H is for How They Come In - One Day in July . . . 2014!

Another day's purchases, this from a trip to Basingrad in July 2014, and we've had articles here on most of it, but I'm clearing Picasa with these posts you know!

The Noch bar set and the Model Scene came from the Church Street model shop, the skydivers and the pencil/eraser/sharpener set both came from The Works I think, not sure about the Team GB Olympic clearance thing (the now defunct 99p Stores?), while the blind-bag dino's and Hobbit stuff was also The Works I suspect.

The Bart Simpson was a blind-bag from WHSmith's or someone similar - it may have been reduced in Tesco, but it was a while ago!

Can't remember if we looked at these here, or another pair, also I think these and the dino's may have been bought in another Works a week earlier and just hung-around to end-up in the same collective shot?

Much covered elsewhere, so I won't bore you with the minutiae, there were differences between the first and second series' plastic colours I seem to recall, and these are 2nd series I think?

The naming of the parts! This has been sat in Picasa waiting for god-knows-what post, but I thought the way the bare runner was arranged in the blister made it ideal for labelling-up, if only to illustrate the difference between the 'Sprue' (missing in most kits/figure packs) and the 'Runners' which a lot of people refer-to as sprue, and a few idiots lesser mortals [I must stop insulting everyone] call sprew, sproo or spru!

Some kits, in the past, have had sprue left on; early Aurora, Pyro and Revell-Monogram type model-kits often included them while some of the late-production, unpainted Starlux 40mm in the 'figure set' boxes were packed with the sprue intact, in both cases (old kits and later figures) the sprue had a tendency to damage the box/box-art over time by wearing a hole/working through the card.

The reason the actual sprue ends-up cone-shaped is because it stretches as it's pulled away from the still-hot injector head during the removal of the runners/product from the mould-tool.

R is for Rubbed-out

The other noticeable trend - which we've been showing here for a couple of years now - is the modern, crumbly-rubber eraser trend; kids have always collected rubbers (I once fancied a girl who collected them!) so that's not as new as the material which seem mostly to be aimed straight at collectors.

I shot these shelfies the other day in a discount store (Home Bargains) in Basingrad, I've collaged all four images as the reflection was diabolical! Around the 70mm mark, these are like the Iwaco rubbers, having a slot-together 'swoppet' element to their make-up, but much bigger.

And: a new name in the Blog's tag-list! Sambro seem to another of those modern equivalents to the old FOB-jobbers, handling licenses and their applications, rather than inventing 'new' stuff, wearing their branding but manufactured in an anonymous great OEM-factory in China.

Brian Berke sent these to us at different times over the last year - on the left is a London Bus (in New York!), with a pull-back motor in the lower half (the body of the bus seems to be in two parts) while the torso of The Batman is  also pierced for use as a pencil-top, but he's a bit heavy! Your handwriting would suffer long before RSI kicked-in . . . stick him on the desk-top as an ornament of popular culture! Thanks again Brian.

This goes with the little Bluesky shuttle/spaceman combination we've already looked at on the Blog, a hybrid modern multi-role fighter with something of the Typhoon and both Mirage and Saab's latest offerings, along with a Russian or Chinese looking rocket eraser.

Finally you can't go wrong with this from the same maker as the Turtles, but shelfie'd in TK Max . . . an army of minions! There's actually only five sculpts (four of each) and they don't all seem to interconnect, some of them have different dungaree designs, therefore different neck/shoulder shapes, but 20 Minions for a few quid? Bargain!

RV is for Regular Visit!

Back to The Works , which if you are a regular here, you will know I might as well be the prime advertising agency for! Sadly they don't give me a penny for all the publicity I give them, but hey! These are from a few weeks ago, but Internet has been problematical recently...Voda-no-fone! [Accurately; Voda-intermittent-pricey-fone]

So, as I say a visit the other week, it's all ephemeral, eclectic stuff which - I know - leaves the purists thinking "What the hell?...", but there you are, I try to cover a little bit of everything, and this pocket-full ticks a few boxes;

Pencil Tops, erasers, Sky TV, zombies, moles, monkeys, media toys...all for £4.24, which I spent so you wouldn't have to!

Close-ups, on the top row are the Ugo la Talpa figurines (by Giochi Preziosi), these are a Sky (Italy) character, presumably now on the clearance warehouse list somewhere and snapped-up by The Works for sale-on here in the dis-UK. They are flocked with the exception of accessories and the 'oscar' (Ugar?), although his base is flocked.

The semi-flat zombies (Bluesky - who also made the spaceman topper we looked at a while ago) are hideous, and are only here for the sake of completeness, seemingly transfer-printed onto Identical cut-outs, I later went back to check and all the cards have the same three images and the same duplicate figure. The monkey climbers (also Bluesky) are also supposed to hold the pencils up, but their bottoms aren't flat enough, so you have to prop them-up!

On the same trip I found these in Poundland, a 'Lucky Bag' (Funtastic) with no sweets and some pretty poor contents, but...it's a pound

N is for New Finds, Pt.7 - Gold Daleks and Pencil Tops

Or...B is for Bluesky, Blueprint and Bluw Ltd...

So, this little lot of interrelated things were all coming in to the collection over Christmas just gone, as I went about seeking things out for other smaller people, the linking trends being names with blue in the title, gold Daleks and/or pencil tops!

So the first purchase (back in the late summer/early autumn?) was the Bluesky pull-back motored, hard-styrene space-shuttle pencil-top and astronaut rubber (that's 'eraser' to those so childish they can't say rubber without giggling), there were other designs, I can't remember them but I know I then found more on the Internet but this was the one with a figure, so this was the one I got. Can't remember where either, but it was a cheepie shop - I think?

Then at Christmas I was passing through Basingrad and found a little old model shop clinging on to the pile of new precincts joined together with poured concrete. In a mug on the counter he had white, yellow, blue and orange Fatleks along with a TARDIS as pencil-toppers, this time by a company called Blueprint out of Harlow, Essex (importers I imagine), I bought a yellow one.

At around the same time Dr. Who Adventures were re-running (?!) their pencil-toppers, so an issue was acquired.

This meant I needed to go back to Basingrad to get a TARDIS (for comparison!) and another - blue - Dalek...because it was there and er...the orange and white ones had gone! The TARDIS is a pen top, not a pencil top.

A week before Christmas doing last-minute shopping for jelly window-stickers (a tradition) I found this die-cast key-ring of the new-old-shape gold Dalek in Robert Dyas (UK hardware chain) and had to have one...for comparison! I also couldn't resist taking it part to see how it was put together. it's a very robust little model but the eye stalk is the softest PVC ever. This is the Bluw contribution.

Then just after Christmas I got this big one in Waterstone's bookshop, it's part of the range of little boxed games and 'executive toys' they do on a rack near the tills. I've previously bought the little set of foam aeroplanes. I suspect it's a re-boxed toy from the action figure lines but is unmarked?

Comparison shots include the Character Options minis in black and gold, a styrene Fatlek from Dr. Who Adventures/HMA and another of the Basingrad Fatleks - in orange, because...

...in January I returned to see if he'd been restocked and he had, so red, orange and white were added t the growing pile of approximately 35mm Fatleks!

The shots to the right are the final comparison for now and include two colour variations of the DW Adventures pencil top, the Blueprint pen top and a resin Police telephone-box from Harburn Hamlets.

Now when I wrote '(?!)' above, that's because when I was putting all these away I realised that the Christmas Adventures TARDIS pencil top (which came with a note book) was different from the one issued with a Fatlek and other things a year or two ago (see blog passim), so HMA have issued two different TARDIS's (what IS the plural - Tardis, Tardii Tardises or Tardis's?), but that will have to wait for another day when we can also look at the Dinky and Wardie/Mastermodels Police boxes!

Relevant Links;

Church Street Models - Basingrad
Bluw - Daleks
Blueprint Collections
Bluesky Designs Pullbax