W is for Wild Wild White Tower West!

At the last London Show, just before Christmas (next show now is Sandown on 22nd Feb.), I caught up with old friend Matt Their, who - like many of us - is going through life's ring of fire at the moment, but he retains his sanity by continuing to add to his ranges, and the Wild West were centre-stage that Saturday, so below is a partial catalogue of the Wild West highlights, real catalogues and the range can be purchased from the usual site;

 

https://whitetowerminiatures.co.uk/

 

"Ah Soh! Grasshopper!"

Brilliant!

"They were in a big tin saucer, which was this wide! Hic!"

 

 

 

The buildings are a partnership/scale-up with 28mm role-playing stuff from somewhere else, if I recall the conversation correctly, and are built in sections so you can place figures inside their spacious interiors. They are manufactured in one of the new lightweight foams, but dense enough to hold shape and detail like harder polymers.

 

 

 

Pancho Villa's firing line!

Elements of the Bounty Hunter line

 Native leadership!

Trappers and 'Backwoodsmen'.

The growing 'Saloon' line.

If I had the money, if I had the space, if I had the time . . . but, you know me and my lack of knowledge on new production solid metal (Gareth (Morgan Miniatures) has some new Highwaymen - see Blog link list, on left of page), however, Matt can answer any questions you may have.

D is for Dinky Dan Dare Derringer!

Nothing to do with Dan Dare actually, beyond my looking for an alliterative title! I picked this little sweetie up at the Autumn Sandown Park show, more because of the maker than the subject, the last thing I need is to start collecting ray-guns, but this comes into the category of novelty, both by way of its diminutive size and the fact it's a water-pistol!

 

It's very small, and the sort of thing we might have got in a Christmas stocking back in the day, if not this actual one? Also, it's quite robust in construction, still works with no cracks or leaks, and may have been retailed by Poplar well into the late 1970's, although I don't believe Springwwell Mouldings had a stab, but they may have?

M is for More - Palitoy and Renwal's Plastic 'Planes

Not really a follow-up as it's been a while now since we last mentioned the Palitoy 'planes, and the Renwal are new to the blog, but I picked these up in one of the autumn shows, and there are a few things to unpack, so a T is for Two . . . maybe!

I actually picked up a bagful of the Palitoy aircraft for next to nothing, which was nice, these bargains happen from time to time, and we all have them occasionally, so not an obvious or deliberate brag, but I didn't know what I'd really got until I'd got them back to Adrian's table, and looked at them properly.

We have looked at the Spitfire[s] before here, and the musing on that occasion, are upset by this pair where the supposed earlier, inaccurate one is here found in the supposed later, stable polystyrene, while the opposite is true of the other moulding, with an early marbled/flecked example of the better quality model, which logic dictates must have come later.

So some new points or musings from yours truly, first, in conversation with several other collectors at the show, we mused that (given the inaccuracy and pre-war nature of several of the other aircraft in the range) there could be the lines of a French Dewoitine D.520, albeit without the long sharks-nose of the original, and someone has started to add French roundels to this one in paint.

Now I'm not saying it ever was a Dewoitine, but I have learned that among the specific war work of Palitoy's Coalville works was Spitfire landing gear, and perspex components for the aeroplane industry, and there remains the possibility that it might have been renamed at the last minute, due to perceived failure by the French in 1940, or just the need for a Spitfire.

But the fact that the two now seem to have run alongside each-other, and the inaccuracies to both against real Spitfires, which they (Palitoy) would have been very familiar with, might suggest they were originally two different planes - maybe one was meant to be a Hurricane and got the wrong marking-stamps, first - and that my previous assertions of the age of these being definitely wartime and with possibly some pre-war production, seems more solid now.

The Wellington; the early ones might be manufactured from what Palitoy (then British Cascelloid, or even Pallet Toys as they may still have been known) called cascelloid, which was a rather flammable celluloid polymer, but that tended to be processed into product as/from a sheet material.

 

In 1931 they were purchased by British Xylonite (another branded celluloid), and in 1939, merged into Bakelite Xylonite Ltd. (BXL), who's Union Carbide partner in the 'States may have something to do with the earlier unstable plastic these aircraft are found in, some kind of Bakelite by-product?

 

My own feeling is that they are an early, unstable form of polystyrene, looking to copy the product being made by IG Farben in Germany from - also - 1931, which had been worked on, fitfully, since the 1870's.

 

Lockheed 'Hudson' bomber-reconnaissance aircraft and air-taxi; While the 'early' models tend to have the red/pink wheels and propellers, and the late (obviously polystyrene) ones black accessories, the fact is I now have all four combinations in the collection with the later Spitfire first seen here in a stable blue, having the red attachments.

 

This actually only reinforces my thoughts on wartime production, as while some will tell you there was no toy production in the war, that's not strictly the case, as with the tariffs we're all currently being threatened with by that lieing, criminal, orange loon, exceptions can always be sought in these matters, with exemption licences being issued on a case by case basis.

 

As a company engaged in 'war work' and a group experimenting with plastics on both sides of the pond, the idea that those experiments could be undertaken in small runs of cheap playthings makes perfect sense, and once they started playing with perspex components for real aircraft and gas-masks/respirators, the small transparencies on the Wellingtons also makes sense, and also ties them to wartime production. The toys helping boost morale while promoting popular aeroplane types, of the time.

I think these Renwal were either the same seller, or the same bag, I can't remember now, but new to me and ready for action as 'Dimestore' style ready-made's, one (wing-tip tanks) marked Navy Plane, the other Army Plane, I guess there's a third out there somewhere - 'Air Force Plane'?

 

The army 'plane is a generic design, although there are recognisable elements of Sabre, but not that pointed nose! The other is a better rendition of US Navy Grumman F9F Panther, capturing the rear-wing line quite well.

 

A comparison shot, between the two lines, scale per se doesn't come into it, but they're both the same size, which, with their simple construction, would put them in the same pocket-money category!

Q is for Quickie!

I've literally just found this - below shot - looking for something else to post quickly before I go to work, and as it's 12th night/the last day of Christmas, today, I'd better post it!

 

These were part of a donation from Peter Evans back in the late summer, and I've mentioned that several donations and a couple of toy fair lots have rather been forgotten or subsumed into the general folders, several of which were from or involved Peter, so many thanks to him, but here's one of the lost images, with a couple of other Picasa-clearers!

 

Back to cake decorations! The footballer is a hard polystyrene Hong Kong copy of the earlier, larger Gemodels sculpt, the polar-explorer next to him come from an old Revell (or Monogram?) aeroplane model kit of a ski-plane, or so I thought, possibly the old Ford Trimotor? However, a quick Google says no, and neither does he seem to be from the Airfix one, so answers on a postcard please! Home-painted, but in a nicely commercial style, I feel.

 

Micky is one of the marked 'Culpitt' figures (I think, I can't honestly remember), very similar to the Marx/Combex, Bully and Comics Spain pieces, among others, there seem to have been quite a few of them, if it is Culpitt, it's the second seen here, but I may have more, and it's something we can return to another day.

 

Below left is probably a Hong Kong Santa, and he looks like he's meant to be holding a sleigh/sledge's handles? While the other two have been covered here before, the Gemodels stag and much later festival/Culpitt plug-together.

These are definitely Culpitt marked, and it was the Goofy we saw last time, shot taken from the Culpitt cake decorating book, which you won't be surprised to hear was called the Culpitt Book of Cake Decoration! And which doubled-up as a catalogue.

Last time I mentioned it, someone else rushed out to find a copy (or cover shot!) so he could mention it too, which was sweet "sincerest form of flattery" and all that, but actually there are two versions, presumably the 'ghostwriter' employed to provide the blurb, issued her own version!

 

Interestingly, there are a couple of page-differences and blurb-variances in the opening and closing sections, but otherwise it's the same tome, with different covers - both now in the library, for completion!

N is for Not Christmas Odds & Sods!

These were sort of pencilled-in for the Christmas season, but aren't really Christmas stuff, with the possible exception of the Carol Singers, however it seems easier to post them now as civilian stuff (despite the connection some of them have with Nazi Germany!), over the festive season, than shove them down in Picasa's 1968 with the other eight folders of pending Christmas stuff, or elsewhere, or just leave them choking-up 2025 in the short queue, before the year's even properly started!

 

Vaguely nutcracker'y, but not really; no bushy beards, proper muskets, lack of overemphasized uniform elements, but they do have the huge epaulettes, this would appear to be a belt-buckle of some kind.

 

But it doesn't seem to have the robustness to survive on my trousers, where I've broken heavy die-cast buckles over the years, yet seems a little too whimsical to be part of a genuine military panoply, not even the historically-dressed 'old guard' many British regiments still have a few of, for ceremonials or KAPE - Keep the Army in the Public Eye.

 

So, my guess is some sort of costume jewellery or actual theatrical costume?  The clasp clearly hooks to a bar or rod similar to the belt loop, and the whole has been cast from three repeats of a single figure moulding, with the joins between them barely hidden, possibly using the lost-wax method - I'd add that the paint's probably been added by the/a later, hobbyist owner.

And while it looks brass, it doesn't really weight 'brass', so it may be a brass-coloured (alloy) base metal type material with brass clasp and copper or copper-bronze wire loop, which could be brazed, but are more-likely soft-soldered, suggesting it wasn't meant/designed to take any great strain, or long-term work-load . . . any ideas greatly appreciated?

These are a mystery also, they are composition, rather than bisque, and painted in a similar style to some of the Zang 30-40mm's we've seen here before, but with more effort on the faces. You can see from the damaged blue figure that the composite material is similar to Zang's too, however they came with some WHW figures (next section below) and may be Winterhilfswerk?

 

If they are WHW I'd love to know the set, if not, festive cake decorations from Zang are a possibility, or someone like them, of 17/18th century garbed carol singers or street musicians seems to be as likely? Equally, some French/Low Countries composition uses that plaster/pumice base? A real question mark?

While these ARE Winterhilfswerk, nine of a ten-set of Grimm's fairy-tale characters, with - from the left - Snow White and five dwarves, a lovely Puss-in-boots, a frog-kissing princess, a goose-girl, a generic witch, a very small 'giant' or hunter, a girl with blue birds (I remember some story about the bluetits sewing a dress or something?), whatever the Grimm version of Tom the piper's son is called (Tomas?) and Red Riding Hood on the right.

The box is probably not original, but I will keep them in it, it's a nice little fake snake-skin embossed paper from the 1940/50's (probably a gift box, from a watch or pen), and will keep them together until they inevitably have to be handed on, one day.

 

They are the typical bisque of such sets, looking quite like French fèves (which are traditionally hidden in tarts at this time of year), with a firing hole, that doubled as a receptor for the chemical fixer/glue blob we've seen on these before, for when badge-pins are added (two issues?), and the tenth turned up hiding under the faux-wool when I put them away - Sleeping Beauty, still holding her bobbin of spun thread!

Also, please note Dwarves six and seven are moulded on the rear of Snow White, albeit undecorated! And I don't know the set's issuer or issue date/s.

 

Finally came this witch-like, rather troglodyte, femme-sinister, who you can see from the chip at the baseline, is in a red terracotta, again reminiscent of other WHW sets/subjects, but would appear to be a beer (or Bier!) promotional, the monogram is not clear, but could be HB (Herforder Bier?) or RB, and whatever that answer, she may well be contemporary with the other pieces above, excluding the brass number!

 

Clearly she's holding the moniker'ed Stein, but what is in the crook of the other arm? A swaddled baby, some kind of brötchen or pretzel, or a sheaf of brewer's barley?

 

You can see she's barely 30mm to the more standard 40-mil of the other two, and more questions than answers with all four here, once I'd sat down and typed the blurb! So any help with these, sets, dates, issuers, origins, gratefully received!

L is for Let's Have Some More!

A Bit of a follow-up to the previous posts, but once you've got the Phidal's and a few Kinder or other figures on a given theme, they rapidly get their own 'zone' and become a side-collection, so I guess that's what we're looking at here - the bulking-out of two side collections!

 

Encanto again, from Jakks Pacific, I think we may have seen these in a B&M shelfie post sometime over the last 12/18-months, but clearly I weakened when they reappeared in TKMaxx for a pound-twenty a figure! They look like the stampers (coming to the Blog soon) which are everywhere at the moment, but are just stand-alone figurines with very thick bases, for little fingers to manipulate, and weight against fluffy surfaces so they stand up, I suspect!

While I think these, The Nightmare Before Christmas figures, were from B&M? We've been looking at these on and off for several years now, Jada's line of Nano Metalfigs, with various franchises already seen here, I though what is probably a seasonal-special 'whole' set was worth grabbing at the time.

 

I know I've said it before, but it's worth saying again, or I wouldn't say it! I really love these, not because I used to be a small-scale collector, but because the metallic paint is so . . . . thick, deep, lush? I dunno', it's like you can dive into the finish; you won't understand until you've handled a few, but they are very different to anything else I can think of, and among that rarefied class of hard-metal figure which includes the Monogram WWII/Vietnam sets and the equally uncommon Kenner Star Wars die-casts.

N is for The Nightmare Before Christmas

Mentioned a couple of times in recent weeks this particular Phidal Busy Book is more up our street, being the movie-related set of Tim Burton's mad creations from the film I still haven't seen, but A) keep meaning to and B) feel I have, because of the amount of merchandise and/or clips I've seen over the 32 years, since it hit the theatres!

Cover; this was actually in a supermarket, as part of the Christmas stock/promotion, with the kids' annuals in a card display stand, between isles, Sainsbury's, I think? And must be a new title in the range. Scale/size is a bit meaningless with this one, but they are fun figures nevertheless.

 

The properly bad guys - Oogie Boogie, the rambling bag of bugs! Lock (a poorly disguised Loki doppelgänger), Shock and Barrel (geddit - lock stock & barrel), Oogie's trick-or-treating sidekicks.

 

 

The barely good guys - Zero the dog, Jack Skellington (American spelling!) and his love interest Sally the witch, a creation of Dr. Finkelstein's - another poorly disguised doppelgänger; for Dr. Frankinstien!

 

The rest - the aforementioned and evil, Dr. Finkelstein, a rather dodgy Santa Clause, known to the locals of Halloween Town as 'Sandy Claws' and the two-faced Mayor. I forgot to shoot them from the rear, and that's your Nightmare Before Christmas characters from Phidal!

 

A year ago this wasn't in the Tag list, now it's got three Tags and about five mentions, so there's a definite attempt to re-boost it somewhere, for some [commercial] reason - expect a sequel, a streaming thing or a director's-cut!

E is for Encanto

This is another 'we buy this shit so you don't have to' piece, and I knew straight away what it was, but it was pennies in TKMaxx, so I bought it to prove the point.

 

Like those arch-shaped 'Mini Busy Book' ones a couple of years ago, this 'Tattle Tale' is barely half the contents of the original Busy Book set, but repackaged as a smaller effort, with an even more juvenile 'early reader' board-book. Three of the principal characters and a supporting one.

 

I've tried to find the other figures in similar books, more with the earlier arched ones, and it seems there were probably two tools per original set, and only the one is used on these re-hashes, so you're never going to track down all the figures with these smaller sets, and over time, the other 4/8 items from the original sets will become less common.

W is for World of Horses

I thought it must be about ten years since Phidal first featured here as an unknown, but a quick look at the Tag list reveals it was 2018, so, seven years to the month, in that time I've had cause to use the Tag some 44 times, and they have featured as 'likely'/'possibly' in many donation and show report posts. Over those years, I would say that A) we've managed to track down and cover most of the sets worth commenting on, and a few which aren't!

 

While I think it's also fair to say, that while the odd new set does still come out, they have lost momentum on the Busy Books specifically, and moved the concentrative efforts of their core product to other areas, but I've found a few recently, which we're going to look at today, a couple briefly and one in more depth.

These are pretty much 54mm compatible, and apart from being great for 'farm kids' where it's probably always been a bigger 'hobby' or childhood theme - our farming cousins hardly had a toy soldier between them, but their Britains farm, with a smattering of old hollow-cast and the odd bit of Corgi/Dinky, inhabited a huge wooden farmyard in one of the sheds - they will also prove useful for modellers/figure painters looking for breed-specific mounts.

Going on the accompanying book, those breeds are (clockwise from the top left), I think; Pinto, Shire (white, in the reflection, and possibly the poorest sculpt?), Percheron, Appaloosa, Mustang, Icelandic, Shetland (or Shetland/Icelandic; whoever has the smaller one!), Thoroughbred, Arabian, Friesian? You can see it's one of the newer ten-figure/item sets. They went straight to storage, so we'll look at them again in a future horse post/page I'm sure.

L is for Loose Ends

The last of the Christmas figurals, and it'll be back to more normal output, if equally occasional at the moment, but that's life! A mixed bunch and some of them from last year . . . 

 

Hobbycraft were clearly selling the end of the line we've seen over the last year or two, as they only had a few, back in November, and once they were gone, they weren't replaced, not even with a similar line? I managed to grab this deer family, as one day, a cake-decoration deer page is on the cards; there are loads and loads of them! Poured resin and about 40mm?

 

I also picked up this snowman, which reminded me that while we looked at the line two or three years ago, last year's post went to archive when I ran out of time, inclination or whatever else contributed to quite a lot going off to the long queue. It meant I could get this year's out as last year's is still in his [net] bag, along with the Santa' in a poly' bag.

 

The Mushrooms were from The Works, a bit of fun for a possible future project (fantasy secenry), and this year I saw them or similar assortments in several places including The Range and possibly either B&M or Home Bargains?

Can't remember where I saw this, but I think it might have been the aforementioned Home Bargains, along with The Nightmare Before Christmas, I saw a lot of Grinch 'Merch' as it's called these days - by a dying civilisation which insists on abbreviating everything - JLO, LOL!

 

I mentioned that I thought there might be a sequel to Nightmare in the offing when I started to see that everywhere, back in, sort of, Oct./Nov., but I think with both, it's just the inexorable commercialisation of Christmas, particularly by the toy and home-furnishing industries off the back of Holywood? But it was a very inexpensive white-button walker, which is a slowly-growing side-collection, in main-part thanks to robots and Halloween!

 

I think we did look at the Malteezer deer last year, this year's edibles included this Santa Clause from Marks & Spencer, which was illustrated as being like an Aero inside, but was actually the more solid and disappointing texture of a Wispa - which I've hated from the day they were launched!

I forgot to properly check out the edible cake decorations, this year, but managed to find this in Sainsbury's a day or two before the big day, we looked at all the ranges/brands a year or two ago, but this was a new colourway of one of the Santa's from Cake Decor.

 

While I think this lead flat is similar to the set we looked at a while ago, this one possibly coming from Chris or Adrain last year sometime (2023), and also held over, I brought it forward with the Hobbycraft images! I think a similar sculpt can be seen at the back of the upper set's image in this post, which, it turned-out, are Hafer, but this one has a different base and will be from another set, how many were there!

 

Finally, while the above are mostly in some sort of chronological order of when they acme in or were shot, (or make narrative sense to me!), this was an early purchase which them hung around, unshot, and uneaten until the other night, when I managed both! Hence, the fogging of the chocolate, I think?

A departure for Kinder I think, I don't remember seeing them before, but they may be a year or two old as a concept, the prizes are meant to be tree-hangers, and obviously it's a Christmas-specific thing, being a merry festive snowman!

A is for Advent Calendar

Another occasional regular at this time of year! B&M was the only place I found doing a cheapie generic, with the sort of non-licenced or product-placed chocolates I consider traditional, although they were an import from the continent in the mid-1970's, quite exotic to us kids, back at the time!

 

My own 'hopes' for the coming year are best not divulged right now, although you may get to read them in the next few days, but, yeah, I wish you all the best for what promises to be one of the most interesting years of my entire life, probably the most entertaining too, but happiness may be in short supply for most!

O is for One for Fun

I was going to add these to the end of the Christmas cracker post the other day, but I realised they are very different really, being not small monochrome blobs, but a more sophisticated product altogether! I know! But they can go here, in their own little eraser post!

 

I bought these in a supermarket but can't remember which (Tesco or Morrisons I think, Home Bargains as a maybe?), however it should be available elsewhere or online, as it's an HGL product  from One for Fun, who are the over-brand now, holding Ozzbozz and Tobar in the same stable.

It was less than three quid I think, and for that you get quite a lot, with three plug-together Iwaco knock-offs, two flowers (tulip and rose) and a stegosaurus, three other monobloc dinosaurs which we may have seen before from The Works, three 'flat' sports balls and two space flats, an astronaut and a rocket, all five are polychrome extrusion slices, and another five; random items of over-moulded, miniature domestic household goods/food items. So quite a mix, almost a 'starter pack' for someone new to erasers. Bargain!