E is for Exhibition - Fleet Library 2021

I noticed I broke 2020's down into parts so I could tag everything properly, but I'm chucking these up here as a single post because A) I just need to get them off the Laptop, and B) there isn't a key to all the exhibits, so it's more a question of what can you spot? What did you have?!

Last year's theme was wooden toys, and they often seen to loose their packaging/branding quite soon in their ownership, but a few do have their box, and for a four-shelf cabinet and small table in a local library, I think it gives a good overview of wooden toy over the last 70 [plus] years!

I'll try to get the other one up this evening sometime, but there's plenty here to amuse or entertain, not so sure about the educating or informing angle!

S is for Solid Slime!

This'll be the seventh post on the Aliens franchise this year, so clearly 'the year of the Aliens' here at Small Scale World . . . purely accidental, or coincidental! These are another iteration of the EMCE 'Nanoforce' figures with an additional Alien sculpt and no Colonial Space Marines!

Further branded to both Diamond Select and Previews Exclusive (PX), who have been associated with a lot of the EMCE 'toy soldiers' stuff, the slime has, over time, set solid! The material is a sort of bouncy-ball rubber now, so I had to break them out physically, rather than just pull them gently away from the gloop!

The solvent for slime is apparently vinegar (discovered for a forthcoming post!), but I'm not sure it would succeed in re-hydrating these lumps! I kept a few of the larger lumps as a 'might be useful later' addition to the 'spares box'!

Of the six possible, I managed to end-up with four sculpts, which is not bad going, when I already have the standard ones, but there is a surprise here, in a sixth pose (a 'Facehugger'), as the previous issue only had the five adult Xenomorphs. It's not a very good sculpt, and out of scale (unless you collect Action Man/GI Joe dolls) but may - therefore - remain uniquely in the glow-material, as far as being a collectable goes.

The Facehugger is not on the press image (left), probably because it's a bit shit, but the box clearly states "collect all six Aliens!". The box is shown as being apparently a 24-egg double-decker, while mine only has the one layer of 12 eggs, which also calls for a shout-out to eBay seller 'silver-acre' (Darryl Jones, Silver Acre Comics) who sent me the whole box with a multiple purchase even though it wasn't part of the offer - cheers dude; got a post out of them!

S is for Snow Pictures in Fleet

Nothing to do with toy soldiers, or even nostalgia; when I was a kid you got snow piled in the corners of shop windows but that was about it, this is a newer craft altogether, and takes advantage of the techniques of the graffiti artist and the properties of fake snow-in-a-can, and I thought they were worth shooting and sticking-up here as we career towards the 25th with alarming speed!

On one level it's a bit formulaic, with the same tropes from picture to picture; four-pointed stars, a snowfield across the bottom, snowmen (all white!) etc . . . but also some skill in making each design fit the window-frame or shop-front, and as a form of advertising it's as good as any other, after-all I made the point of walking the whole high-street and photographing them, didn't I!

Mostly found on the smaller independent shops and boutiques, none of the multi-branch names have bothered, nor have the larger - national - estate agent chains, but a couple of the smaller ones have, along with a couple of the hairdressers and several of the coffee-shops, while some (the 2nd one down and the delivery van) reflect the nature of the business, most were just seasonal fare. Anyway, enjoy - Aliens later!

The hare is very feint in the last two images but he is there, down on the left in the first image and filling this one! There were also a couple I couldn't get decent images of due the the low, winter sun!

It's also reminded me I have a High Street post from last summer in the queue somewhere - animals again, along with last winter's exhibition at the Library, and I'd better get up there and see if this year's is up? I'll have to run them back-to-back!

T is for Two - Phidal's Latest

Pleased to say TKMaxx have had a Phidal top-up in time for Christmas, and I've grabbed two - so you don't have to, but you might want to after you've seen them! It's funny, when Spectrum Steve first ID'd these it was fun finding them all and learning to recognise them in mixed lots, now it's a case of keeping up with the output to tick the boxes!

There were four that I could see, the Disney Christmas one Brian Berke sent to the blog a few weeks ago, a 'Cars' one (I have no interest in anthropomorphic vehicles!) and these two, sadly it's the Disney Pooh, not the original, but then we'll never see the original one again - Disney Pooh; insert you own acerbic joke here! Encanto was new to me when also in that Brian B post, from Walmart on that occasion; here's the Phidal set, and I believe a second movie (some underwater stuff) is on the way?

Everything you need for a decent Pooh adventure in the 100 Aker Wood with all the characters except Penguin, who was a late addition and is not well known. The jar of honey though seems too big for a bear with even 'very-little brain' to get his head stuck in?

Lovely Jaguar; Parce, is the highlight here, along with a large Capybara or Chiguiro; Chispi which is also preferable to the humans, in my eyes anyway! But then I haven't seen the movie . . . but I'm thinking along the lines of - they are quite realistic sculpts (for cartoon animals) and could probably be painted to be more so, realistic that is?

Both sets are the new ten-count, but they are big, I struggled to get them in the standard archiving 4x5½ bags I use, and they both got 5x9's after this shot. Consider that the sets of 12 superheroes' back at the start of this Phidal odyssey would fit the smaller bags loosely!

F is for Faraones y Dioses

Pharaohs and Gods . . . just'a quickie, these are copies of the Safari set we've seen a couple of times now one way or another, and while I bought them bagged 'NOS', it was obvious the set had seen better days and several sets of staples had visited the header-card, so; as it's both 'modern production' and the Mexican equivalent of a China rack-toy, I felt no compunction in getting them out for a box-tick!

The front and back of the header-card; a high point of the clip-artist's Photoshop efforts and no mistake! We have a colony of pyramids, some movie undead characters who definitely aren't in the bag and a loose camel, just I case we haven't worked out where the set's set! Manufactured by Magic Toys and distributed by SHS Toys, we've got two new tags out of it!

They actually have a charm which leaves them with an apparent age they just have't earned, being crudely painted/washed over a softish silver PVC-vinyl (a couple are a cream or black substrate) rubber type material, very flashy, and somewhat worn (whether in the bag, or due to the several removals from the bag in the past I will ever know), they look like they might be from the 1950's and gum-ball machine prizes at that!

I can't compare them, as I have the other sets as they appeared over the last two years (Safari donors, two K&M/Wild Republic sets and the recent Hing Fat set from Peter Evans), due to the current storage situation/excuse! So we'll return to all-five one day for a full comparison of them together. Oh, and there are no actual Pharaohs in the set, just a wrapped-up dead one! For all their pirated daftness I quite like them!

T is for All Moulding . . . Maybe!

Toumoulage; a French company, the meaning of which is probably no more translatable than Triang or Meccanno but which can produce the above English, or variations on it ('Mould All') in translation engines, so may well mean that (input from friendly French welcome!)?

A hard polystyrene plastic original, factory painted, behind, with a soft polyethylene premium in front, the premium probably isn't Toumoulage, but rather a piracy/licensed copy, reduced in size by somebody-for-Procter & Gamble France?

P&G had issued unpainted polystyrene versions in their soap power, which were shown on Ludo's old site, so I guess the smaller, soft plastic ones are a later edition for the same companies products? But they could be from another issuer, these premiums tend to 'do the rounds'?

I think there are eight poses in total (plus a mounted line, we'll look at another day), I've still to find the crawling Indian and cowboy with lasso, and you can see they are part based on the second set of Lido Wild West (also copied in Hong Kong), part based on the earlier Crescent/Lido from hollow-cast Wild West set (seen here a while ago), with elements of the Siku premium set maybe and even the Thomas/Poplar for Quaker cereal premium set.

This is not to say they are straight piracies, they have their own style (a sort of art-deco meets yellow-submarine!), but the above named companies would have been contemporaneous-with and clearly influenced these.

Close-up of a couple of the smaller copies, so far I've only found them in the soft polyethylene, but as stated above there was a hard polystyrene issue, while the Toumoulage are always 'styrene, but can be painted or unpainted.

Colours found so far, I shot these from a very small sample before I'd found the larger ones (there may be a few more in the storage lots?), so there's not much else to say about them!

Elkie the moose shall sing no more, but he'll taste good and make excellent moccasins! I think the moose (Hong Kong) and background foliage (which includes a coral!) were in a lot from Chris Smith which was to-hand and the moose was the right size to suggest the vignette!

The tree on the far left is particularly interesting as it's a variation on the stackable Merit type, but with a single stepped-trunk you drop the greenery over, unlike the more common plug-together stack of separate sections . . . I recently picked-up a larger one, which is former-Soviet, so this one may be too, I can't remember?

B is for Back At'cha!

"You think you're ready?
We're readier!
Back at'cha!"

Actually I think they are slightly outnumbered by those in the previous post and I've reinforced them with some gash metal from the London Toy Soldier Show on Saturday! But at least they arrived - eventually!

News Views Etc . . . December Already!

Sorry for the absence, but Real Life! The car was proving difficult to get through the MOT and I had several mini-adventures sourcing injectors and a decent garage! Once it was going and taxed I had a lot of rushing about to do to catch up and in the meantime I've paid for a flat for six months and got my teeth fixed!

Don't forget it's the last London Toy Soldier Show later today, and it's the last-ever stand alone show, before the combining with the Sunday modelling and war games show into one, next Spring, which remains to prove itself?

Chalk Farm, London - London Toy Soldier Show

Haverstock School, 24 Haverstock Hill, Chalk Farm, London, NW3 2BQ

Web. - www.toysoldiershow.co.uk

eMail - kim@guidelinepublications.co.uk

Tel. - 01908 274 433

10:30 - 16:00hrs

Admission £6, early bird (from 09:30hrs) £10, late hares £4 - after 14:00hrs

Parking £5 (reasonable for London!)

Check all charges - this is an old profile.

 

Paul announced the firm date for the Plastic Warrior show a week or so ago, flyer below;

London - Twickenham / Whitton - Plastic Warrior Magazine - Plastic Warrior Show

The Harlington Suite, The Winning Post Hotel, Chertsey Road, Whitton, Twickenham, London, TW2 6LS

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/PlasticWarrior?fref=ts 

Blog. - http://plasticwarrioreditor.blogspot.com/

eMail - pw.editor3@gmail.com (pw.editor@ntlworld.com)

Tel. - 01483 830 743 (01483 722 778)

10:30hrs - Finish, no early-bird

Please note the new email is the only eMail, and check you have the right 'phone-number, as that's changed recently too. Still the best plastic figure show in the world!

Shot this for 2020, but ran out of time or circumstances dictated otherwise, two years running! Bisque figurines around 50mm, there's a lot of these around; I think I saw some in TKMaxx a couple of weeks ago, but the moss slowly brittles and fades away to dust, leaving them looking a bit sad and tatty, so I removed the figures after the shot and the stable went on the fire a year ago! Removing the remains of the hot-glue (sticky wax) was the hard part!

 

I had something else for here, but I can't remember what it was so it can't have been that important, or it can wait!