S is for Seen Elsewhere - Space!

I got confused last night, that bronze figure wasn't Lido, it was Archer, but these (first shot) are Lido, seen elsewhere, not that long ago, but I'm trying to get stuff cleared from Picasa, and off the PC, so let's get these out of the way!

 

Lido, Captain Video, the large versions! I'm missing the robot, and there may be a fifth pose, but as a sample which didn't exist two years ago and has literally come in as one's and the painted pair, it shouldn't be too long before I've tracked down the missing miscreants! Note the 1930's leather American football or early Tank Crew helmet, on whom, I assume, is the actual Captain Video himself?

 

I don't know if the two painted ones are factory or 'home' painted, but if home, it was a long time ago, so contemporary with the unpainted issues, I'm not going to strip them, as I have unpainted versions, and you can harm 'styrene in a way you don't damage 'ethylenes, trying to clean them.

 

While this is the latest (and not even the best) line-up of Archer robots. These have all come-in over the last 24-odd months, and add to previously seen samples here, with two Archer on the left, a probably Tudor Rose in green, a - smaller - silver copy by Glencoe unknown and the 'heritage' reissue of the answer-robot! House of Marbles or Keycraft Global? They've both carried the game in recent years?

 

As with the Lone Star 'Richard I's, there will have to be a final comparison with all of them, as this makes about 11 robots now!

 

I wondered where the turquoise one had gone (it's in other images), and upon finding it realised the Glencoe are from the old tools (I think there's a long post, somewhere else on the Wibbly Wobbly Way, which explains it all), so I dug-him out on Sunday afternoon, and here's a corrected image with, from the left

• Archer
• Archer
• Glencoe (recent)
• Tudor Rose
• Unknown (smaller copy)
• Board Game 'Magic Answer Robot' (current)

V is for Variations on a Theme

Nothing earth-shattering or definitive, so much as a few bricks in the wall, on the subject of the two robots seen in the previous post, which I picked-up at Plastic Warrior's show back in May, these are from a number of image folders I have with lots of pulp-era 'dimestore' stuff in, and were probably all shot on Mercator Tradeing's stall over the years.

 

We did have a look at them here before, as well, and some of those in this post may have since joined my sample in the older post, to which the other two will be joined, when everything gets sorted at the other end, where-ever and when-even that is!

 

I shot these on Adrian's table, this Saturday just gone, the reason being I thought it was interesting to show, that while there are some differences between the early and late runs of the old tool, here we have two originals (blue and copper-bronze), and a Glencoe re-issue (turquoise) who all have the same PAT. PEND. (C) mark on the rear of their torsos, latter Glencoe issues had a larger set of marks for some reason, but I've yet to shoot one, I have a sealed set, which I'll open on here one day, and see what marks that's got!

 

While these silver ones have no markings at all, and must be copies? You can tell they're not from the same tool by the lack of a collar/washer on the rivets compared to the Archer originals. I'm pretty sure the one in the two comparison shots is now in my stash, while the top left image of the back was taken at Sandown, at the weekend, and shows a more gunmetal/aluminium coloured moulding. The green one I picked up in May is the same moulding.

Suggesting these (bottom image) are clones too (Ajax, Banner, Dillon or Empire? Maybe Tudor Rose or Kleeware over here? Nobody seems to be 100% sure! Indeed, one source states no one else produced them, which is patently false.), while in the upper shot, I compared them to a few other spacemen from Marx, Manurba (et al) and Torgano., that were available on the day! Really only musing on the robot, I have rather neglected all these dime store era space figures, but soon hope to have the time to play catch-up with all of it.

G is for Glow-in-the-Dark Space Troopers

A real "Bloody Hell, this thing's taking off, find something we can put out there NOW!" moment, as Toy Box rushed to exploit the excitement being generated by events far, far away and long, long ago, back in 1977!

This auction was brought to my attention by someone on Brian Heiler's Faceplant group three or four years ago, and I was pretty sure they looked familiar (beyond obviously being the old Archer sculpts), so I grabbed the images, against one day blogging them.

 

Then, when I was up the storage unit in Jan. '22, putting space-stuff away, which had been in the garage, I spotted these in a tub, so shot them poorly, in a confined space, better than nothing, and you should have seen the shots I deleted!

 

I think they are from the old soft-ethylene Hong Kong copies rather than the proper Archer moulds which Glencoe cleaned-up/repaired a few years ago, well, a while-ago now. Although they do claim to be 'American Made'?

Finally, last year, these were up on feebleBay and I nearly bought them but the BIN-price was a bit steep for loose, seventies, rack-toys! They do seem to suffer from brittleness, but it may just be the tool, and I'm missing the chap with the longer ray-gun. Only the six poses seem to have been produced, with only two armed, and they are helmetless, but glow in the dark!

 

Space Trooper Action Team, from Toy Box Inc., absolutely nothing to do with Star Wars!

Not Archer . . . Ajax sculpts . . . Doh!

S is for Sandown Park - May 2023 - Civilian Vehicles

The civilian vehicles I picked-up at Sandown back in May are probably more interesting than the military stuff, but it's a question of personal taste, and it's not like you're going round a show trying to work out what's cool or not for a future Blog post! Although you do sometimes buy things for a blog post, mostly it's filling-gaps, ticking boxes or grabbing interesting, or unusual curiosities or novelties!

 

 

A couple of bagged Hong Kong rack toy vehicles, seperate purchases I think, but shot together for this post. The Surry wagon is my second, and with the first in storage, I'll wait until I can compare them before I open and construct one. The tractor I may have loose somewhere, but I thought I'd better get this one to tie-in the Thomas-Poplar looking driver.

 

A pair from Tudor Rose, A London Taxi and Bedford / Morris (?) type minivan, the Taxi will be off to New York soon in exchange for the Marx one we looked at the other day, and it has slightly more realistic wheels/tyres than the van!

 

A few shots of the van, with the Taxi's belly-mark inset, bottom right. The marking on the van was quite poor, due to play I think. Garden/beach toys, the van has working rear doors and a sliding side-door. Those wheels though - "Purest Grreeeen, Blackadder!"

 

This was lovely, an Archer steam road-roller, I don't know if they were imported from the US at the time, I suspect not, but rather imported more recently by a collector, I will try to get a Tudor Rose (or Kleeware) one, and a Lipkin one, so we can compare with the Merit one! The red button on the nose is the knob of a pull-cord wind-in motor, not that common a motive system, but there were a few back then. I also have the Pyro (and Banner?) in 'army' khaki!

 

Not sure about this at all, the card looks fake, home-printed on a PC, but a small company may well have done something like that back in the early years of computing and desk-top publishing, yet the contents are genuine enough, and maybe it was last-minute clearance or something of a 'Friday Afternoon' or 'Monday Morning' project? Also despite the busy graphics, there's no real branding, but it's hardly a typical generic either?

 

Poplar Plastics; this looks to be an early and not wholly stable plastic, but only the v-point of the blue moulding seems to have distorted slightly? A nice model anyway, and I'm a bit of a sucker for plastic racing cars!

 

Airfix - another! I put a Hillco cowboy on it in the absence of a motorcycle rider. I've picked up a few of these now, and that page on the Airfix blog will get an update with new images. Blue body with red wheels seems to be the commonest combination, I have several now, different shades of both though.

Another Poplar product, this shares the baseplate/chassis with the Easter Bunny egg-cart we looked at a few years ago, albeit with slightly different mountings. The wheels and chassis are polystyrene, the horse and cart-box, polyethylene.

 

The cart doesn't seem to come with or be fitted for hay-racks, but has seating, presumably from it days as a Thomas Toy when it would have come with a set of those seated PVC rubber kids?

G is for Going . . . Going . . .!

A cheap segue to look at the Hilco space figures, but there you are; I'm clearly a manipulative bastard! No, I thought there were similarities between my broken unknown spaceman and the Hilco figures (although I think 'technically' these were/are the full "Johillco"?), not least that he's in the same state as most of them, who are getting increasingly brittle!

He is similar to one of the [Jo]Hilco figures, but probably only because both are channeling the100-odd-mm  Archer 'space' grenade-thrower (looks like a foam or Velcro lawn-dart!) pose. The picture on the right is from a series I took in 2012 and destined for a future post, the guy on the left has (at time of shooting) just had his weapon's tip glued back on . . . ohhh! Misses!

Because this is how I found them - for the second time in recent years! The kneeling guy was OK and the shooter just needed a little work on his . . . err . . . tool! But panic-central guy was in a hell of a state! The two yellow arrows show previous mends, and getting the left hand guy back together was exactly like working with chalk.

How they look now (March 30th), and they won't move until I've bought a box of cotton-wool, at which point the bubble-wrap will be replaced with a bed of the stuff, and a second layer will be placed over them, thick enough to hold them firm when the lid pushes it down, but not so wadded it breaks them again!

I shot these on Adrian's table at Sandown Park's toy fair (back in 2012), you can see the kneeling guys tend to survive (with care) and fifty-years from now he'll be the only pose in collectors' collections! But the waist of the robot is a definite weak-point.

I thought I had a robot, as I remembered gluing one (at the waist), but I think I must have mended some of JB's years ago. In the meantime I shot this guy when I posted all the robots a while ago, and as well as the comparison/group shots, I posed him separately (as I must have subconsciously known I didn't have him?), so we have four poses and a broken duplicate in the whole image.

I don't know how many there are altogether; the early PW guidebook (B&W editions) have a similar figure with a base which they think isn't from the set, while the full-colour edition has a very nice pre-production test-shot never released (which looks to be in a non-chalky, therefore, lasting polymer), along with a walking figure which takes the set-count to five?

Also, despite the Hilco/Johillco comments at the start I wonder if they were only ever Cherilea? Firstly; Cherilea are known for their early, chalky, explosively-brittle shite and secondly while these are from Johillco hollow-cast moulds, later, Cherilea also issued them in hollow-cast . . . looked at here, where a sixth pose is the crawling figure.

There are also two (Cherilea-only) monsters (a cata-slug and a running gecko-dragon thing) neither of which have I ever seen in plastic? However, I think I have seen the rocket and separate launch-ramp in plastic? Joplin adds a Buck Rogers Treen-type and a vending-bot, along with a seventh 'human' (the plastics are always painted as green 'Martians') spaceman holding a dumbbell aloft! Joplin believes the boxy-bot and 7th humanoid never went to Cherilea.

But it's not clear when the mould went to Cherilea, and what packaging any Hill plastics might have appeared in, but for Cherilea to issue them in late space boxes already printed for the hollow-cast figures seems sensible?

Wilfred Cherrington is credited with designing these, and it may be that - with or without permission (?) - he took the mould as part of his severance from Hill, which would make the plastic figures a Cherilea thing.

Summing up of the preceding text!

A is for Answer Robot

There was a game, very popular in the past, more of a 'parlour game' than a board game, but it was sold as or in-with the board-games, and would end-up in the family board-game cupboard.

There were many versions from the 1950's or earlier, through to the 1970's if not '80's, it appears on all the auction sites in a dozen languages and can come with a magician/mage/mystic, or a monkey/ape, but the best is The Answer Robot!

On Boardgamegeek

Mentioned a few years ago here in passing (possibly in a 'News, Views...'?); it was re-issued the other year as The Magical Amazing Robot, I didn't at the time of mention have the publisher - it's House of Marbles.

Spoiler alert - for the young at heart, please miss-out this and the next paragraph!

The mechanism is simple slight-of-physics in that you set the robot (or magician/monkey) correctly and then turn him to a question "Any question, pick a question sir, I'll wager the robot gets it right", he having been rotated has become off-line with his hidden magnet.

You then move the answerer to the mirror-pond in the centre of the answers and by placing him randomly opposite a wrong answer, he will revolve until his hidden magnet lines-up with another hidden magnet set at another angle, under the pond; both being polarised bars which can only line up one way, leaving the answerer pointing to the corresponding correct answer!

Here he is, the subject of today's biography! He oozes that 1950's throwback kitsch to the Sci-fi of the Edwardian era, of Wells and Verne, looking more like a kid's comic idea of a robot schoolteacher, still a popular trope when I was young, and you will recognise him as being . . .

. . . a reduced-size copy of the old Archer robot, a copy/re-issue of which by Glencoe is seen on the left, with an original (sans 'answer stick') sandwiched between, His pointer arm has been re-set to allow for the dramatic sweep of the denouement and his feet absorbed into the large base, but otherwise there's not much in it.

The new one is lacking in the finer surface detail (as if the other two have much to write home about!) and would seem to be a copy, but a good one, there's no reduction in size; or from a very old and tired mould.

It's not the first time the Archer has been served 'homage', as both Johillco and Cherilea issued copies of him first in hollow-cast lead and then in plastic (as seen here) possibly under the later Hilco branding, all examples are around the 50mm mark, and very brittle these days in the plastic form.

With the gubbins of the secret base removed he looks like a robot mine-detector, or a Vogon intergalactic space-highway surveyor!

Another difference between the older version and this latest incarnation, it that the old one was formed round the pointer (which would have been set in a jig in the tool before each shot), while the new one has the [heated] wire inserted into the hand after the figure has been manufactured, leading to minor melting/loss of detail to the fingers of the hand.

The dismantling of the set for onward transit to the recycling-bin raised an interesting query which will appear as a separate Question Time in an hour.

And many thanks go to Adrian Little for letting me photograph mine next to his pair.

S is for Sterwin Watch . . .

Did you see what I did there, sort of like 'Amerind', except it's Stads and Erwin!

Being the latest nonsense from Paul 'The Jabbering Fuck' Stadinger (TJF) and his cock-wackin' money lizard; Erwin 'Makin' it up as I go Along, Again' Sell. Crappy Post but I can't have the two idiots thinking they're getting away with it!

How fucktarded is he? . . .

. . . This fucktarded apparently! And what the hell is an 'A. American - brackets - Peruvian' when it's at home, some unleavened bread, an Arizonan wall-builder? Still it’s nice to know he has a hand - for all that cock-wackin'! Too funny, just too funny!

I could have used the word 'Mesoamerican' but I would have been on shakier ground, so I used the cover-all (for a figure I'd admitted I didn't know 100%) . . . 'Amerindian' . . .

. . .  which was the correct word to use, this is the Oxford University page, but there are others - all saying the same thing! In point of fact had a tossed the coin for and got Mesoamerican I would have been spot-on, but I'm careful, so lost a Brownie-point!

This guy is so stupid, so ignorant, so utterly fucktarded he sought to correct me on a word which has totally escaped him, a word which it didn't even strike him as maybe being worth Googling before his pontification! Trying to be clever when you're not very clever is not very clever. Too funny, just too funny!

Meanwhile his sponsor [TJF] has decided to spend January (or maybe the whole year?) playing I've got those too! This means I'm now literally driving the output on Stad's stuff - pretty poor output - it has to be said! Unfortunately it seems he didn't have the Lido 'Captain Video' figures necessary 'cos he showed some Lido knights he's shown before, instead - not a full set or anything useful like that-  and then threw-up some other space figures which he stated he didn't know!

Can he (or his supporters) not see the blatant hypocrisy in pulling me up for not knowing a Spanish figure, then he, himself; not knowing his own US-made Ajax and Archer, like his apprentice, he's too fucking funny! And - as I've said before - as thick as pig-shit; if not thicker, he started this war a year ago and so far has done a very bad job of prosecuting it.

If I wanted to play along!

While he has - for a while now - shown a tendency to play I've got those (or something similar!) too, I try not to post stuff they've recently shown (because I don't need to follow, too busy leading!) unless it's a major correction, so this lot (above) which has been in the queue for a while can stay in Picasa for a while-longer and we'll look at other stuff!

To find a level of stupid to match that coming from the PSTSM's headquarters these days, you have to go to Kim Jong-un's palace . . . or the White House! Hard to tell; both buildings are inhabited by child-like ranters with weird hair!

The children are making a concerted-effort to take over the nursery! Something more toy-like this afternoon!

B is for Bad Boy Bender and the Bat Bots

Who will be performing live at Guildford Civic Hall from when until then!

Or......

A is for Almost Superheroes

Or Super Heroes, Super-heroes or even Superhero's as some feebleBayers will insist on calling them . . . Superhero's what? Which one?

I'm going to presume, guess AND assume (it winds-up you-know-who and that pleases me) that these were larger gum-ball machine prizes, although they may have had a header-bagged issue as well, probably mid-to-late 1970's, but; maybe later . . . the accuracy doesn't really matter, as while they have a charm (like a lot of rack-toy shite), they are - on one level - really, really, really shite, and will only ever be a curiosity, even when the full facts ARE known!

They turn-up infrequently, but I've been encountering them pretty-much since I started collecting again back in the late 1980's, usually in ones and twos, although both this lot and the bulk of my collection in storage were together, obviously amassed by someone else who saw through the charm to the shite, no . . . saw through the shite to the shite . . . hold on - I'll get it right in a minute . . . oh - you know what I mean!

The weird thing about them and the reason for today's alternate titles (apart from the fact that I couldn't make up my mind which one to go with), is that while they look - at first glance - to be 50mm space robots of some kind, when you study them, they all have Batman's logo on their chest[cabinet]s! I mean WT-very-F?!

Then you realise the left-hand 'knobbly-knee' robot has a Bat-Hood^TM, with Bat-Ears^TM and a utility Bat-Belt^TM, while the one in the middle looks a bit like Bender from Futurama? In fact there are elements of Bender in both right-hand designs, but I suspect any resemblance is either coincidental or was the other way round with Groening and/or his/the artist/s having some of these esoteric lumps of polyethylene on their desk/s as they started the Futurama project?

To give the post another image! The reason I was picking these up even when I was only a small scale collector is they were smallish, at around 50mm, and I tended to collect the stuff no one else rated at the time - up to 50mm!

You can see the Gemodels spaceman (whom I always consider a spacewoman) which I also collected from the off (there's a bagful in storage, all different colours, even a marbled-swirl one - I think?) is a slight 50mm as well, with the Crescent-for-Kellogg's at a more traditional 54mm, the two German Wundertuten coming-in around the 60-mark and a factory-painted Hong Kong copy of Archer at their original 70-odd-mil.

Sometimes I look at these and wonder if I haven't just missed a Batman parody episode of Futurama, but then I realise the Asian toy-producers had pretty-much stopped using the HK marks by the time of the TV show (late 1990's) and I was encountering them earlier than the show anyway.

I'd like to think there are more poses, but I'm pretty sure my in-storage sample has the same three poses and no others? It's just struck me that the Bender-Bot is wearing his Bat-signal^TM Bat-logo^TM like a medal; on a chain!

Also - I'd like to say there are other colours, but my memories of the storage lot seem to suggest this is it, there may be dark blue ones, or maroonish-red ones, but I think rack-toy  'armyman' green, brown and 'sand' is your lot? Greyish-black maybe?

But they're great aren't they? I mean they're shite, but it's some great shite!

Go Batbots^TM!

A is for Ajax, Archer, Bergan, Beton . . . Not!

This pair was donated to the Blog by Brian Berke a while ago, he found them as old store stock ages ago, so many thanks to him.

Marked MADE IN HONG KONG down one leg, the horses are nicely finished but poor copies of the old Bergan Toys horse, although the riders are from Ajax poses, and a quick study of the horse - especially the mane - reveals it's a copy of the Ajax copy of the Bergan horse, specifically the Ajax 'Large Horse and Rider' range.

The un-carded bags don't have any staple holes or tape marks, being heat-sealed like old bread-bags! Therefore they probably [almost certainly] weren't mounted on a larger backing card either but rather; sold from a shop stock box, or transferred from a generic shipping carton to point-of-sale 'bin' type thing?

One of the bags wasn't sealed very well at all, and had opened itself with a little help from Royal Fail so the Indian can run free, his black Mustang carrying him majestically across the central plains his ancestors enjoyed; the cowboy will remain a prisoner where he will be unable to wave his 'legally-held' firearm about with quite the gay abandon he might otherwise claim a constitutional-right to so do!

Left over from a post a while ago (the shot was in another folder and I forgot it!), these are cheaper Hong Kong copies loosely based on European posts, the upper pair being found in a similar bag to Brian's two; it's a copy of the Britains Trojan horse with a swivel-waist Indian harking back to Crescent I think.

Below the 'mint' pair; are a few that appear vaguely related, from the right; a same size - as the Indian above - cowboy, again swivel-waist, but with heavier leg sculpts and factory paint. To his left are two smaller swivel-waist clones, following the pose, paint (and plastic colour in the case of the middle figure), these will be copies from a smaller firm of the larger figure, just to grab a slice of commercial-pie!

The middle guy being a direct clone, while the chap on the left only has paint on the upper half and seems to be an earlier version of the unpainted foot-figures we looked at here and which were carried in Baravelli sets Indiani e Cowboy - I noticed the other day that that's still 'Barabelli' to the PSTSM!

A is for Another Update!

Renovated in the last few days

I've pretty-much doubled the size of the Airfix 'Bergan-Beton' horse/figure page, and added another dog! Also there's a useful horse comparison on the Toy Animal Wiki.

T is for Ten Tin-clad Toy Troops

A pyramid of medieval mayhem!

 

And an exercise in clearing stuff from Picasa!

S is for Space...Cannons and Trains

From the plastic colours these are believed by some to be almost certainly Ajax or Archer, but could just as easily be Lido or Plasticraft, for now though - hobby wide - they remain unknown! I actually favour Plasticraft...the pastel metallic mauve and that pale minty-blue gun?

Small dime-store cards of micro-toys, being a futuristic train (which hasn't happened yet!) and a set of heavy weapons...bargain!

Similar aerodynamic trains were in service, back in the fifties, with a steam-loco under the fairing, I love how the fairings give-away the prescence of standard twin-bogies underneath!

But we're still waiting for ray-guns, disintegration-rifles, sonic-destroyers, immobilisation-sprayers, phasers and just about everything else that was predicted back in the days of real 'pulp' fiction. We do have a range of much smaller, small-arms rounds, with no real stopping power?

"But the ambulances...think of the ambulances they'll need!" Yeah...those Talib's; they really choked-up the Hindu Kush with convoys of para-medical, paraphernalia...didn't they? And that Putin fellow...he starts shaking and orders more military medical facilities every-time someone says "NATO" on the radio! Although he is offering a 5.56 export model of his 7.62 squaddie-killer!