B is for Brontotherium?

I think actually I decided upon a Diplacodon last time we looked at them . . . yes, Dinocerata, as a much reduced-scale copy from Lik Be (LB, because it's Be not Pee!), although I'm getting ahead of myself, as it's the last image which is the more interesting!

 

I think Brian B may have previously sent shelfies of this or one similar, certainly he sent the vintage set he found in Blackpool, which contained what were probably Holly originals, while these may be second generation copies?

 

This post was shot in '22, and is meant to be part of a forthcoming season on the 'Gygax Monsters' (the son's interview was on the BBC's World Service again, the other night)*, but as it doesn't actually have one of the acknowledged monsters in the bag, I thought I'd post it separately as a Ja-Ru rack-toy, to thin-out that aforementioned series, which has too many posts!

Both sides of the bag, not the best pictures, I'm afraid. They are pretty much the bog-standard Holly style, but the smaller ones lack the casual bust of spray-paint which tends to ID them as Holly, still, as a subcontract for Ja-Ru, lack of paint may have been a stipulation, while the plastic colours compared to Holly are both hit-&-miss!

So, the real interest is the mega-fauna, which is a really nice sculpt, millions of years adrift, but then half the contents of the set were millions of years earlier or later than the others! The Brontotheriidae have been undergoing reclassification in recent decades, and it's not quite as simple as I think it was in my Ladybird book! But there's more here;

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontotheriidae

 

if you are genuinely interested, with the Megacerops being the more Rhino-looking ones, and the Dinocerata being the more chunky-monkey ones!

* As well as the Gygax history/interview, there was a very good hour-long (well, 58-minutes!) documentary on the history of ITC (the Incorporated Television [Programme] Company), the other night on Radio4, which covered all the staples, the detectives and the Anderson story, Lew Grade, the American connections and licensing, and dispelled a few myths along the way, well worth finding on Listen Again, or BBC Sounds or whatever it's nom-de-jour is at the moment!

A is for obviously, how could it possibly be anything else but, of course - "Avon Calling!"

I've scanned these 1:1, but have no idea how they will show on your system, and being press-out, it's not that clear where you will be required to cut, should you chose to try and make one, but I've darkened the instruction side to try and make it a little clearer, and the things to get 'really' right are the four slots in the engine tubes.

It's naff, it's very simple, and it was sold as a Christmas 'mobile', still, it probably made someone very happy way back when (1980), and was apparently supplied by Ccai Como, which sounds Italian? And it's a robot, so no scale, it can be a mile long or a nano! Avon calling, but not the 2nd Captain of the Liberator, although the walls are just as cardboard!

And - speaking of the BBC, for it was they - apparently as part of their maths programme; they made 4 (or 14?) 'Print & Do' Starships? Anybody know anything about that?

D is for Dapol

This is just a quick box ticker to get the stuff up here, I have a lot of Dapol stuff in storage with header cads and suchlike, but as a quick box ticker, this will have to do!

An early catalogue shows the same Hong Kong sourced PVC figures that Hornby, possibly Thornton and Lifelife I think have carried in the last 20-40 years at one point or another.

 

 

Later catalogues carry the imagery of the sets they seem to have inherited from Airfix, with the bases being changed from small squares and oblongs to landscaped (or lumpy) 'cloud' bases.

They also carried the Station Accessories, but in the same soft cream-white polyethylene as Airfix, and as the set seems to have become harder to find in recent years, the suspicion is they only obtained back-stock of Airfix production and have slowly used that up?

 

The three sets with a few other ex-Airfix kits in a later catalogue.

 

When redesigning the bases, Dapol also added their own corporate marks to the old Airfix tools, meaning they are now, indisputably Dapol product!

Example of the Dapol runner, complete, they tend to sell three runners in a set, passengers or workmen, and being polystyrene kit plastic can be remodelled or converted with relative ease!

Dapol are still going despite the bad luck of past works-fires and the BBC's underhand pulling of the Dr Who licence, just before announcing they were bringing the time-traveller back. These are the current shots of painted-up sets on/from their website;

https://www.dapol.co.uk/

D is for Dino-Mag - 3 of 3

For those who don't like dinosaurs here, you will be pleased to learn that's it for these, but - no doubt - gutted to learn the next post will be on the same subject!

Another issue of Andy's Amazing Adventures (not!), with a decent head-count of dinosaur models, this time two bigger and four medium-sized, including metallic polymer being used for both the larger models. The Kerthunkersaur's are not the same species, but are similar sculpts.

 

While I've suggested some may have commercial origins, re. tooling, others may be copied from more commercial makes, like Scleich or Papo, I'm not familiar-enough with them to recognise them in the same way I might instantly recognise Airfix or Britains toy-soldier knock-offs, and they will be much reduced in size?

More paint and a new colour, also the first pterosaur with any realism, I had him on a piece of cotton, I've touched-up, out of the picture! As well as being painted, and one of the larger models so far seen by me, the sauropod is also articulated with moving limbs and head/neck for added play value.

 

This, also a larger model, came in a mixed lot from charity or one of the Blog's donators, however, the black-dot eye says 'probably from this magazine', and clearly I've missed more than I've found, but then I often see them in the Post Office and just think "No, you don't need them, wait for something interesting . . . ".

 

. . . which is why this was the most recent actual purchase of this mag', because paint-your-own, and PYO dinosaurs, specifically, have been another common thread here at Small Scale World, over the years.

 

This one not only had two nice models, but a couple of unusual PVA paints, in both the 'International Emergency' orange and the purple! In fact, the two greens and the muted mustard-yellow aren't the normal colours you'd expect with this sort of freebie . . . so keep your eye out for Andy's crap magazine with occasionally useful cover-premiums!

D is for Dino-Mag - 2 of 3

So continuing with Andy's Amazing Adventures magazine, and I call them magazines because they are not really comics, yet there is very little to their substance! When we were kids we had three types of periodical, straight-out comics, on newsprint, for various age groups, 'bigger boys' magazines like Look & Learn, World of Wonder or Tell Me Why and intermediate stuff, like panel-story fairy tales, or the Disney stuff which tended to be TV-related and aimed at those too-young for the other two types - they were the closest to these modern ones; with puzzle pages and such-like. There is, and always was, the Marvel/DC thing as well, but that's a whole fourth genre!

Now it's all these kinds of things, for all age groups until you gravitate to 2000AD or Judge Dredd, and whether it's this, or the Dr. Who Adventures we followed for a few years at the start of the blog (long gone now), or the stuff aimed at younger kids, it's ALL ephemeral crap, with little to reward beyond whatever IS taped to the cover.

 

Simple puzzles, a sheet of stickers in the middle, some colouring pages and an invitation to send artwork in, is the standard, with maybe an internet portal, all aimed at getting you to watch that programme or that channel, there is no adventure, and nothing amazing about any of the issues I've seen!

Of course, the freebies attached to the covers, need to wind you in, so occasionally, you get an extra-special one to keep you, or parent, buying, and this is a prime example, a substantial card volcano, on several sheets, plus three larger animal models, means this issue would have been sold at a loss, or as a 'loss-leader', to get new 'victims'! Ergo - if You are only buying occasionally, you can stay ahead of 'the man'!

 

This one also had three larger models, and while you may have clocked that the little black eye-dots is a trope with these (not all, but often), this was the first one I noticed with real paint, the spine of the Steggy' having a quick spray of red.

 

This is the same Spinosar as the orange one in the previous post, another thing you have to watch out for with these magazines, and I highlighted it with the Dr Who one a decade ago, is repetitions and duplication, again, by grazing occasionally, you can avoid the worst of that, while building a decent sample.

 

This one just had a decent model-count with three larger and five smaller animals, and another touch of paint . . . the same red! The five smallies look familiar, and will, I suspect, be from standard mini 'toob' dinosaur toys, normally found in more realistic two or three-colour finishes?

 

And this one had twelve minis, six animal models and six to be recruited into a Games Workshop skeleton army! Again, I'm sure all these have had commercial issues elsewhere?

 

The two stegosauruses, though, are from completely different subspecies! But the other five aren't that bad, as matches, with both Dippy's having the head-bump, and the Triceratops horns' being similar.

And, I'm only buying the odd set, as samples, if you are a dinosaur fan, irrespective of the poor contents, or the occasional piece of duff, plastic crap, alongside your dinosaur models, after a year or two, you will have a large tub of many dino's, as most months have at least one, usually multiples.

D is for Dino-Mag - 1 of 3

Another trio of posts! I could have done it as a two I guess, but I had a lot to go on before I did all the collages, and they broke-down easier as three! I've followed this mag pretty casually, only buying it when I feel flush or there is something particularly interesting/worthwhile on the cover, and these posts are what's come-in over the last four years or so.

 

I can't remember if we've done this Mag already, some may be a bot older, but I wasn't paying much attention to the dates, just got on with the images, but they are in the order I took them which should be vaguely chronological!

So this was the first one I noticed (if we haven't had them before), and it wasn't until I got it home that I realised the larger model had a stunted tail! But the fact that the two 'baby' T-Rex's are different sculpts sort of made up for it, and the large one either went to recycling or charity?

 

Another one with half-crap contents, but that's the shtick, isn't it? For the kids or parents of kids who want to follow these mags, most of which are quite short-lived; to get the good ones, you have to pay for enough poor ones to make the thing profitable over its run.

 

I just liked that you got an adult and a baby, even if it is that poor-man's Dimetrodon; a Spinosaur . . . which  - speaking of Dimetrodons - I learnt the other day weren't dinosaurs, but the precursor of dinosaurs, which themselves, probably went on to be mammals or something . . . which might be why the better-modelled ones tend to have that dog-like countenance, they are distant kin?

This one was a bit daft and I thought it might amuse one day (this day!), as it's a capsule toy in which the contents of the - open - capsule are clearly visible! Although all these are in bright, unrealistic colours and look a lot like erasers, they are all modern, environmentally-clean[er], stable (as far as we know, only time will tell) PVC-substitute, polymers.

Note also, it's not the same magazine, this is Cbeebies, the little kiddies BBC mag, I mean they are both BBC mag's, but this title is aimed at a lower-aged demographic, and had dinosaurs as a coincidence, not a regular occurrence, although the eponymous 'Andy' of the other title is there.

 

Another one where the main-item went straight to charity or recycling, pretty sure it was charity, as I thought it was a fun novelty some kid would like to muck-about with on a tedious shopping trip! And with two larger dinosaurs, I was building a more varied sample of the Mag's output . . . more in an hour!