M is for More Stationary

Picked these up the other day, planets in The Range, and the cacti in TKMaxx, actually looking for Halloween or Christmas stuff, drew a bit of a blank on those, but these were worth a punt, given previous things seen here!

 

Tinc again, on the small ones, the larger are an unbranded generic, and I'm beginning to think the originals of these must have been Iwako, just because of the number of other items pirated from them, and the number of these cacti I've seen, we saw two lots a few years ago, one lot I cut-up and 'painted' with marker pens, to make Wild West scenery, the other set I may have only shelfied, but these two sets, in different sizes, were in TKMaxx on red-tickets the other day, so it was a no-brainer, as the expression is, these days!

 

While The Range was carrying these (CDS Group), and they were nearly out, in two stores, so I must have just missed them on previous visits, they are in remarkably subdued or nondescript packaging, so that's plausible, and because the carrying cartons were nearly empty, I don't know if there were more than the two designs seen here, an Earth-like planet and a Saturn like ringed-world.

 

But it's what's at the core of these planets that got me purchasing them, not giant diamonds, boring! But, a shuttle-craft and an astronaut! Which, judging by the wooden-pick in the shots (which looks slightly longer than the one supplied on the packs?) are about 25/35mm, and eminently suitable for joining the stash!

D is for Dinorasers

I'm sure we've had that title before, but I can't be arsed to think up something else! Not exactly a Rack Toy Month perennial, yet something we have returned to often enough, and probably during some RTM's, but it happens I've found four new (or newish?) Dinosaur eraser sets recently, and these is they . . .

 

This was the missing Iwako set, which we did eventually look at I think, but I can't remember if it was shelfies, sealed, a show-shot or the full enchilada, so I grabbed this one when I saw it a while back now (garden centre I think, early May?), so I'd know I had one!

 

We've seen the Pterodactyl, and the other four biggies in close up for sure, but this set (and another multi-animal set) also has the two smaller, single-piece Velociraptors, and a pair of Archaeopteryx (Archaeopteryx'es?) for a nine-model count.

Then, at the end of May, I found these Kiwi dinosaur pencil rubbers, and again I can't now remember where, but it was probably another garden centre, but might have been Home Bargains, the TKMaxx full-price but cheapo' off-shoot? They are straight copies of Iwako (with the exception of the green cartoony smallie, who's also a single piece moulding), but more obvious piracies for not following the colours of Iwako as other clones do, but making for a more interesting heard, when added to the existing Iwako/Hawkins ones!

 

The other day I found these in . . . yeap, a garden centre, but this time I know where! It was the big Longacres  one up at Bagshot, and they are familiar sculpts in a new packaging, this time branded to Deluxbase.

 

And one new colour - the red Spinosaur! Although the two greens are quite different too. We saw the Range/i-doodle set a while ago, but for comparison, you can see it's basically the same assortment. 'Back to school' season, can be a good time to look for these things!

S is for Shelfies - The Range

Shot these back in February, but like a lot of things, they got caught in the general malaise here at Small Scale World this year and languished, lost in Picasa! So, with a rather Easter flavour, here's what was trending in The Range, six months ago!

 

Paint your own Rocket, what's not to like - 

And the umpteenth cartoony-retro rocket this year!

 

I shot these out of a sort of nostalgic feeling, one of the first things I ever reviewed in PW was the encapsulated toys, imported, then, from the USA (circus, wild animals and dinosaurs), and facing stringent safety stuff, due not to the swallowing danger (the capsules melted in warm water . . . or throats), but because the foam would then expand and present a breathing difficulty, they are now around the place in several formats, with no hysteria! Although, these are larger and for print-stamp painting.

 

More paint-your-own!

 

Blobby infant toys, but might turn up in mixed lots in the future?

 

Again nostalgia bit and I bought these, reminding me of the old Pop-a-point pencils of my youth, I've since seen several other similar products, bears, pigs etc . . . as pencils, coloured crayons or felt-tip markers, so clearly another bandwagon trend this year.

 

I also bought these because while the main 'Iwako Eraser' fad, seems to have cooled off, pencil-rubbers remain a great favourite, and you do still get the odd set of Iwako clones or homage-copies, and with a section of them in the collection, it's worth adding to, occasionally, to keep a picture of the genre's trends. These are not direct takes on Iwako, and bent ears seem a defining feature of the set! Branded to i-Doodle, everything else was in-house for The Range or CDS Group.
 

M is for More - R is for Rubbers!

I've been rather too addicted to 'Reels' since Facebook started posting them on our feeds about six-months/a year (?) ago, and one of the common themes seems to be younger Brit's and Americans comparing each other's food, language and culture, often disparagingly, or at least comically, and one of the words which keeps coming up is 'rubber' for eraser.

 

Now, I deliberately chose to use the word 'eraser', from the off, and as the Tag, back at the start of the blog, or when I first covered them, as even if you're not chasing clicks, it behoves you to at least help the search-bots, which are, in the English language, mostly American in origin or location. But yes, we use rubber in everyday lingo.

 

And the various European forms of Spanish 'goma', the French 'caoutchouc' (cow chew!) or German 'gummi', all refer to rubber, as in the latex from rubber trees, while the word erase belongs in the group of words that includes destroy, obliterate, as in to wipe out or cancel. Although the fact that in Hollywood movies, the mafia are often rubbing people out, suggests that the connection is there, and that American English has evolved away from English, and 'rubber', with the adoption of 'eraser'?

 

I'm not sure that we've learnt anything there, or prevented future giggling on dreadful teenage influencer's Tick-Tock's or Instagram's, either side of the pond, but I've got a substantial intro', without much effort! As a follow-up to the eraser's seen in the 'London loot' post yesterday, here's a few more which have come in recently.

 

These are by Rex London, who we've seen before, and I can't remember where I got them now, but it was only a few weeks ago? more Iwako knock-offs, and more marine subjects, the whale with the fountain-spurt found in yesterday's Symex set is here, but the others are a bit more toward the realistic than the cartoony?

 

We did look at some of these in a previous post too, with their little black plastic eyes, and I wonder how may of them ever actually get used as rubbers, the bulk just building as a combined weight of collected novelties on the planet's surface, with the occasional clear-out sending some to landfill?

Dinorasers! We have seen these sculpts in WHSmith packaging before, but I think we have new colours/shades in this set, which is branded to i-doodle, one of the in-house brands of The Range, for their stationary lines, suggesting a third party contract-manufacture for both lots, and further brandings likely, away from these shores!

50p in a British Heart Foundation charity shop here, fundraisers for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution), another charity, and a flat lifeboatman was the attraction! There have been quite a few lifeboatmen figurines, and other relevant items from the RNLI, over the years, and they will get a page on the A-Z's one day, as I have several flyers of their fundraising items.

As an addendum, because I also chose to set my PC to proper English, every use of eraser above, has a blue line under it asking me if I want to switch spellchecker to American-English! And yes, we use the other 'rubber' too! Although there, the nationalism switches to our 'Auld' enemy', where we also call them French Letters, and they call them English Overcoats!

L is for London Loot - 1 Rack Toys

I had a day 'up the Smoke', the other week, sort of annual thing, and managed to come home with a pile of stuff to short and photograph, for adding to the pile and sharing with you, this post is all the 'new' purchases.

I spotted this in a corner shop as we (Mr Evans of Plastic Warrior magazine and I) were passing, and while it's another BJ Toys one, it's not one I've seen round here, and I've checked out many convenience stores in three counties, around and about, so well pleased to find it. It is what it is, and won't be seen again until I tackle the sea life more seriously, at some point in the middle distance, or get BJ's A-Z Page entry done!

Peter took me to one of his favourite rack-toy haunts, and we'd almost given-up looking and were about to leave the shop, when we saw a bunch in a darker corner and this was one (SM Imports) which left with me, more of the thin-walled, hollow types, clipped together from two polyethylene parts, I love the treatment of the curls on the sheep in pink pad-printing!

 

The other find was this set, again larger sized animals, I never used to track down, but over the years the need to ID or annotate everything that might come in loose, has slowly extended the parameters of the collection, and, while for now it'll stay in the bag, I dare say at some point they'll come out and get a better photo-sesh! Branded to an SHC (Shing Hing Corp.?) in China and imported by LTC (London Top Choice).

 

I also visited the Party Shop at Clapham Junction, as always, and picked up a few pieces, among which were these, I think we've seen the make - Symex - before (from the same retail source), but I hope they are new assortments of what will be Iwako knock-offs!

 

These (Fiestas Guirca) were fun, and there were quite a selection, I chose the two simplest probably, to add to the insect pile, with earthworms and glow in the dark centipedes, while the Sainsbury's glow set obviously turned-up in some warehouse clear-out, and got wholesaled as clearance as they were both cheap, and very old stock which we have seen here before, each bag had different contents and not remembering what was in the previous find (charity shop I think?), I tried to get the one with the more eclectic mix!

 

Henbrandt, we may have seen them before, but if we have, I can debag one lot for proper shots and keep a set pristine. Also erasers; and into the mini-car oeuvre, we've already looked at today!

R is for Rubbed Out

I know, but I'm in a hurry and they did all go extinct! Back to the Iwako 'Dinorasers' or Erasersaurs, and I did manage to get one of the new 2020-launch sets back in 2021, so as a bit of a box-tick, here they are, and the backing cloth really seems to be that colour, I can't remember what it was, but the erasers are all relatively colour-true!

 

Packaging

 

Parts count

Assemblies;

Spinosaurus (poor man's Dimetrodon!), Sauropod and a Kerthunkasaurus!

 

I think this means I have all the known Iwako dinosaurs now, but not knowing if the Dimetrodon I found, or these above, will have other colourways, while knowing I still have two colour variations of the Paralophosaurs to find, means the search goes on!

I is for Iwako - Toy Fair 2020

Yeap! 2020, because, despite TJF's protestations about "Timely Manner" 's, most of what I shoot at the toy fairs is non-toy soldier, or non-time sensitive, or both, and is as much for my own records as anything else! Particularly with a novelty item like Iwako, who regularly get pirated by Chines producers, so it's as useful to have the record of the right colour-ways to help filter out copies, as anything else!

 

And I did post the new dinosaurs at the time, so this is a sort of bonus post! But to presage the next post, here's what I shot a few weeks before Covid started to visibly undermine capitalism and our trust in capitalists, if we had any?!

 

The main display; showing how this stuff is never actually rare, a row of modern injection-moulding machines will churn that lot out in ten minutes, and they can run for days, weeks or months - if you want, so people getting excited about late-production Starlux or Britains Deetail is just not something I can really get my head round!

Wacky/non-realistic colours were the thing that year!

Larger Paperchase stores had these point-of-sale displays before their recent bankruptcy. Smller stores may have had one of the others above?

That's it, just a bunch of images I took as much for my own amusement as anything else, and with some 45 folders still in Picasa from the 2019, '20 & '22 seasons, and '23's not even sorted/broken-down yet, I'll be bleeding the stuff onto here and the A-Z Blogs for years to come!

H is for How They Come In - While in London!

I managed to get up to the party shop at Clapham Junction again this year, it's a routine now, I don't really look at my watch on the second troll round the show (after the pub!), but once it's obviously dark and heading for five' or six'ish, I get the over-ground back to Clapham and wander up to the party shop (which closes late).

I have a little mosey round, and head back to the Station, find an hour or more's the wait for a Fleet stopper, so get the next up-line to Waterloo, grab a burger and get the fast-to-Woking service out of there which slides through Clapham without stopping! It used to be every half-hour from both stations, but since privatisation it's got steadily harder to go anywhere conveniently - thanks Tories!

But before all that shenanigans, Mr. Evans handed me a pack from The Toy Project (one of several toy charities both sides of the pond) as soon as I arrived! They actually weren't at the show this year - having not been invited - but Peter had been up and picked me a handful of useful figures, among which were another Beatle (Macca-moneybags is the left-hooker isn't he?) cake decoration, some Lucky Toys (et al.) figures and a farmer from one of the sets Pagett/A-Z were carrying a couple of years ago.

The Piratical chap in yellow might be from a board-game, he seems to have a cocked or tricorne-hat designed to stack something (counters) on and a very board-gamey base? A Disney princess type and small PVC farmer (New Ray?) make up the lot - thanks Peter, and you can support The Toy Project here.

So to the party shop; they had moved everything around and while the novelty/party-favour section was larger, there was less there of interst to me/you, but I managed a set of Iwako knock-offs including a third iteration of the micro-tank, this time branded to Symex and the same guns we saw last time (The Works) as a single, but now three!

I also bought these as they were dirt cheap, and I think they are a re-shoot of an old 1970's tool; the 'rubber jiggler' / hollow finger-puppet dinos', here a bit stiffer, but still rubbery! Actually there's a fair bit of dinosaur stuff gathering in the queue so we will have a dino-fest soon! And note they have been bought-in as Asda clearance (I vaguely recall eschewing them in Asda as too expensive around the 4/5-quid mark a year or two ago?), so they may still be findable in Walmart 'over there'?

As it happens, the Iwako and 'Rock Star' boxes were both still here, they went to storage last week but I quickly shot these 'cumulative' shots before I shipped them out!