R is for Rack Toy Round-Up - North America - Three is Supernumerary

More rack toy shelfies from Brian Berke, he found all these in Dollar Tree I think, and all figural, with 'Action', stretchy and 'Solid' types to suit most tastes!

 

Wall Walkers, unusual, in being solid, swivel-waist figures, with the sticky 'walking' compound attached as blobs to hands and feet, rather than the more usual form of an all-sticky figurine!

 

Although not a bendy, this guy looks like a perfect foil for the stretchy astronaut we saw a couple of months ago from Keycraft!

 

Generics? Their names all begin with 'M'!

 

Another of the Power Ranger's we saw the black one of, in a previous post from Brian.

 

Disney!

 

I'm not sure how this would work as a Yo-Yo, and I've tried to avoid PJ Masks and Paw Patrol here, but the longer they remain popular characters, the more likely they are to creep into the content from time to time! And I don't know anything about them - are they some male version of Power-Puff Girls?

 

This would find a place in the collection; appears to be a sculptural solid? There's a lot of adults buying toys these days, more for lifestyle signalling/decoration, than pure collecting, and this sort of thing is very much aimed at them, for a mantle or windowsill, or a display cabinet in the hall Monster High!

 

Three-inch, four-inch? Look out GI Joe's, Barbie is looking for a husband and she has expensive tastes!

 

Peppa . . . removed from Douyin (China) due to her association with 'gangster' subcultures and the creation of subversive memes!

 

Many thanks to Brian for all these, there's more to come, probably two more posts, so nicely inside Rack Toy Month, while I think the Gygax Monsters will slide into September! 

G is for Gygax Monsters - Part III - Hans Postler

I'm pretty sure these are all copies of Holly, rather than Holly product, and from the leery colours of both plastic and casually sprayed paint, the 'Chine' and the bar code, mid-to-late 1980's or more laikely second half of the 1990's? But an interesting chapter in the Gygax Monster story, with most of the monsters in the one set and the possibility that other assortments may have had the missing sculpts?

 

Header card, much of a muchness, and a pure coincidence that Hans Postler and Holly Plastics both have an HP monogram!

 

Bag and contents which we're going to dissect below!

 

Six more conventional dinosaurs, all copies of Holly's products, and, at least five of them (green and brown) also used by whoever produced my favourite childhood set of silicon rubber dinosaurs, which we saw here, in Fleetwood colours. There are soft silicon copies of the Gygax Monsters too, once you start looking for them, they turn-up everywhere, like LB (for Lik Be) astronauts!

 

Two cavemen, also ex-Holly, although originally Marx, MPC or someone!

 

The 'meat & two veg' of the business, seven of the Gygax Monsters, including two named, the Bulette (top left) and Rust Monster (bottom right), the oddest, and hardest to find after the Owlbear, is the Chinese dragon, which I failed to see on the Holly carded set, and had to add, an hour after I published last night, doh!

 

The one I call Gator is called Lizard Man by some people, but as an unnamed 'Gygax', can be whatever you want to call him! Likewise the one which I call Ardvark, some call 'Armadillo' or Armadillo Man.

 

On the subject of naming: some sources mention Kaiju, Ultra Man and 'Pachisaur'/Pachisaurs, but most of the mutterings don't agree with each other, and seem to be people trying too hard to make connections, links or a narrative which really isn't there. A couple of guys, mucking about, chose three monsters, at random, out of a bag, and named them, just the three!

 

In one case Pachisaur seems to be being used just to sell 'merch', while another guy has a very detailed graphic, but the two most important links are greyed-out, because, as he himself admits, it's not clear if they exist as links at all! Another Gygax AD&D monster was called Pachisaur, but doesn't resemble any of the Holly Sculpts closely.

 

Scenics

 

Close-up's of the Phoenix

 

Plastic colours and distribution.

 

Polyethylene play mat.

L is for the London Scene

Peter Evans also sent me some rack-toy stuff in time for the end of a slow month! We've seen some of it before, but images is images and these blogs are all about the images;

There's a lot of this kind of thing around at the moment, funny little pull-back-and-go cars, carts and these trikes, ridden, driven or mostly consisting of baby animals, teddy bears or dinosaurs, and I've seen boxed-sets of multiples!

 

I think we've seen both of these here, but new images, and out there now (try garden centres, if out of town), Peterkin above and Halsall below, the Peterkin's are similar to the old Ackerman (et al.) sculpts, while the HTI set is from a current generation of China-troops in the style of modern US GI's.

 

These are the larger version or 'next size up' from the sets we saw out of Poundstretcher the other day, Supreme copies, but here four figures (instead of two) and two main accessories instead of one, so presumably four assortments, two with cowboys and two with Indians. 

 

 

And I think we saw a green one of these a few years ago, also Poundstretcher, or similar? Soft vinyl or silicon rubber key-ring dinosaurs.

 

Many thanks to Peter for these, all submissions gratefully received! 

R is for Rack Toy Round-Up - North America - Two of . . . a Few!

Continuing to look at the stuff Brian B has sent to the blog in the last few weeks, these were all shot in a Target Store in Connecticut I believe, and mostly TV/Movie related licensed characters.

 

My Little Fawn?

 

There is, somewhere in Picasa, a multipart 'miniseries' which never got published (it will, one day!), which Brian contributed to, on the subject of those figurines you see in the windows of game-swap shops, which are interactive, electronic playing pieces, for/from several modern gaming systems, these seem to be similar, but are more music oriented I think? Can't knock The Muppets!

 

Superstuff!

 

Also a bit big for my parameters, but I know from the Plaid Stallions crew, that there's a massive fan-base for GI Joe, Stateside, with the guys telling each other where certain figures have popped-up! Same with the 'new' Mego's!

 

Even dog-food is promoting the new movie! It launched with much hype as the summer's big movie, and a sort of reset for the brand, but it's gone quiet now, so I don't know if it's good, OK, or a bit duff . . . Has anyone seen it?

 

The two boats are halfway between the rockets and the rubber-boats we saw yesterday from B&M, and it looks like the two boats are wind-up workers.

 

Plastic flat, gravity floaters?

Thanks again to Mr Berke for going out and finding these.

G is for Gygax Monsters - Part II - The Holly Plastic Factory Limited, Kowloon

So, who made the Gygax Monsters? Well, it would seem the bulk of the common ones, and those similar but with slightly different markings or sizes, are to be found in the Holly Plastics catalogue for 1970.

 

A common enough logo on 1970-80's boxed plastics, Blue Box farm and zoo knock-offs, New Maries Noah's Ark clones and the like, but also, it seems, carded rack toys of farm, zoo, LB style funny animals and, yes. the Gygax Monsters! For years I thought the monogrammed-logo was AJP, rather as it used to be thought that Lik Be's LB was actually, first ID, IDL or ID Ltd., and then LP, how silly 'cos there's no pee in bee! But it's an HP, done as a leaf or onion-tower motif.

 

Counter-top or shelf-display/dispenser box, with an assortment of dinosaurs

and the Gygax Monsters

The two pink blobs are cavemen (from the top) and we'll return to them another day), but we can see the green Spiny monster, the dark-chocolate standing 'Gator', the waving monster with 'winged whiskers' in red and the 'Friendly' dino-monster, with a horn on his nose (in white), as the classic Gygax Monsters.

The Rust Monster top left, with Spiny below it, Wavy Winged Whiskers below that, Friendly to the right, then Gator, with a Bulette under the wing of the 'Phoenix'. Both the above may have been random assortments in carded bottle-bags, while the next three seem to be fixed-content blisters.

 

An almost complete set of Gygax Monsters here, but possibly the smaller sculpts? From the top, then top left left, by way of an excuse to list them, Gygax monikers in bold;

• Chinese Dragon 
• Bulette
• Friendly
• Spiny
•  Ardvark
• Wavy Winged Whiskers
• Gator
• Rust Monster
• Wavy Fan Whiskers

Missing from line up

• Owlbear
• Phoenix
• Disney (might not be Holly)

 

  

These two sets only have the Phoenix, and while it might be meant to be an archaeopteryx, it's a more convincing phoenix, which puts it in the Gygaz Monsters line-up, rather than the dinosaurs, which, while there are lots of other dinosaur sets in the catalogue, I'm not really concentrating on in these posts, as the reason they were languishing in Picasa was that I intended to add to them, and even as I blurb them up, I am seeing how they can be returned to another day, although whether I remember those thoughts later, is anyone's guess!

 

But, yes, it looks like the Gygax Monsters, were Holly Plastics monsters!

T is for Two - Pool Party!

I went back to B&M to try and get another set, so balance up the figures a bit, and they were sold-out in two stores! But I found these beach-toys, and shelfied one while buying the other!

 

Fun for kids, but the rubber boat would be useful for garden gamers. I suspect I bought these (or something very similar) a few years ago, which was why I only shelfied them, that and the rather too chunky, white-button motors!

 

De-carded now, so I can't retake it, I'm struggling with the settings on a new camera!

 

They are actually soft polymer (like a dense PVC), and totally sealed units so when the stack of three watch-batteries run out, there'll be no more lights, and the shock of them hitting the water presumably sets them off, I didn't work it out until I dropped one! It's the same tech' as all these flashing kids' shoes and suchlike!

 

B&M, now, three-quid each!