O is for Odds & Sods - Other Figures

Although Jon's last parcel was filled with non-human animals, there were a fair few bipedal troublemakers too, and these are the rest, we looked at the small scale the other day. It's an eclectic mix with some interesting peeps!

A bit of a cheat given it could have gone with the other vehicles, but there's definitely a rider there, on the big one! Looks like it might be some sort of stunt-toy, or trick cycle with the metal studs and thin wheels - for running in tracks of some kind?

 

The others are three Micro-Machines and a Kinder type, which will enhance those corners of the collection. I did a sort of mini-season on [small-scale] motorcycles right back at the start of the blog, but never got on to the Galoob ones, so that's still for another day, and while I got into the hang of regular M/C post/updates, the next is overdue, so I'll have to address that!

Three lovey Native Americans, the Crescent Mohican (left) a particular treasure, while the Chromoplasto one is also lovely and quite animated compared to some, even most, of the other sculpts in that range of vulcanised [tyre] rubber figures.

 

The Marx six-inch is the less common hard polystyrene version, and I may try to replace the missing barrel at some point, you can hide the mend under solid strokes of gloss brown and black! While the Lik Be copy (he might be an LB original?) is in a new size - for the material (polystyrene) at around 50mm.

More Wild West, and the highlights are to the right, with a Cherilea (Hilco, from the plastic colour, Phoenix?) Indian with seperate headdress, sadly damages (as most are), but I've only ever seen chalky-brown ones before, and definitely have a spare headdress for this one somewhere!

 

While one of the few casualties of the Post Office's ministrations was the possibly Spanish-made cavalryman, whose hand is a clean-break, and should be glueable.

This horse may be Spanish as well, and once ID'd I may have a correct rider for him, but weather Wild West, Ceremonial or something else I don't yet know! Not sure if I have/had the 60mm Crescent guardsman either, but I do now!

 

The zookeeper is an oversized copy of the Britains one, possibly by Roggaz/ZZ, although in polystyrene as it is, it maybe someone else? And the mini-action-figure wit a bulls head (Minotaur?) is fun, I don't know what franchise he's from but suspect something Japanese, and televisual in origin?

 

Kinder bits go in the Kinder zone for sorting, reuniting with their accessories and building into sets! I suspect that blue nose is a little crayon, Kinder had a habit a few years ago of putting these little crayons (which last only minutes) in the tips of things and including a very small colouring sheet in the capsule-egg.

 

Combat troops; another post-office casualty, a couple for the Khaki Infantry page (kneeling firer appears to be a new - to me - Hong Kong figure) and a Monogram knock-off along with a Timpo para' sans base and a businesslike Lone Star figure.

 

The rest, the right hand picture nearly got dropped it's so poor, but the footballer will be in the next football round-up, and Timpo spares are always useful, while in the left-hand shot, the crab and ray are rather sweet, flocked in the Sylvanian Families fashion (with airbrushed detailing), while the huge medieval war-horse is by Chap Mai, and I'll have to look out for a rider!

 

Thanking Jon Attwood again for all this, as you can see, it's a fine collection of all-sorts!

UFO is for UAP - Uni-King Toys / Peter Kiri - Mysteries of the Universe UFO

So, I'm not so fussed about the absolute order of these, but these are the 'better' of the three lines (marginally), so I'm leading with them, even though the Uni King sets (which I call the 'Triple Flap Families') were dated 1996, against the 1993 of Imperial's Mighty Max knock-off - Sammy Steel!

 

March 2021 - Sci-Fi & Fantasy

These three posts are a bit of a mix of Internet stuff and my stuff, as the bulk of mine went to storage before I'd got all the shots I wanted, although some of them had already gone, or been separated at some point, the best are the Hinstar (next post) as all three loose sets came together at the end!

 

So, variously generic or, as the larger sets, credited to a Uni-King, and sometimes the UK importer Peter Kiri, these are a lot of fun, and you get little 'families' of aliens (hence my shorthand name for them!) with a few accessories, in a 'flying saucer' or UFO which unfolds in three sections and has a micro-mini UFO as the roof-piece, which can be flown off! By fingers!

We saw my first family, incomplete, way back at the start of the blog, the dog-faces, in the blue saucer, and a black saucer came loose from Chris Smith I think, not that long ago, but they are both in storage now, one with a couple of bits missing, the other sans contents.

 

But I did get the figures from the black one, although I'm not sure if I shot them, and these (Greenies) may be an evilBay image? The 'Greys' I did have to hand, but the accessories were only partial! Basically, you get two adults and two kids!

 

The green set, with its micro-UFO sitting atop the central column. This one also has three not-so-greys, moulded into their stasis-chambers, and - like the other three - a revolving floor, which allows for a second layer of detailing underneath, visible in sections as you push the missing segment of floor/gap around the central column.

Spiny-twisty things, there seems to have been plans for a third cover/hatch (hole next to left-hand feature), but for reasons of budget, or technical difficulty (or forgetfulness?) it never happened? The saucers and accessory-pieces are a 'styrene, or brittle'ish polypropylene, while the figures are PVC or one of its substitutes.

I'm missing a tripod, which should be red, but is white on the packaging artwork, in fact all the packaging artworks show pre-production stuff, and there are various subtle differences in design and contents. The missing elements mean we can return to this set another day, when I've got everything together and filled any gaps!

 

Each set is themed around a couple of tropes of the UFOlogists, here it's 'Greys' and the Easter Island Moais, the huge monolithic sculptures carved by the Rapa Nui with NO help from phuqing Aliens! And the little Moai is also missing, but I may have one somewhere in the stash, but I fear mine is Lego, Kinder or something similar?

18/12/2023 - Late Addition:

My original 3 of 4 'cute' aliens, I'm missing the other 'child'.

I is for Interesting Invertebrates or Insects

There were lots of Insects in Mr Attwood's parcel, so an unscheduled insect overview ensues now, another much ignored corner of the Small Scale World 'archive collection', there are lots in store, a few in the growing 'next overview' folder, and many downloads of sets to help ID them all one day for the A-Z pages, while there are good websites out there, for those who want to search for themselves, the STS Animal Wiki being the first place to start.

Spiders, this - like the cheetahs - was another one I had to re-shoot, as I found smaller spiders lurking under other things after I thought I'd found them all! A mix of the novelty/joke type and more realistic species identifiers, the stripped one on the left, for instance? But none are branded, with a smattering of CHINA marks, they will all need further research!

 

Big beetles; the khaki/dun and grey & white ones are from a set, while the two real biggies are probably (like the two big spiders) counter-top pick-me-ups, there is a consistency of marks/undersides within the contents of these five images, which suggest the majority of them are from two sets which should be easy'ish to ID one day.

 

Colony insects with a wingless ant facing-off against all his winged bred'rin! A couple of houseflies have snuck in under the 'wing' qualifier, but I'm not too sure on either of them, both larger than the usual novelty/joke flies, they have some bee/wasp qualities, and the red-eyed horror (a green-bottle, or green-arsed fly!) is more bee than fly!

 

Creepy, crawly critters (ooh, that would have been a better post title!), we have seen similar centi-milli-peades, but as we saw then, they all vary, and we may have seen the catapillar, or something similar, but I think most of these are new to stash?

 

With the exception of the little dragonfly, these all seem to be from the same set, with two issues of the devil's coachman and centi-milli-pede! The coachmen are both damaged, which makes them look more different!

 

Closing with scorpions, I've listened, all-night, to someone who's been stung by a scorpion, not an experience I ever want to repeat! The large damaged one (happily retained as 'first sample') seems to have always had two less legs, but scorpions do come in 6 and 8-leg (or 8 and 10-leg if counting front gloves) types.

The medium-sized one goes with the two medium-sized beetles in the second image, and the smallie goes with the chaps and chapesses in the previous image!

As always, many thanks to Jon for all these, they will be better sorted one day, and all have a place in the collection!

UFO is for UAP - Introduction

For reasons known only to them, the US Government have stopped calling UFO's 'UFO's' (for Unidentified Flying Objects), and started calling them UAP's (for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), given the number of fuckwits who will struggle to spell the last two words of the definition (including me!), it's hardly a beneficial change, and people are already starting to use Aerial or Airborne for the middle letter, yet, due to the hegemony of US culture on the English-speaking press, it is a fact that everyone else is stepping into line behind the Pentagon, and UFO's are sliding into the history of 1950's hysteria, where some might argue they belong?!!

I picked this up a while ago, going cheap in Esdevium Games I think, as an end-of-line/discontinued item? It looks distorted, but that’s just the Reaper Miniatures packaging refracting the viewable image of the contents! It's quite a simple kit of six parts, I think there are three legs and a clear-yellow canopy, and is presumably a one-man UFO in 28mm, but could be a bigger machine in a smaller scale.

 

eBay I think? It's been in the folder for a while, seems to be a take-off, or partial take-off (styling) of the Marx Mystery Spaceship, we saw here, but this is a push-and-go friction toy with sparking action! Seems to be copied from the Zee Toys version: Space Saucer, or a re-boxing? And like Lincoln's clockwork, sparking Jeeps, both could be taken from a Japanese toy, or even produced under licence from someone like Yonezawa?

 

Seen before here, but there's not a lot you can do with a carded generic except photograph it against a different background from time to time! Fixed-key clockwork, I keep hoping to find a loose one going cheap, but may de-card this one day?

 

This was a recent modelling show piece, although when I say recent, I think maybe three or four years ago, and I can't remember if the picture was online, or eMailed, but I think it was a forthcoming show-dates thing, so the model may be older still? I thought it was fun though, lifting a cow for weird experiments and/or visceral mutilation!

 

Clearly other people think it's fun becuse there's quite a few around now, this one is credited to a Matt Smiriglio and issued by Running Press Mini Editions, usually to be found around the 10- or 12-quid mark, with free postage (or £20+ if you click on one of the US listings by accident!), and as well as lights, sounds and a magnetic cow-abductor, there is a booklet on the cow-abduction phenomena! It's Christmas soon, hint-hint!

 

While these band-wagon products are cow abduction table-lamps! The one on the left being £150-odd, and a generic? The right hand 'Area 51' piece can be found from between £50 and £180, and is claimed to be from a Wan Tai, in some ad's.

 

While the real reason for this post, is some forthcoming posts, on the three sets of UFO minis in the style of Polly Pocket or Mighty Max, which graced our cheapie stores and corner shops a few years ago, Three sets; Aliens, Robots and miscellaneous Sci-Fi 'stuff', each line had three toys, and most had more than one final branding/packaging type.

Here we see two carded cheap sets, two robot sets and one Alien set (green), and the three set-specific posts will be interspersed with the Jon Attwood donation-posts over the next few days.

L is for Layouts and Little People!

There were quite a few figures in the huge box of mostly animals Jon Attwood sent recently, and we're looking at the smaller-scaled stuff in this post. Of interest as my intention is to get some model-railway stuff posted over Christmas, because it's a long time since we looked at any of it in any depth, and the last time we did, it was all that Preiser/Merten stuff, which won't feature this time round!

A late ('yellow' pull-off lid) box of Airfix Platform Figures was stuffed with small scale . . . err . . . stuff! And this is me sorting it into piles! Most of it is grist-to-the-mill stuff you wouldn't want me to go through pile by pile, but what can you spot - the image enlarges quite big, but a little pixel-fuzzy.

 

Some highlights from the previous though; the paratrooper is from a parachute-plane kit, but I can never remember which is which, as there are more than one with a figure, one is Airfix, another Monogram I think, which may be this one? Then a Blue Box German throwing  grenade over a damaged, but rather fine (Edwardian?) board-game piece, to his US oppo', while another of my favourite little Hong Kong cowboys charges into the fray!

 

Faller scenic sets, these are the really useful sets of 'bits', rather than specific kits, and I well remember those coin-operated railway dioramas at mainline and terminus stations in Germany having the contents of 973 stacked round the two cottages under construction, which would be made to look on fire with blackened timbers, cotton wool, hidden red and yellow grain-of-wheat bulbs &ect . . . so the fire equipment of Roco, Preiser, Herta, Praline and/or Wiking could be given something to do, for a feature in one corner of the layout!

 

A lovely sample, of samples, of metal railway figures, both bigger name and after-market, old and new'ish. Jon has also sent images, and I have also had both a photography and scanning sessions, so there will be intermittent posts on some of this in December, all going well.

 

We looked at these years ago, they were samples from a dodgy outfit in China/US/Germany, and Mike Niederman confirmed Tomolio's suspicions they were Presier copies, but fun nevertheless, as figure collectables, and seen here in what looks to be OO- and O-gauges. Upper shot is duplicate poses in the two sizes, lower shot are colour variations of the OO figures.

 

Hong Kong knock-offs of Merit/Randall scenery, with the white stuff attributed to Blue Box and through their Sunshine lable, Marx!

 

Jon also sent this for a very interesting advert on figures from a maker I only knew from their similar ad's in the military modelling press, where they were promoting 1:90 or 1:100th NATO recognition models of Cold War armour! All for the forthcoming posts on Railway figures!

Thanks again to Jon, for all this, which is already proving useful and will continue to do so for years to come. You know, everything which you physically have in the 'stash', is something you don't have to search for, at some point in the future, to feed blog articles or illustrate points!

M is for Merched Cymru

Or 'Welsh Ladies' to the occupying English, while - "Formidable infanterie de ligne" to French invaders! And yes, we sort of had that gag before! Really an F is for Follow-up, as these keep coming-in, and of course they do, they were (are?) in one form or another, a standard tourist trope/souvenir, and there will be many around, some commoner than others. 

Indeed, it's one of the big gaps in the hobby's knowledge, these localised figurines/figurals, I do have a couple of Christ The Redeemer's from Rio, a few Virgin Mary's from the Vatican, Italy, Lourdes or wherever, the Tzar Gun from Moscow, and the Russo-Ottoman war gun from Bulgaria (Or Hungary?), but there are hundreds of these sites, statues, famous guns &etc., from all over the world, and the bulk of the touristy 'toys' from them, are missing from the bulk of collectors' collections!

For instance, I know I'm short of Irish Ladies/Irish Dancers, and Leprechauns, although some of the latter are repurposed gnomes, which I do have in the collection, sans the extra green decoration!

So, not strictly to scale; a new keyring, the previously-seen keyring, un-drilled in the hat, but with a hole in her back (for mounting to an egg-timer or something?), the old styrene one we have seen before and the one believed to be Cherilea (or Charbens)? I think someone was questioning it's attribution the other day, so 'believed to be' is the way for me to go!

 

It's funny, I have my critics, many of them, all waiting to pounce on the slightest error (or even just flat omissions), even as they ignore their own, or each-other's howlers, so I've learnt to be as careful as I can be, while still passing as much as I can on, to you, as accurately and comprehensively as possible!

 

The facts here, are that the figure has a base unlike those of other figure production from either Charbens or Cherilea, and as a commission from a tourist whole-seller in Wales, or serving Welsh retailers, could have been made by any one of several dozen other British figure producers, or several hundred, even thousand plastic injectors, not known for their figures. And - so far - I don't think it's turned-up in any of the reissues from either firms' mould-banks.

As I mentioned only the other day, at a point in around 1998, there were 3 injection-moulders within yards of each-other in the commercial belt between Frimley and Camberley, that they have all gone now, is a moot point, they were there, and they were only the ones I knew of, there may have been more - there are three or four still listed on Google Maps, none being the ones I knew back then, and in the 1950/60's there would have been twice as many.

And with those musings in mind, returning to the 'Hong Kong' not her usual keyring self; these items are used not only as key-rings and egg-timers (why I suspect she has a hole in her back), but also as/for attaching to pincushions, barometers/thermometers, note or calendar holders, key-cups, egg-cups, hooks, knife-racks, cruet sets, anything you can think of as maybe being sellable, to people from elsewhere, looking for a small, travel-friendly keepsake or memento of their trip to your neighbourhood, your attraction!

Now, I also think the vinyl one may have been in Chris Smith's last parcel, but in looking at that folder to ID it, I can't find it, so either I shot the pic's for this post (which has been growing in Picasa for a while) and forgot to include it in the plunder-post shots, or I ended up combining it with the key-ring I picked-up in a mixed lot a while ago, while putting-away Chris's stuff, but in any event Chris has sent some, and he definitely sent the reconstituted slate one we also looked-at here, so many thanks for everything he does for the Blog.

M is for Many Moulded Malleable Mammals!

Part three of Jon's big box brings us to the Mammals, although a bird snuck-in under the radar while I wasn't paying attention, and the rest are definitely from the Zoo/Jungle/Wild zone, farm and domestic will come later!

Big cats, 1 of 3, cheetahs and leopard'ish critters, I like the big cats but there is a tendency to use the same moulding for different cats, or just not pay much attention to the things at all, so while the Britains one is a 54mm leopard, also found in black as a 'panther' (melanistic leopard), the pair in the next size up look more doglike, as does the orange one to the right, he has quite a hyena'ish head/jaw!

There was a bit of a comedy involved in this image, as I shot what I thought was all five Cheetahs, then reshot 'all' six, before finding another one under the dinosaurs! The big, dark, stretching one (lovely pose) is Triple-A (the 'AAA' mark), the others, all generics, for now.

A pair of colour variations of the same toob' animals, and a larger one which is actually a lighter-weight than either of the smaller brethren, being manufactured of some slightly-foamed polyethylene?

 

Big Cats 2 of 2; hunting! They don't often bring down any but old, infirm, or very young, lost giraffe's, who otherwise enjoy a relatively blessed existence. The larger lion is a China-marked newie, the other, a similar sculpt, is an older Hong Kong toy.

The giraffes are three old HK's, probably from different tranches of the Corgi Chipperfield's Circus giraffe carrier, and two larger modern chaps, one clearly marked KS in a similar oval to Toy Major, the other a generic for now.

 

Three generics here, and the really big one is a Toy Major, probably from a pick-box/counter-display. And when I say 'Generic', the hope is a fair quantity of them will be attributed in the near-to-medium-future?

 

Smallies; seem to match each other with plastic type, sculpting, size, China-mark etc . . . and probably came together in a toob or small-tub, but sometimes the small ones are chucked into tub-sets with larger animals to make-weight, or add to the item count

 

Big Cats 3 of 3; The big orange beast at the back is a Toy Major animal, marked Cheetah! The cub to the right is another AAA, while the flocked guy to the left is just lovely, but of unknown origin, with no dinks or worn-patches, he really is sweet!

 

Three generic elephants, one of which was marked ELEPHANTCHINA and for a moment, just a moment, I wondered if I'd left it out of the prehistoric animals post! And, all three newish sculpts.

 

Thanks again to Mr Attwood for sending us these, they make a nice change from 'armymen', Wild West or space/fantasy, especially as we head into the Christmas season - Fleet had its night market tonight, nothing on the council or Fleet BID Faceplant pages . . . of course!

ITMA is for It's That Man Again!

The hype has been growing for a week or two now, with the BBC's Radio4 and World Service both covering a certain new movie more than once in the last few days, it's all about some Corsican chap 'Blownapart', from the Wellingtonian period, who did something notable, or infamous? And the talkie-format, moving-picture presentation opens worldwide, today!

He's been modelled a few times, indeed we've seen him here before, so often, he has his own Tag (yeap, it hurt!). And here we have a large fairing in the centre, flanked by two substantial home-painted model soldiers on plinths, in the 80mm bracket.

 

Then the smaller front row, around 54/60mm scale and from the left . . . 'Metallion' of the younger artilleryman, two French-made Jim, a JSB from Belgium, Hong Kong's Blue Box (courtesy of Chris Smith's forthcoming donation-plunder posts), another French plastic (Acedo maybe, or Cofalu/x, Guillbert/Clairet, someone like that?) and a faux-antiqued tourist piece in slush-cast base-metal.

 

******      ******      ***      ******      ******

 

On the subject of the title, for foreign readers; ITMA was the moral-boosting comedy sketch-show on BBC Radio from 1939-49. We lived, for a while, next-door to Clarence Wright, who had retired to Alderney, he played several of the well known characters, among whom were the Commercial Traveller and the Man from the Ministry, and I had the pleasure of chatting to him on several occasions, when he would tell the most irascible stories, which I couldn't possibly repeat here, even if I could recall them, but I remember him as a thoroughly nice man.

W is for Water World

The next part of Jon Attwood's donation parcel to be looked at is the sea, pond or river life, and lots of interesting items were hiding among the dinosaurs, to be uncovered and shared here.

Bottom feeders, and the nice kind which aren't bidding against you on feebleBay to turn a quick profit on the only two things in the lot worth the not quite as much as they will reappear for, a few days later, on a BIN!

The larger lobster is marked for Shing Hing, and the two bigger starfish (brittle-stars) are maked BCLA 1997, which may mean something to someone (there could be a connection with the US 'jobber' Imperial?), the rest are simple 'China' marks.

Sharks, the two yellows are from one maker, the other pair from another, with a simple 'Shark China' on the yellows' (colour variants of the same sculpt) and only a China on the other two.

 

Mostly unmarked or carrying simple China-marks, the reef and flat-fish, I think the unmarked may have "Hong Kong" age, while the others are a little newer.

 

The cetacean sample has big whales (they're not a country Donald!), modelled small! Dolphins and probably a porpoise (I'm not sure if I know the difference - like kangaroos and wallabies; does it just come down to size and blood-tests?!) and a killer whale, off to Gibraltar to sink a yacht!

 

The fur-seal pup, is a two-part, possibly Iwako type eraser, but the polymer's a bit too hard, and the grey pup in a larger scale is in a dense 'polystone', and again the small sample ticks all the boxes, with seals, sea-lions and a walrus!

 

A frog of more decorative/ornamental origin, and two turtles and a tortoise who dragged some lizards to the party! For terrapins, see kangaroo/porpoise note above!

Again I thank Jon for sending them to the Blog, and we will have final reckonings when all this stuff is reunited, soon I hope, and we can start tying all the odds into sets, and attributing them to brands, lines or generic rack-toy titles!