B is for Blow-Moulded Blow-Ups

Another one of the Rico Firenze relief 'posters', also marked up to Master Mount in the USA, this one was lacking the header-card, but is possibly the more interesting of the two, dealing with Reptiles & Amphibians.

 

Snakes, Lizards & Frogs!

 

Lizard.

 

Frog.

 

 

Snake-heads, no gangs!

 

O-Level biology!

Yes, the girls cooked a bit of eye-muscle on a Bunsen-burner and ate it! 

 

Digestive tract.

 

 Hearts.

 

The lighting at Sandown Park is not that conducive to photography, sometimes, it's bright enough, but I think it resonates at a different speed to pocket camera's shutter's and with shooting them through their polythene bags, they've all had to be contrasted and enlightened in Picasa to get them closer to what's actually in the bag, which is very colourful!

 

Many thanks again, to Adrian Little for these. 

T is for That's a Relief!

Does anyone else remember these, I have vague memories of them, in school science labs, hospital waiting rooms or corridors, dentists surgeries, that sort of thing, but I also remember them being cracked, dusty, sun-faded or discoloured, so they must have been popular in the 1960's perhaps, most of my memories being after 1970, when I was six?

 

Rico Firenze of Italy, but an English Language version, and a thin, polystyrene vac-formed moulding, I assume from the contour-following location lines, that the coloured artwork was added before the shaping of the sheet?

 

Dog!

 

Deer.

 

Heart and the Digestive System of a carnivore.

 

Digestive System of a ruminant, and the Lungs

The reverse of the card/sheet.

Imported into the US by the Master Mount Corp., of Flushing, New York.

 

And while I may have given the impression in my opening paragraph, that I remember them everywhere, or all over the place, I don't, but I do remember the odd one here and there, and probably in small frames, did they come here from the US, or dierect from Italy, or did we produce our own, were there more than one maker? I would have loved something like this at Christmas, you could look at it again and again!

 

Thanks to Adrian Little for letting me photograph this old treasure, and rare survivor.

I is for Insect Lore - Archive

I thought I'd posted these guys, literally years ago (these are from 2020), but they are all still in Picasa! So I'm posting this here, and then I'll combine the smaller numbers of shots from '23 and '25 in a single post later. This was from the London show, a couple of months before the Covid lockdown, which - time has, I think, shown - changed all our lives, more than we thought it was doing, at the time?

 

!!!! Effing annoyed when the images loaded in reverse, which seems to happen quite often these days and I don't know if I should be blaming Windows 11, Blogger/Google or Lenovo! But in fact, it makes sense to use the poorer images (which were going to be at the end) for the introduction to the company, then look at the figural products!

 

Insect Lore are a kind of 'early learning' schools-support / craft outfit, where you buy the kit, and/or any supporting products, then sent away for the Butterfly (or Ant?) eggs, so you can raise them to adulthood, learning the egg-pupae-lava-adult cycle along the way, and then release them, or do an ant-farm?

 

In 2020 they were raising Painted Lady's (or Ladies? No, some of them must be men!), which - while not native to the UK - are a regular summer visitor around the Southern and Eastern coasts, and with nowhere in the UK further than 51 miles from a beach, it means you can find them pretty-much anywhere in a good year, and also means that after any release, they can complete a typical life-cycle.

 

The kit here consists of a jar of feed, instruction booklet with details on how to raise them and find the food plants, along with a jar of the special feed etc . . . and the 'butterfly net' netting cage, in which to observe the metamorphosis of the chrysalis phase and emergence of the adults.

 

Blister carded life-cycle sets of rubber (modern PVC-substitute) polymer animals are also sold, and these may be bought in or commissioned specifically, I don't know, and am no expert on toy insects, but they look a little different, so may well be exclusive to Insect Lore?

 

Toobs of mixed Insects and Butterflies are also in the catalogue, along with all the expected stickers, booklets &etc. Again I don't know if these are unique to Insect Lore, or bought-in generics, they look more familiar, so may be the latter, however, they are both reasonable samples with about 18 Butterflies in the first image of this sequence - Insect Lore, box ticked!

 

Websites -  

US https://www.insectlore.com/

UK https://www.insectlore.co.uk/

 

P is for Playplax Plastic Play Pieces by Patrick Rylands

This is one of those nostalgia hits for people of a certain age, as if you didn't have them yourselves, you knew someone who did! In our case we never had these, but various other friends did, and they tended to be kicking around, but didn't get that much play, as we were older, as friends, and these were leftovers from earlier childhood.

I can't remember the exact date of this Sunday-supplement cutting, or the title, but they were a batch from mostly 1969-74'ish. The toy had won it's designer a Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design in 1970, among a tranche of other toys he, the Patrick Rylands of the post's title, had designed for Trendon Toys. He would go on to work with Ambi Toys in Denmark, not in the Tags yet, but I think there is something in the files for the A-Z entries!

 

He was - and I believe remains - the youngest ever recipient of the award for which the citation, as published in the June edition of the Design Journal that year, reads;

 

"The Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design 1970 has been awarded to Patrick Rylands for a range of toys designed for Trendon Ltd. The judges were impressed by Mr Rylands's creative approach to the design of toys and by his sustained contribution to toy design in the development of this range. They particularly commended the abstract qualities of the toys, which encourage children to use their imagination and introduce them to ideas of structure, form, colour and balance.

The best known of Patrick Rylands's toys is Playplax and this illustrates all the features which the selection panel praised. Playplax consists of simple tubes and flat squares of transparent polystyrene slotted so that they can be constructed in a multitude of ways. Red, yellow, blue, green ond clear pieces are included in each set so that children learn about colour combinations while exploring the wide variety of constructions which can be achieved."

 

He had originally designed them in ceramics, which he read at University (Hull and the Royal Collage of Arts), before creating these for Trendon in ABS/Acrylic, which was quickly replaced with polystyrene. There's plenty more on the internet, under Patrick Rylands or PlayPlax!

My own memories of them are mixed, I did have a few plays, the friend's samples tended to have lots of broken and cracked pieces, it was, in fact, far too easy to break them, either by forcing, or just sliding them together or apart at slight angles, and equally - they cracked easily.

 

As you can see from this shot, they were also quite wobbly constructions, that needed a flat surface, and steady hands, if one was to produce anything lasting and/or memorable! And actually, they had a pretty limited spacial-geometry, the tubes being far better for constructing substantial things, than the plates, which tended to spread quickly in space, without producing much of practical application!

Colours varied over the years, or between sets, and the one thing you can say for them is that they were colourfully eye-catching, especially when new and shiny! One US licensor (or pirate?), added triangles at some point which you see on evilBay from time to time, but what would have really given the line 'legs' would have been square or triangular tubes, like the round ones, or . . . and why did nobody ever do it, small joining clips, which would have allowed for long, flat runs, or side-by-side mounting?

 

The stuff is apparently still made, by Portabello Games, in the original colours and the original factory, still polystyrene (still brittle!) but no further innovation since the 'flower' pieces were added, or, are they knock-offs?

Instruction sheets from the first two sets, I don't know when the flowers' hit, but it must have been quite late, as you don't often see them in feeBay lots? And they may be a piracy thing, but I do seem to remember some of our mates having them in the larger samples?

Where they come into their own however, is in futuristic settings, think: Logan's Run, Babarella, or some of the early alien city's in Dr. Who or Star Trek! Not to mention half the props in Blake's Seven! Here I've managed a garage for space car number five! But it is huge, and you still have a very low ceiling!

 

Slightly more success with a rocket tower, but the inspection platforms are breaking all the rules of Playplax, being half-set at an angle and not locked in! But not too shabby for what was basically an infant's hand/eye coordination, 'early learner' toy.

 

There were the inevitable knock-offs, here made for a US 'jobber' (The Toy house), in the British Crown Colony (should we call it the long-term lease, now?) of Hong Kong. Pluses were more colours or - at least - different shades, minus were that they sometimes had different dimensions which either made them looser, or more likely to jam and split/break the not so cheap UK production ones!

H is for How They Come In - Charity Shop Backlog - 2021, 2 of 2

I think this lot all came from Blue Cross, the animal charity, they tend to get my cast-offs too, although that has led to me buying back my own Chinashite on at least one occasion! But it had had some good stuff added-in with it, and it's all for charity!

Beginning sorting, I shot this badly, as there are several bags hidden under the one with the label, but they are all in the .gif-shot below! Date for these is August of that year, an immaterial detail, but if I don't tell you 'everything', TJF is likely to cum in his pants again!

 

I see he's going to show us all the Blue Box characters I failed to, the other day, or at least I hope he is, so far he's only shown a duplicate, and much more of that would be 'Simon says catch-up, follow-up, copycat!'. And strange that he didn't show them to us six years ago, when I was accusing his Blog of falsely claiming - through his little apprentice - as fact, that there are 33, when there are only 12, or 24?

The contents of the upper bag, were the detritus of smaller dinosaurs the shop had gathered over time, the pile in the middle are shot again (below), while the little yellow jobbie and the bigger blue one (bottom left and right) may be from the kid's magazine we had an overview of here a while back.

 

The bat is a bit of Halloween fare, and has already been seen in that capacity, I think, here at Small Scale World, while the snake looks like an accessory from a larger-scale play set or action figure companion piece?

 

This is one of those rare occasions where two shots are so similar they can be slammed together to make a '3-D' .gif image which gives an idea of the shape, size, bulk, even texture of the figures!

 

In fact, it's showing rather small, so here;'s one of the original images, from the hidden bags, we have a pile of Kinder Super heroes, several cats, probably from kids magazines, and a large China-goat! Heay, it will be indispensable when I get round to the mighty Goats page/post!*

We're about to look at the multicoloured pile - top right, while the Jasmine mini-action-figure from Disney long-ago went back to charity! Novelty frog, dogs, penguins . . . I've had a lot of penguins come-in over the last decade or so, many of these pocket-money, softish, animal sets seem to include a penguin sculpt!

 

* For a certain type of American - that's humour, b't . . .  am I joking?

So, the multicoloured pile, I suspect some kind of early-learning / infant toy, there's a lesser possibility of them being from a boardgame though, or family 'carpet-game'? But they are more like all that Merit, Galt, Salter or Pedigree stuff of our own (50/60-something)'s childhood, the nuclear family in a robust, simplified form, for little fingers to manipulate? But in this case, of not-much age?

 

I also suspect the yellow 'family' is complete, and that the whole sample is all the colours - four? I don't need any more, it's almost too big a sample, given how far removed from Toy Soldiers, wargaming, modelling or model railways it is, but I do need a blue cat - any missing cat, is a cat missing from that side collection!

 

I shot them last, but these are the larger central pile of mini-chinasaurs from the second image, they obviously go together, and as I've mentioned in the past, I will bring them all together in one post, someday, as there are so many of these 2/2½/3-inch types! These are a semi-translucent white polymer, soft PVC-alike, with a one-colour over-spray.

 

The green Steggie' (top left) was in the 'odds' bag, and probably doesn't belong with the others, but I included him in the shot, as he is in the same size bracket, so illustrates the previous point about so many of them, mostly different, but sometimes copied, or - in the case of the Toy Major ones - marked differently for different contracts/end-users, or decorated differently, while he's very similar to the other set.

F is for Follow-up - Return to Infant Farms

We've looked at these twice now;

 

First Visit

Second Stab

 

But there is always more to find, another chapter of the narrative to be told, and today we're looking at a 'West German' version from Magneto (more on them in a subsequent post), a name which could the one jhnptrqn remembered as his brother's 'French' set, on the original post;

 

The generic we looked at last time was clearly aping this set, even to the clear polystyrene lid, however this (original?) has a deeper box and floating tray, but is otherwise very similar. And it establishes the rules followed by the Hong Kong clones, to wit; three smaller houses with pitched roofs, one larger one with gable-ends and a slightly larger door, the towers with their bridge-piece and the designs of animals, figures and trees.

The sides of the box offer clues to information which my incomplete sample would otherwise not give-up, sheepdog and sheep, a pine/fir tree, a trough which seems to be a reduced-size version of the bridge and the fact that they were intended as beach toys as well as home-entertainment! It also gives suggestions of ways to use the few building elements to combine for larger structures or a church!
 

 

The roofs are glued on with this set, unlike the HK ones, where they are loose, and all the buildings are larger than their clones. While the 'sprulettes' which came in the box seem to be suggesting the four missing sheep were a softer polyethylene, everything else here is polystyrene.

 

It also looks like the Hong Kong makers we've seen previously here at Small Scale World may have invented the other figures, but there may well be a 'W. GERMANY' marked town set or village with the other poses?

P is for Preserving Popeye's Poorly Packaging

Just a brief one, this is almost a re-run of a post I did with a similar box-frame from SAE of South Africa back at the start of the blog, but it may help someone somewhere fix something similar!

How the parcel in yesterday's post unpacked; the combined results of various postal services 'duty of care', coupled with the sellers decision to send an old and already torn carton in a heavy paper envelope with lose bubble-wrap and a sheet of card, the bubble-wrap rolled and bunched under the floating card and ripped the end of the box off!

Slide the contents out, unseal the glued flap and flatten out the carton, damp it and iron it flat, on the printed side I use a couple of sheets of printer paper (there's a change in my lifetime; 20-years ago I would have written 'typewriter paper' there!) between the work and the iron.

Bookbinder's licky-sticky adhesive paper-tape; Butterfly Brand is commonest, indeed, it might be the old one still extant, I don't know? Really it should come back as it's far more eco-friendly for parcels, if a bit messy!

Run the tape through the water so it gets quite wet, place it where required and then 'squeegee' it flat with dry cotton cloth or kitchen paper.

Cross-ply over particularly damaged areas, tares etc. And you need to cross the 'grain' of the tape, as it will help keep everything flat, over time the tape has a tendency to memory-curve back to the roll position, it's why you want to get it quite wet. Iron it dry, but with a lower heat, you don't want the tape popping-off, just consolidating flat.

Then cut back to any edges you've gone over, and here, I'm cutting the line of the original die-cutter, where Popeye overlaps the front as the material beside him folds down to make the frame-box. I use the fine No.11 blade from Swan Morton (No.3 handle)* as it has a very fine tip, and I use a new blade to get a sharp, instant cut with no snags. Obviously this is a posed shot, I would never use my left hand to do something requiring such accuracy and light touch.

* I have not been paid for this blatant commercial!

Apply a contact adhesive to one half of the previously sealed side. Allow it to go tacky. Bostik haven't offered any cash either!

Likewise with the opposite surface of the other flap of the join, watching for strings, all contact adhesives seem to veer toward stringiness, that's one of their properties!

Bring the two surfaces together, dropping the camera so you can line up the other end and get the whole thing straight! When you are sure it's all good, press them lightly together, you will have a nanosecond to change your mind and pull them apart again, or slide-squeeze them into line, then run you finger down the laminate with a little more pressure.

Finally I use a metal-edged designer's ruler to press the join heavily with a bit of back-and-forward 'sawing' action, getting into the two edge-folds to ensure a firm join. Again, you need to loose the camera, to hold both ends and press down, then 'saw' back and forward. You could use a piece of square-profile dowel or wood-strip, but you wouldn't get the required firmness in the middle.

The finished item can be seen in the previous post (forth image down), which will either be immediately below this post or can be found by left-clicking the 'older post' hot link below.