F is for Follow-up to Plunder Posts - Animals (Prehistoric)

Confirmation of the 30mm rubber cavemen being issued by Harett-Gilmar (HG Toys), and some of the rather fat dinosaurs they lived alongside, in the well-known prehistoric continent of Gondneverwhen!

 

Sometimes it's those mid-era (of one's life) toys which pass one by, those issued while you're busy doing other things, but which have disappeared from the retail market by the time you return to collecting, full-time, and I only discovered these, looking for something else, in 2023!

 

The dinosaurs are fat, I mean there's something wrong with their metabolism, which may be a clue as to their demise, if the meteor theory proves false . . . they ate themselves extinct by getting too fat to mate, or move! The shrub, being like everything else, a softish PVC, could easily be mistaken for a Bata accessory, with its semi-flatness?

At least four poses, although I've also seen the guy with stripey loin-cloth ascribed to another toy line (Mighty Max, I think?), but that was almost certainly a false identification, and I'm guessing the string on the bow is a home addition (in fact I think the whole bow is a replacement), and the club is missing from stripey-pants, but you get the idea!

H is for How They Come In - Sunday Surprise!

The 'phone went last Sunday, not too early, but I was veging on my bed in the extraordinary heat we had last week, Adrian was passing and had a 'few bits' for me, he's be about five minutes . . . so I flung some flip-flops on and wandered down to the road . . .

. . . to take delivery of these! I'd mentioned to him that I was after some more Bata (pronounced Barter, not Batter - I know because they had an interview with one of the UK Work's foremen on the World Service the other day (try 'Eye-Witness History')) and he kindly found these within the month! There are four OK and four with minor damage (missing extremities) which is pretty par-for-the-course with these early rubber figures now.

Technically they are Czech (or Czechoslovakian) figure production, but there's every possibility the moulds did the rounds of each Bata factory, so British ones may be British-made? One of the things I learnt from the recently broadcast interview was that in some parts of Africa bata has become the generic term for shoes, so common was the brand locally in the mid-20th Century!

To the Bata Adrian had added a bunch of mini/micro aeroplanes, a couple of mounted Rocco guardsmen and a few Hong Kong bits. We will return to the small pile of mounted Wild West in RTM in a week or two, well; few days now!

However the caveman joined his mates for a quick photo-shoot, I suspect these are by/from LP/Lucky Toys (now known to be - LB (LP) - Lik Be) as they have similar codes to the other figures from the range (excepting the spacemen) and in a similar format to their 'Funimals', but I haven't - as yet - identified the dinosaurs I [also] suspect they should be accompanied by?

They may - of course - be gum-ball machine or capsule-prizes though; due to their small size (50mm), which would make them stand-alone 'novelties'.

 

2025 - A suspicion which was proved correct a year later with the finding of a full set;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2020/08/m-is-for-monster-fantasies.html  

F is for French Figures III - Rubber and Polypropylene

These are the ones that aren't Starlux and don't fit on the other two pages! Mostly recent re-issues by a company unknown to me, some quite early...and Czechoslovakian!

So the older figures are both by BATA from Czechoslovakia and are made from a hard-wearing vulcanised rubber, hard wearing because the parent was a shoe manufacturer! They are therefore not French, but the blue ones may have been made for the French market?

The others are a dense plastic I used to automatically label nylon/rayon, but they're probably polypropylene? Looking a bit Qurialux, a bit Starlux they're probably neither!

These are all made from the same material, the two  middle images are all Quiralux poses, but they've lost the swoppet-heads of the originals (who were in a similar plastic...a clue perhaps?) the upper shots are of older poses originally in hard plastic by other makes, so a mould inheritance thing going on?

These were all (along with the upper 3 in red and yellow/green) 1980's/1990's reissues - I think?

M is for 'Mostly' Unknown!

When I did the WWI post the other day I nearly included this image as a source of potential WWI figures, but realised it needed a toy soldier related text, and as that was a PPE rant, I held it over. These are all either unknown or of an early 20th century style that makes them potentials for WWI.

The first figure on the top row is a Bata figure from Czechoslovakia, he's really a later figure, but with the pack and puttees looks the part for WWI, he's also that rare thing, a true rubber figure who doesn't melt into a puddle like so much of the contemporaneous Italian-made rubber production.

Next to him is a Marx re-issue - probably polypropylene, from the old hand-painted 'Warriors of the World' mould, and while technically an 8th Army/North Africa WWII figure, could just as easily be marching to Baghdad in the First war.

Then we have a complete unknown - definitely polypropylene, I think he's from a construction site toy, but the little tin safety-helmet looks like our old piss-pot, so he could be painted up as a WWI chappie! I have a mental note that he's from New Zealand, but suspect that's actually bollocks and he's just a Hong Kong 'generic'?

Last one in the top line-up is the Reamsa Turk, falling wounded in the Dardanelles - defending his homeland, the best way a soldier should die, not attacking some god-forsaken shit-hole thousands of miles from home. This is a late unpainted example; he's a nice figure and I wish I had the rest of the set!

Bottom left would also seem to be a Spanish figure, but buggered if I could find him on Google the other night, even trying search terms like 'Spanish Ceremonial Cavalry Modern', Spanish Lancers, etc...Included here as he would paint-up to a nice German cavalryman of the immediate pre-war period? Anyone know who made him, or what unit he represents?

The final figure would make a nice British officer from either war, and could be in WWI Palestine/Iraq, Gallipoli, WWII North Africa or even Burma. He turns up quite a bit, in charity shops and vintage toy soldier shows, he's metal, and while it's probably an alloy, it's not the granular Zamac/Mazac of die-cast toy vehicles, being a heavier material which holds fine detail. I'm sure he is actually a tourist keepsake of a Hong Kong Policeman from the pre-1997 period, and must have been quite a common purchase.