down you hair!" I also remember (now) that the buildings in the two sets were slightly different, even though the tower stacked, with different dimensions on the Larami barn (right hand) and a roof with an inner ledge more like the smaller building's from the anonymous set.

One of them was the same as my loose ones (the unbranded one I think?), but with Chris's unmarked sample, we seem to be looking at at least three sources, which is not uncommon for this kind of stuff . . . how many spinning UFO disc-toys, how many ramp-walkers, or jig-puzzle issuers!

There was also an inclusion! The hair of a paint brush (used to clean or lubricate the machine-tools) or a factory cat's whisker managed to get caught in the blister-sealing iron, and survived for another four-odd decades untouched, stuck under the rim of the clear plastic cover!

We shall return to these, for sure, I like them and their design and place in plastics history is worth a study, while with three professions and a farmer, you feel there must be more figures, where are the women and children? And pigs . . . gotta keep the hope alive; farms need piggy-wigs!

RTM is for Rack Toy Month! F is for Fun-Tastic Fighters of Fire and Felony!

Well, saved July with a quick plethora of posts over 48-hours, lots going on in real life I won't bore you with; it's just life and it happens to all of us, but it did mean I just couldn't justify faffing around with toys on the internet! Although I posted the odd bit elsewhere, but they require simple uploading to the anonymity of auto-produced meta-data on the part of the host servers - a Blog actually requires a little actual work!

But, here we are, bloody August already! The weather's given us 20 years to live, which is nice, at least we have a target date now, I knew my '2055' was a bit optimistic when one of the activist science sites dropped to 2050 a while ago, now we're looking at 2040'ish!

But have any of your neighbours chucked out their tumble-dryer or dish-washer? Their Kärcher pressure washer, their four-wheeled gas-powered BBQ? Their fucking-great 4x4-crossover-SUV-utility Truck? No! So we're all going to die - quite soon . . . might as well enjoy tatty rack-toys while we can!

We actually saw variations of these sets some time ago here, with the same figures, and while these have been in storage since forever, the older post was ten years ago, so they 9the two paires of sets) are closer to each-other than to now!

Also there are three F's here; Funtastic, Fun-Tastic and Funtastik with a 'k', I haven't looked into it properly, but I think we worked out in the past that the first two are UK (one word) and US (hyphenated) branches of the same Hong Kong based jobber/shipper (with connections to many other rack-toy importers/carriers), while the 'k is another second use of the term as branding.

The figures; seen before more than once, following the Fantastic tag will reacquaint you with all sorts of polymer tat, including larger pose-counts of these, which seem to be copies (or just re-packs) of figures also carried by Ja-Ru.

The funniest thing about these is that the helicopter is a poor copy of the Thomas the Tank Engine helicopter, or at least I thought it was, I now can't find it, so it may be another kids license, I've definitely seen it in blue or white with a  face on!