K is for Kennedy Space Centre - Helicopter

I think it's fair to say this helicopter is a bit fictional, looking more like a deformed Sikorsky H-19 Chickasaw from the 1950's, rather than the famous Sikorsky SH-3D Sea King '66' of the Apollo programme, but then this set probably predates the Apollo missions by a year - my cursory investigations suggest these sets date from 1968, the set was renamed the Johnny Apollo Moon Launch in 1970?

 

In the simple style of a dime-store 'readymade' but in a soft, polyethylene plastic, like the T.Cohn/Airfix vehicles in the shops at the same time, rather than the more frangible polystyrene of the true 'dimestores'.

 

The hook and string are missing, usually a sturdy length of button-thread, I'll have to hope one turns up on a damaged model, going cheap! There was only one helicopter in the set, one of the few pieces not duplicated.

 

The bulges seem to be an attempt at the flotation wheel-housings of the Sea King, but placed up on the top of the helicopter? It's a 'space helicopter' isn't it? For a space station! It's certainly in 'space toy' metallic blue plastic!

K is for Kennedy Space Centre - Case

I picked this up in September, and while it's not complete, there's enough for a few posts, and I guess you start with the biscuit tin! The Marx 50mm figures; Carry All Action Cape Kennedy Play Set, of which there are several versions (this is 4625), and I wouldn't pretend to be an expert on any of them!

 

I'm guessing from the full colour, photo-artwork that it was a later set, and if the entire contents are in the picture, then I seem to have got most of the contents of two sets, less one or two important bits, which I'll mention as we go through them, but I also got an extra piece?

 

One item which was missing from the box, was the return-module, but we saw one here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/08/c-is-for-constellation-of-capsules.html

 

And, it's the correct red-hot steel colour, so that box is ticked!

 

 It's basically a colourful kid's briefcase!

 

I suspect this is a highlight, an undamaged vacform of the NASA 'Guided Missile Centre' offices, riveted into one end of the case. Assuming they can get damaged with age and play wear, but it's not like these sets are particularly rare, there were several on feeBay, when I was trying to work out my contents.

 

The two hinged sections which allow for the closing of the case are printed-up as double wire-gates, and connected with a roadway, which makes-up the spine of the case. I need to re-wire one of the hinges, as the piece is loose, and will need a new wire-rod, run down the hinge-loops.

 

The whole base, with plenty of room for the activities of the contents!

 

Ed's is complete!

https://toyconnect.blogspot.com/2012/06/marx-4625-action-cape-kennedy-carry-all.html

1 is for 1st Rack Toy of the New Year!

Just a quickie, picked this up on my rounds the other day, it's BJ Toys again, and a new one on me, sadly the four main figures are a disappointment, but I have been noticing more and more Paint Your Own sets, a trend spotted here a few years ago, with the cheapo'sets in The Works one Christmas, and which have since featured several times a year!

 

And, of course, the real interest here is not the handful of 45mm Matchbox GI copies, but the four 90mm Chinese Army figures, original sculpts, although, sadly hollowed-out behind, so after painting - for display only!

 

But they are dressed as they would have been through the war with Japan (second Sino-Japanese War) and the Civil Wars, in total from 1927-49, and which ultimately brought the Communists to power. A bit different, and hopefully, a sign of interesting things to come, from the Toymen of the Far East?

Y is for You'll Have to Google it!

Without a shadow of a doubt, the weirdest thing Brian Berke sent the Blog in his image packages last year was the following three items, which we'll look at before I explain, as once you've looked at them, you'll realise an explanation is the least you can expect!

 

 

Yes, those are people with domestic appliances for heads! They are the bad-guys. Yes, there are heads living in lavatories! They are the good guys! I think? And they don't live in the bowls, they are toilets - you'll have to Google it! In a nutshell, a race of the eponymous Skibidi Toilet people are engaged in a war, with Grand Theft Auto styling, against a race of appliance-headed people - the Multiverse!

 

This is the most extraordinary phenomena, for several reasons, firstly Skibidi Toilet, is a purely amateur, one-man, AI-assisted, CGI-generated cartoon series, made by one YouTube content creator from Georgia (the country) on his own PC, you'll have to Google it! Second, it's entirely an online, 'Gen-Alpha' fan-driven phenomena, which has exploded in a singular section of youth society.

 

But, thirdly, as far as I can tell (you'll have to google it), the guy (Alexey Gerasimov) responsible has only produced the material on YouTube, which suggests that these toys (you'll have to google them) are entirely unlicensed, hence the lack of branding beyond the title-graphics, nicked from YouTube.

 

And your Googling will rapidly reveal tons of these toys on Amazon, evilBay and Alibaba, among other platforms, so a factory, almost certainly in China is making an absolute fortune out of one guy's weird Gen-Alpha flex on YouTube . . . You'll have to Google it, but the whole Skibidi Toilet story is amazing, these Gen-Alpha's will not fight in Trump's, Netanyahu's or Putin's coming wars, they are as alien to us, as we are to the Romans.

 

You can see the figures are toy-soldier'y, in not being articulated 'action figures' and my own Googling suggests many of them have been issued, and I thank Brian for shooting them on his Italian holiday, and sending them to the Blog, where I've had a crash-course in what's really happening out there! Weird, but you'll have to Google it!

 

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

 

I've just Googled them again, and in a few months, the picture has changed greatly, with many more figural products, including deforms, action figures and larger statuettes, when Brian sent the images (last June), these (roughly 60-mil I think) were pretty-much all there were, but many of them. Maybe some of the products are now licensed from the originator?

T is for Two - Keycraft Novelties

While I was up at the Spring Gift Fair in Birmingham last week, I had a very useful chat with a rep' from Keycraft (among others), and while there are show reports to come, he actually gave me a couple of samples, both of which were figural and fun, so here they are, with a Brucey Bonus for a three count!

 

The first thing was this bendy-toy, astronaut, too cool for moon-shot flight school! To be honest, because NASA's spacemen have what equates to a fat-suit, by the time you've modelled it accurately, there is too much rubber compressing to allow the wires to move far, so he's probably the least bendy of all the bendy toys we've seen here, poses rather limited to Dr. Frankenstein's Monster in a flight-suit, but he's still fun!

 

He has the same twin air holes at various points in the back, as have all bendy toys since the year dot . . . Maybe it's to do with how they keep the wires spaced correctly, in the mould, for the surrounding substrate to be equally distributed, with the 'maquette' wires in the dead-centre of the cross-sections, if you know what I mean?

 

Well, well, well, really? Is he just using me for ideas now? That's tragic!

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-world-of-bendables-space-alien.html

 

The Keycraft chap also gave me this fun item, and as you can see, because both the cheese and the mice are made of stretchy silicone, you can stuff the meeces in one hole, and pull them out of another! This will provide hours of entertainment for little people of a certain age, or even excitable Aspergics of an embarrassing age!

 

I then found this, unlabelled, in the new toy superstore in Basingrad (Toytown), and a quick google suggested it may also be Keycraft, however the same Google results further suggest an outfit called The Senmsory Place issues them with grey, white or dun-brown mice, while Keycraft's issue are typically only the grey one, so this may be a Sensory Place one?

 

The purchase code, the only clue I have was KS, which could be Keycraft-something, or have a completely different meaning! You can see, however, it's almost the same size as the holey one, and there's another, similar novelty, in forthcoming posts!

 

I've since - this week - seen both the bendy astronaut and the holy mice for sale in Redfields, Fleet, so very-much out there now!

T is for Two - Peterkin

When we looked at the Peterkin's I both purchased and shelfied in a garden centre near Borden, back in the autumn, I mused that there must be cats, if - as there were - they had a set of dogs, and sure enough, in another garden centre I found the 'missing' cats, and a set of birds, so grabbed both!

 

Cats on the left, birds on the right!

 

The birds can stay in their bag, they look OK and it's reminded me I should pop-up to Birdworld and see what they've got in their gift shop, it must be 50-plus years since I was last there! 

 

The cats are a bit disappointing to be fair, a bit lacklustre, particularly the tabby-cats, although half an effort has gone into the grey, but the two gingers are very poor, while I'm not sure what species the one in the top left corner is supposed to be, but, still, cats is cats!, and under the poor decoration (the Calico is the best, I think), they are characterful sculpts!

T is for Two - Cosmic Correctors!

 Or: P is for Poor-old Pluto!

 

Picked these two up on Wednesday of this week, so both are fresh in the shops, and shops I regularly check for such stuff, to boot!

 

The second find is on the left, the Legami set of Solar System erasers, while about an hour earlier I'd grabbed the Scribble Pop Shop set in Home Bargains (the TKMaxx vehicle). Google's AI answer-bot tells us "Legami was founded in 2003 and has their headquarters in Bergamo, Northern Italy. They started by selling book straps to tie your books together for easier carrying, and now they have more than 4000 products across all sorts of stationery types.", which makes more sense than they're having appeared out of nowhere, as they otherwise seem to have - presence at both recent product fairs, and more items in the queue, from a garden centre!

 

Obviously, it was the Iwako-style mini-rocket ships which attracted me, not the . . . 

. . . astronaught in a nappy (diaper)! The Scribble Pop Shop; an in-house branding, also responsible for a pencil case and colouring set in the same space theme, is presumably ('obviously' once you know the history/timings) aimed at countering the Legami set, or riding its boot straps (book straps!). And they seem to have got their generic planet from whoever made Legami's Saturn? The Legami set was in Ryman's, but they are also in garden centres, venue gift-shops and Claire's I think? Poor old Pluto!

H is for How They Come In - Recent Charity Lot

Continuing in the same vein as the Chris Smith posts, there will be a bunch of posts with stuff from Peter Evans shortly, interspersed with Toy Fair/Spring Gift Fair stuff, but we'll have a bit a change first, and before that change, I'll throw a few other bits up; this was a Charity Shop purchase a couple of few weeks ago.

 

Three bags, rabbits, dinosaurs and other animals!

 

We saw these before, the Ubisoft Rayman Raving Rabbids, or 'Rabid Rabbits'! Each has a costume or theme, they are blind-bag collectables, and the best way to get a sample is like this as I bet they're not cheap out there in retail-land! They are more fun that those Kid Robot Dunny Bunnys or Medicom's dead Bearbricks, but still look quite unsettling with their lack of rabbit nose, and bulgy-eyes!

 

I believe they are connected to a video game for the Nintendo Wii, and there seem to be hundreds of them! I thought the Rabbid in a rabbit onesie, with a toy rabbit in the pocket, was quite the existential conundrum, in the thought-provoking department, and judging by the look on his face, so does he!

 

Skeletal dinosaur bits, the two Stegosauruses, are so similar, one has to be a piracy of the other, but subtle differences and a more obviously bent tail, suggest they are not from the same house? The Dimetrodon is disappointingly Spinosaur-like!

 

A mixed lot, hard to say anything about something you know nothing about, one or two of them may be from the same set, and some are better quality than the others, but until they are sorted thought the rest in the stash, they won't make much sense like this. The Tyrannosaur is probably the nicest here, with the salmon-pink stretchy, possibly by Henbrandt?

 

I think the figure may be Kinder, modern and missing something? Likewise, the purple alien thing? The Panda too, looks like the recent/current ranges and lines of natural-history related sets from Kinder.

 

The sucker snow-bear will go in the novelty sucker zone, and the big blue chap is an unmarked soft silicon stretchy, knocking off the Panosh/Novalinea types, probably from a 1990's Lucky Bag or capsule? And two snakes for the snake bag, you always keep them in a bag, so you can firmly knot the top, or they get out!

 

I think we saw a large Amazon/Ali Baba set with two colours of the same octopus, so I should be able to attribute these to some sort of branding at some point, they came with the turtle which may or may not be from the same set?

 

Three (?) kittens and lots of puppies, I think most of these may be the ones which get given away with kids comics/magazines, I've seen loads but not purchased any as they are a bit off the Blog's beaten track, and were bound to come-in, in the end, in lots like this, but I suppose I should look out for them to get a title? Or even try to get the issuer's ID, off the card, but they tend to be quite firmly attached to the publications!

P is for Prehistoric Odds & Sods

That's enough dinosaurs for a while (there's more in the queue!), finishing off with a few which have come in recently worthy of a mention, and a quick follow-up on a recent post, so, in the order in which they were shot, which is pretty-much the order then came in . . .

 

These two came in with a mixed lot, possibly a Charity shop lot, several got subsumed into the whole without dedicated posts, while others only got the highlights shot - like these two? A couple of hatching dinosaurs, presumably from a larger diorama or vignette, painting is quite crude so maybe one of the larger generic window boxes you see in TKMaxx, B&M or Home Bargains?

 

I'd been looking for these, to compare with the other two sets when I Blogged them a while ago

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2024/12/p-is-for-prehistoric-party-packs.html

 

I think we have seen them, or a similar set before, and with the other two now buried in the storage unit, it's a comparison for another day, but there are four of these mini-monoblock party-favour sets to compare, in total I think, maybe five, and these are the pooest, being knackered multi-generational piracies of old US sculpts from the 1950/60's?

 

Shelfied in B&M the other day, I thought the painting was quite good on the six animal models, and with the seeable models not matching the artwork, worth shooting against future ID'ing of loose samples when they come in!

 

While I hope one day to do lots of ID pages, as I've mentioned before, firefighters, AWI/Marlborough, cats, whatever, there are so many dinosaurs, it will be difficult to get them all on one page, so I fear the 'Dinosaur' Tag, here, well always be a fall-back!

 

I got a third Depesche pencil-top to add to the two we saw the other day;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2025/02/d-is-for-deinos-sauros.html

 

Only, once I'd got it home I wondered if we've actually seen it before, and that was why I didn't get it when I got the other two, so I may have two of them now, but that might encourage me to force one off the pencil and see if it will stand-up!

P is for Polymer Plunder Package - Everything Else!

Sadly, all good things come to an end, and this is what didn't end-up in the other folders for whatever reason! Mostly because they were mixed shots, although a fair bit of the TV/Movie stuff ended up here rather than in the sci-fi post, but, well, it's another post!

 

A Phidal dome-headed 'Mysterio' (one of the things I hate about Marvel/DC is that many of the heroes and villains are named by five-year-olds, like 1950's cleaning products, shine'o, cleanrite, rinsit, floorbrite!), a pair of Fortnite figures, the one on the left is a stamper, the one on the right might be from a key-ring, hard to tell.

 

The Archer is The Archer/Clinton Barton/Hawkeye from Marvel? The other three still have question marks, Mobile Man ?. . . Or Cellphone Man!

 

The surface of the previous shot wasn't level and I could only get two of them to stand-up by turning them round! So here they are leaning against the backdrop the tight way round! I think the chap on the left is probably a 'solid' from Kinder, they have many of these hard plastic figures, a subcategory to the dedicated collectors, and this may be a specific character, or part of a set I'm unfamiliar with, and I could try looking him up, or not worry, if you know, you already know, I'll have a session in the future ID'ing all sorts when I label them up!

 

While the red guy might be a stamper or a keyring, or another source altogether, there is a lot of this Fortnite stuff in the queue, both Peter Evans and me have located a fair bit, and it was mostly shot some time ago!

 

An Anime/Manga schoolgirl keyring, the closest match I can find are free images, but named characters with green uniforms do exist, however with green, black or red bows? Her interest here, to us, is in the over-moulding of the different colours of vinyl. She's a relief flat - which should be 2½D, shouldn't it; not quite 2D, not quite 3D!

 

Somehow escaped the military post, becase it was mixed combat and historical, I guess! A cake decoration figure, seen before here, a copy of Airfix AWI, scaled-up, two dark green versions of figures more usually seen in dung/khaki, a Marx 50mm Training Centre figure, and a premium flat ascribed to Bonnie Bilt in the 'States, a Timpo copy who might be Polish, or a BR Moulds piece, and finally a US 'comic flat' also AWI.

 

Disney bits, including two princesses, one of which may be a knock-off, a large LotR Elven archer (presumably Legolas?) from McDonald's, who apparently came without a bow, even though he's clearly firing a bow, due to 'health & safety'? The martial-arts chap on the end will be from Mulan or something similar, I haven't followed the recent releases, just become aware of them through social media or Phidal!

 

The guy on the left here is probably a driver from an omnibus/tram/streetcar model kit, someone like Pyro maybe or a smaller maker, Palmer? Someone like that? Although he's also quite Parker'esque! The heavy chunk of ersatz PVC on the right is from Harry Potter, and is a statue which came to life at one point I think, again, I haven't read or seen any HP stuff, but did get Steven Fry's excellent reading of the first book, one Easter on the Radio, years ago!

 

The small scale here consists mostly of Galoob, from pretty-much all their lines, but there's a Mattel or two in there too (Action Man or Batman villain with pistol, and the firefighter), and a Bluebird Snow White sitting on her own, while a Zizzle Cap'n Jack stalks her!

 

Kinder bits, to go in the Kinder bits zone! I think that monkey may be another from the set which included my CAD-monkey mascot! The helmet is a soft polyethylene knock-off of Lego, while I'm not sure about the large lady, but she's certainly Kinder-like enough for the shot!

 

Also Kinder, but mostly mucked-about with.

They'll go in the future project zone!

 

And bringing us to a close on these posts, the 'Halloween' shot! The two ghosts are also Kinder I think, or one of these sets we looked at a year or two ago, the spotted mushroom is a Go-Go Crazy Bone I think, not so sure on the blue (robo-elephant?) thing, while two earlier novelty flats, probably from 1970's (or earlier) Christmas crackers, finish it all off.

As always, very many thanks to Chris Smith for finding, saving and sending all this stuff to the Blog. It's not just that we get all these posts out of each parcel, with something for everyone and lots to ID, but that in the future, there will be more in specific subject posts, a better picture of everything or anything, and I am very grateful to all those who save or send stuff to/for the Blog/Archive/Collection, especially where, like the probably broken cat flat above, it might otherwise go in the bin, a first sample is a first sample, whatever the condition, so, thank-you very much Chris.

T is for Two - Keycraft Dino's

I actually had a good interaction with the Keycraft rep's at Gift Fair Birmingham the other day, well, a week ago today as it happens, but I'd already found some of these and shot them months ago, and picked the other one up at Redfield's garden centre the next day, where i saw both the items they gave me as samples at the show, which will be in a forthcoming show.

 

 

I actually bought these over I year ago I think, there were in the cheapie-bin by the tills in Hobbycraft, and I rather liked the Moshops type (green, another non-dino' synapsid), bought the salmon-red one because it was an equally unusual subject, and then the Steggie' for comparison with something more conventional.

Then I got this from the same store a few months ago (part of the Crimbo' toys reconnaissance!). Mentioned in a recent post, I consider them to be mid-range, in both sculpting and decoration, similar to the WHSmith set of a few year's ago, while they are also what I call medium-sized, and in the 2nd commonest 'group' of toy dinosaurs, after the very small 'toob' types.

The 'header card' has changed graphics over the time I've been buying them.

The newer is the upper card.

 

These came from Redfield's the other day, and are a bit of fun, which I didn't notice on the keycraft stands at either London or Birmingham, but I haven't done much with the images, yet, and they may be there, in one of the collective display-shelf shots?

 

Yes, they are daft, and very-much an 'infant toy' thing, but they are fun, coloured like all those 'Erasersaurs', and can be stuck all over the place, annoying Mum & Dad, so very-much a toy success in my books! There were three (same colour as their oppo') duplicates, so I'm guessing they are assortments, and a pose or two may be missing from the shot, or even/therefore a colour or two?