P is for Plastic Glass!

Sort of a 'part three', but not really connected to the previous two, which dealt with the 1950/60's stuff, these are the more common stuff from the 1970/80's, and will be quite recognisable to most of you, and really no more than an overview of the other plastic 'vitrines' out there.

 

I sorted the Tags out last night, and 'Glassware' covers everything made of glass from marbles up, but not these, 'Vitrines' covers the real glass versions of these, and they will also have the Glassware tag, while 'Glass Animals' will cover both these plastic ones and the glass ones, so these will have the latter Tag only, marbles will get Glassware only, and real glass animals will have all three Tags, which will hopefully help someone in the future, get the right search-results up?

 

A nice set of six from Hans Postler over the Channel, they are better known, to us, from their many sets of rack-toy soldiers, more in keeping with the main thrust of the Blog, but that this is here, reminds us most of these guys were general 'Toy & Novelty' importers/wholesalers, and would turn their hands to anything they thought they could make a small profit on, and, these are probably 1980's, or later?

 

These have more the look of the '70's about them, and they have tree-hanger rings in them, so there you go, get a daft-looking mouse hung for the festive season! But, you know, if you can't afford the glass ones, because you have some shitty, underpaid job, and live on a trailer-park, and you see these going cheap in the local gas station, or drug store, why not, if only for the kids?

 

Kids aren't snobs, now, I am a bit of a snob, specifically on Christmas decorations, but I was raised to be so, by my late, and much missed mother, who had her own reasons for being like that; Nuns, an even stricter mother and an Edwardian upbringing!

 

'The sins of the Fathers . . .', 'The child is the father of the man'  and all that! There is always a truism in old sayings, wives tales and aphorisms. The tragedy is that somehow, 70-years of progressive democrats, totally failed to educate enough idiots, as to what they were trying to do, and we now have enough Morlocks and Yahoos, who don't get 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel', and they are giving justification to the Trumps, Farages and Le Penns of intolerance?

 

Just as we need the World to come together like never before, the warmongers, climate-deniers, the superstitious, and the anti-science brigades, rise, like muddy, Ork scum from Isengard, to wreak the planet with their ignorance, and singularly selfish stupidity.

 

A knock off Snoopy, an elephant who's also a key-ring, two more of the cocktail glass donkeys, we saw in brown, last time, and a variation on the Hans Postler elephant. The HP set is basically the six commonest types (from experience; that may not be strictly true!).

 

Another elephant, slightly better (slightly earlier?), another mouse, and the deer we saw in one of the comparison shots a few weeks ago. The elephant, if cleaned would have that faux uranium-glass look to him, but I don't know if it's a transparent marker (like most of them) or dyed plastic, and fear if I cleaned him, he might lose all his original colour!

 

A swan and yet another mouse!

 

Two of the mieces, back to back, but not yet in pieces!

 

Two of the elephants, with a small rhinoceros, he's probably from a Christmas cracker, but could equally be a gum-ball, capsule-machine prize, or something from a Lucky-bag, this stuff tended to get around!

 

The Rhino', it's missing one of those crappy plastic key-rings, you press both ends of, to hook onto the plastic oblong which he has retained. Is it meant to be a woolly-rhino'?

 

Only came in recently, and a charm-loop suggests gum-ball or Christmas crackers again?

 

These are interesting, Bam Bam and Pebbles, from the Flintstones, both larger sculpts to, they seem to have been taken from the sort of PVC stuff Bully and Comics Spain might have been issueing, he's holding a club behind his back!

 

While these are equally interesting for having been taken from a set of dogs, which we may have seen here in more realistic colours, as polyethylene toys, but here in the same clear 'canopy' 'styrene, enhanced with transparent coloured marker-pen! We'll look at proper glass ones next!

C is for Chained Miniatures!

More glass animals, except these are all plastic, but I explained how and why that Tag is going to work, and glass animals they are, because glass animals they're pretending to be! Looking at Horses this time!

Chained! Make no doubts about it, these critters are going nowhere, until they're glue!

 

While the deer were 'Mum' and two kids, here we get small medium and large of basically the same pose, still connected with the little anodised aluminium chain, and in a rich orange transparency, with yellow-painted higlights and the same big doe-eyes!

 

A darker orange-brown has also come-in to the stash, here compared with the cocktail-glass ornamental donkey, manufactured in a similar colour, in all cases here, a hard, brittle polystyrene.

 

That donkey in full - that's it, more box-ticking! 

100 is for Pipers, Four Pipers!

We saw their board game I think, right back at the start of the Blog, so they've been sat there in the Tag-list ever since with a '1' in brackets, let's make it a two with these charmers, which I picked-up on evilBay a while back.

A blended whiskey, originally from the House of Segram (of the whacky buildings), it's now manufactured in Asia/the Far East, where it's one of the best-selling brands.

Added when doing the tags - no, we haven't? Must have been One Inch Warrior or something? Maybe we saw some of the figures in a plunder post, and they weren't tagged? I'll have to blog them at the other end! It was a boardgame anyway!

Flats, but chunky enough to be semi-flats, these cocktail stirrers, or 'swizzle sticks' could be cut to provide figures of around 45mm, and will have been manufactured by some anonymous local fabricator whose name we'll never know.

 

Worth a mention, to explain the previous line, when I worked at Rotamould (97'ish?), we had another plastics factory a few doors away, and when I worked in an office down the road a few years later there was an injection moulder in the unit ('lot' as the Americans would call it) next door, they have all gone now. While when I found Tatra, their website had a list of the 15-odd companies they had bough-out over a period of about 30 years, they've now been bought-out themselves.

 

Many people were responsible for the more ephemeral figures/figurals out there, and one can only hope they have another moniker to be known by, as in here, where 100 Pipers will suffice!

Y is for You Wait Ages for One, Then Two Come-along Together!

No; not missives from the PSTSM, although it's funny, he whines I should leave him alone back in April and then spends the summer popping like a seed-pod! And I'm happy I'm so 'not a worry' to him, he only needed the two posts in a row; I'm not under their skin like a tropical bugs-egg's, at all, am I? Hee-hee! And the monkey-lizard is getting quite hysterical . . . not funny - just excited!

No, this is further to the follow-up the other day, this turned-up after I'd posted the article and vacated the Wibbly Wobbly Way for the weekend!

The Winner Industrial (International) Company Limited, a bit of a mouthful, still, we'll probably never return to them, but just in case we do, and for the purposes of tagging; 'Winner' will do!

Despite the 'Industrial' in the title they may be just another jobbing wholesaler/shipping agent type, they're probably the same mouldings as those A1 Co., figures we saw on Saturday, certainly the same seven poses, and probably the same glassy transparent polystyrene of my 30-odd year-old example, and a naff novelty I've probably ripped the arse out of by now, but I had nothing-else for today - just lazyness . . . and sorting stuff!

Or are they the quiet-in-the-background manufacturer supplying both the 1980's German importer and 2006's A1 Company? We'll probably never know! A lot of this ephemeral plastic-tat's going to be banned in the near future anyway; if Trump doesn't kill us all first!

Yea! We've been given twelve-years to save the planet - let's have an arms race!

And . . . 

You can have a whole bloody family!

https://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Cocktail-Mermaids-Mermaid-Markers/dp/B003YDWSMI

M is for Mixed Menagerie of Mermaids

The title covers it, a few mixed mermaids - representing all the main toy-use polymer groups!

At the back right is the Resin one we saw a while ago, still available from The Works, leaning against her is a small gum-ball/capsule machine charm in a hard, undecorated styrene.

To their right (the viewers left) is another resin lump, a recent purchase from Penn Plax and one of a set of Disney stuff for fish tanks, note how much better finished it is than their treasure chest, or Easter Island statues.

In front of that lump is a little polypropylene 'Polly Pocket' type thing of the same Disney Ariel/Little Mermaid figurine, probably Bluebird/Kenner for Disney Stores? The tatty-paint pair between the two Ariel's are polyethylene Hong Kong lumps from the 1970's, I suspect they belong with a group of rather eclectic sculpts which include a turtle with gwee-tar and a W-shaped sea-serpent?

At the front is a clear-blue, polystyrene, cocktail-glass decoration I rescued from a party in Berlin in the 1980's (and one of the oldest-sitting non-25mm figures in my collection), unmarked but likely a Hong Kong generic, although the Germans had lots of plastic novelty makers a few years earlier, so it could be domestic production?

The other bright-blue tailed-girl is an unmarked - probably 'China' - mermaid, similar to but not Soma (who's mermaids' are better sculpts), she's probably from a generic 'Toob', rack-toy or possibly via cake-decorating? She's a modern substitute PVC-like rubber/elastomer.

You can judge the scales from the approximately 28mm Polly Pocket alike.

That's a mixed menagerie of mermaids!