E is for Everything Else - Odds & Sodds!

There were a few smaller pieces and loose figures picked up at the Last Sandown Part show, which was, in some respects, one of my best yet for purchaes, but in conversation, there's a feeling that while prices are down, this stuff is coming out of the woodwork at the moment, I got a really nice, never seen before piece off of that evilBay the other day.

 

I've never really followed this stuff, nor felt the need to, poorly acted 'C' movies, for kids, in the 'over the top' style of kids programming, never grabbed me, but there is a big following for the whole Kaiju, Gojira, Ultraman, Atomic-boy stuff, and these are probably quite modern 'Ultramen', and may be from one source, but two are realistic 54mm'ish solids, well within the scope of the collection, the other two are a super-deform (right) and big-head (left), both of which, leave me pretty cold.

 

A Christmas cracker bike, and two micro-trucks from Italy, another 1-ton Humber knock-off, too close to the Dinky original to be considered the donor for all the Hong Kong copies, but could be based on the Pyro/Kleeware minis? And a post-war US 'duce-and-a-half' probably an M39 era/generation?

 

Very obviously an ex-Giant chariot, we looked at them on the Romans page (above), and eventually will look at them again on the But is it Giant sub-Blog, in greater detail, but for now, this one needs a good clean, or at least, the horses do!

 

A couple of bags of odds I picked up on a wander, the gum-ball robot will go in a bag with several others and bits, in the hope his arm turns up one day! Two lesser characters from the larger, 'styrene set of Noddy figures, a Fozzie Bear pencil top, and another of the Rupert Bear pencil-top torsos, I think I have four now, two Kinder and an LB for Culpitt spaceman!

 

Adrian found these two for me, French clowns in hard plastic of the polystyrene type, but being French could be Phenolic or a formaldehyde resin of some kind, although both are stable. Cyrnos, Clairet; someone like that?

 

A bit of fun, it links a common-enough piece of scenery to a specific animal, so not that useful, but it also links marks together.

 

Swoppet knock-offs!

 

A nice, early piece of, probbaly German composition, around 45mm, and unmarked, he's obviously a WWI-era German soldier, and I rather like him, as a possibly very old survivor . . . 1920/30's?

 

Isaac gave me these two lots, the Cherilea 60mm's are clean, but have lost 90%+ of their paint, while the karki infantry might have all been home-painted to match, or are a new-to-me paint scheme, the radio-operator is Benbros.

 

Seen in a recent book-post, useful little monograph on Selwyn Miniatures.

 

I'm guessing this is American, but it could be French, or from down the road! It's a solid lump of die-cast Mazac / Zamak or pure aluminium (not light enough?) with wooden wheels, and may once have been a penny-toy . . . a whole penny!

 

Make your own caption! How cake-decorations are born!

L is for Last May's Lots of Lovely Loot - Everything Else!

Given that I got a shed-load of good stuff yesterday and still have to clear the Plastic Warrior Show stuff first, I'm rather glad to be putting May's plunder-posts to bed! Mostly civil subjects, with a couple of oddments, there were one or two treasures among them.

 

This was one of those frustrations, only associated with those who don't carry a farty, nerdy 'wants' list around with them . . . step-up that man, 'cos it's me! The seller had several of these, but I really couldn't remember which ones I already had, and thought this looked like one I didn't, when I did, doh! And while I looked for them again yesterday, I didn't see them!

 

Should hold this for ITLAPD, but there's some nice stuff lined-up this year, so they can go here, they are soft, PVC, factory-painted, generic versions of the unpainted Webb's Supertoy pirate set, which is also still contemporary, somewhere, as both me and Peter Evans have been finding them.

 

Tudor Rose seesaw, I got it primarily to help ID the babies, and was surprised to find they are PVC like the Thomas ones (I was expecting polyethylene), which means I'll have to be doubly careful, when I come to sort all the pink babies!

 

Also, it's a bit odd that both companies chose a material which can melt the accompanying polystyrene toys they all came with, but then, at the time of manufacture, neither knew the potential for the melting, which AFV kit owners would be learning about by the 1970's! Not to forget the proud owners of Action Man diving suits - that sticky, orange hood!

 

Unpainted castings of possibly game-playing pieces, but I have to compare them with the Lilliput one, before I decide if they aren't actually just home-piracies of the Britains ones? If they are copies, I might paint them up, at some point in the future, before the task is beyond my eyesight!

 

These are composition, and a pumice type, which suggests British or French production, but the little red collars mirror those of wooden erzgebirge stuff, so they maybe from the Ore Mountains area of Saxony (Germany) or Bohemia (the Czech Republic - formally Czechoslovakia)?

 

The two nearest the camera are larger and lack the scenic bases, and also might be bisque porcelain or chalkware, they seem a little harder (but you don't casually test things this small) so I bagged them separately.

 

Some Japanese stuff I guess?, I don't know if they all go together or not, some are harder, some softer, some have pencil-holes, some don't, a few won't stand up, alone, some are transparent, others opaque, so I arbitrarily grouped them into three for shooting, and await further info' on what they actually are!

 

Circus! A Frazer & Glass clown, who has no signs of being glued to any of the accessories, or his compatriots, so one assumes that when they were being sold from the glass-compartmented shelf-displays in Woolworth's, you could purchase single, unadorned clowns? Of course you could, and he was in the sets as well; A1 Clown!

 

Two of the Merit 'Travelling Circus' wagons, which gave rise to various Hong Kong copies, both of the wagons as wagons, and as trains, and a lovely spirit-painted, wheeled, Japanese novelty, a celluloid blow-mould, of a monkey, in a fez, on a hobbyhorse, of course and why not!

 

These are definitely bisque, and probably French fèves, fox-hunters in hunting pink, with their hounds, around 35mm, they are a bit bigger than the common, modern fèves, so may have been more decorative, or even cake decorations, in which case they may be British; but, they need black boots?

 

These were a lovely find, Sima (Sixtus Maier, of Fürth, Germany) model railway flats, these were made for Märklin HO railways, back in the 1950's, although they measure a little larger, and presumably pre-date Märklin's own sets, and the similar Wettig sets? Note how the gosling doubles as a rearing chick!

 

I found another bird on the floor and retook the image, but the colour is all wrong, so I left it down here, purely for compleat'ness!

E is for Eye-Candy - Rubber Suits

Just a quickie, having a sort the other night and photographed all the minor-sample, droid-mecha-auto-tranformer-battle suit, small bots which have come in over the last few months, these are all soft, PVC-like or eraser-rubber, technically - mixed elastomers!

The three larger erasers we've seen before here, while the two taller blue ones are interesting for being my First marked 'Korea'. The sucker-bot is about half the size of the Lik Be (LB, because it can't realistically be anything else) ones, and the checked-chap in pale blue is a M.U.S.C.L.E from Mattel via-Japan, and the small blue one with the big exposed brain is another Japanese Kaiju type mini.

 

The rest (green, silver, orange and sucker) are Hong Kong's finest, with the green one being an apparent conversion, from the straight pantographing of a parachute toy licensed from He Man, I think, by removing the shroud-line hooks.

 

Added within the hour; the sucker-bot has a full set of M.K. and T-in-a-circle marks for Mei Kee, (also and since around 2016/17 credited to one of two Tai Hing's on Moonbase, I can't remember why) and is actually about 2/3rds of the size of the LB ones, not 1/2 as I said above - I'm shit at judging by eye!

 

There's loads of this mini-stuff in the stash, and one day I'll try to make more sense of it all!

U is for Ultraman Ululators!

Well, if they're not Ultraman I'm sure someone will tell me! What can I say about these? Obviously they're not strictly ululators, except that when operated by small children, I think whistles can be classed as ululators . . . "Ululation is a howling or wailing sound"!

 

For some reason I seem to have taken three sets of images from the front, but none from the back, and as I've had a mare of a round tonight - targeted/tracked box with different bar-codes on either end, one of which was correct, but the contents weren't, then I ripped my finger open and lost my vape, so stress levels rose!

 

Anyhoows, I can't be arsed to collage anything, so you get them raw! Novelty whistles, probably from Japan rather than Hong Kong, but who knows, not me, that's for sure! I'll use both Tags.

 

Ultraman 'type' on the left and a couple of Kaiju, one more monster, the other more golem? They're not vast, with the mouthpiece, about 3½ / 4 inches, and soft, blow-moulded polyethylene.

D is for Dinorasers - 2 of 3

The second part, which is really of two pairs, or a T is for Four! Looking at the full sculpt/more realistic ones first, as a carry-over from part one, then a pair of 'flats' although 'slabs' is a better description!

Loving these anonymous types; two obvious dinosaurs and two, clearly Kaiju monsters! These are large for Erasersaurs, about the same size as the Strawberry ones, but I'll sort the sizes out in the final part.

 

While after the Taiwanese set in the last post, we are off to South Korea to find the Popcorn Fancy factory these left, however long-ago! They have a lot of surface detailing, but it's a bit odd, and was either early CAD-CAM machining, or the masters were 3D-printed when that tech' was, itself, still new, as the texture consists of lots of little rod-like structures, arranged in what appear to be similar to Fibonacci 'spreads'?

Flats, in that they are flat! Waterslide transfers applied to shaped cartouches? Blobs? Clouds! Barely figural, but look below, at least these are trimmed to a vaguely figural-shape! And we've got a couple of mammals, but as the oldest sets of Dinorasers have Woolly Mammoths in their line-up - that's practically tradition!

 

And yeah! These are just blocks with dinosaurs on them, but once you have established a 'side collection', completist'ism clicks-in, and any dinosaur eraser is a good eraser. It's the same with robots and spacemen, where 'flats' and blocks now feature!

K is for Kollection of Kute Kaiju Killers!

Bit of a mystery these, they appear to come in two sizes, big and very big, I now have all the big ones but only two very big ones!

 

The story starts about 15 years ago when I bought three off the brothers' Curry, who used to have one of the most interesting stalls at Dave McKenna's toy soldier show in the old masonic hall in Birmingham.

 

They didn't know what they were, I didn't know what they were (apart from the obvious; some kind of Japanese monsters, probably dinosaurian Kaiju from the Godzilla franchise), but I could see their potential with small scale space or GI figures, so a price was agreed, and a deal was done!

 

These were they, the initial three, I now know the one on the right is only a big monster, from the set of twelve this post is mostly about, the other two are very bigs from a set of unknown quantities!

 

I posted them on Brain Heiler's fan site on Faceplant a couple of years ago with a call for help ID'ing them, and Keith Bowman and David Crow both answered the call, with the upshot that it is believed they are all Kaiju from The Ultraman / Ultra Seven franchise, not Godzilla, and from the left, can be ID'd as;

• Bemstar
• A version of the Red King
• Neronga
  

But then this turned-up! Credited to a Victory, and carried in the UK by Henbrandt, I've seen them on eBay in the US and Germany, but with no clear jobber beyond the Victory brand-mark, I've added the extra three as there is room, indeed, there's so much room in the box, you'd think it was a counter-dispenser with maybe 24 items, but the box makes clear it was a set of 12.

 

Grouped mostly in pairs of matching plastic colours, presumably for production reasons, so I shot them in the same groups. These are the pair of reds, who are exploring the ashes of the bonfire down the bottom of the garden, both have green spine plates, and both need ID'ing (as do all bar the Neronga), if you know more about these things than I do!

 

The Greeny-golds! Another pair, and including a baby Beamster? They got to fighting on the gravel area at the back of the drive! The two larger ones in the original purchase have moving arms, with the red king having moving legs too, the smaller ones don't have moving limbs.

 

A pair of pinky-golds, while they don't have the moving limbs, they do have two halves, but only for reasons of production, there's little deliberate or meant movement, and they may actually have been glued or heat-sealed?

 

Running out of ideas, the blacks and grey (another Neronga) were posed round my late Mother's kitchen! the Neronga is slightly different to the first one I found, but we'll compare them in a minute.

 

Ah! The 'fairy' trio! Pale blues and mauve, I'm guessing these are not terribly close to the the characters they are ripping off, but it would be nice to get some sort of name/title for them all, if only to give me the excuse to blog them again another day!

 

Big and very big on the left and variations of the Neronga on the right, none of the ones in the box have 'China' stickers, so maybe they were marketed in different forms of which a box of twelve were one, and individual shelf-sales (with separate stickers) was another? Of course, it could just be that someone took all twelve stickers off! The older purchase has more silver paint and slightly darker plastic.

 

These were on evilBay the other day, only six of the twelve and more variations, but then you may have noticed some variety, just on the box-top photo'? The mauve is purple, and one of the reds has gold spine-plates, as here.

 

I think the dark blue one here has been given a home-paint, there's washing/weathering and more colours than the others normally have?

 

"Yeah, well, yer'no, it started small, lighting BBQ's for tourists, dealing with the rubbish on the beach, then one day I caught the changing shelter's thatched roof, and I was like, 'Wow, that's awesome!', soon I was doing whole fishing villages, moved on to small towns and then, well, yer'no, the whole Tokyo business init! But I'm a changed Kaiju now, mostly these red-carpet events and the odd drug-bust destruction fire for the Police . . . just keepin' me'hand in, like - it ain't easy, bein' fire-breathy!"

H is for How They Come In - Chris - Monsters!

It is always the unexpected oddities which make 'mixed junk' lots so interesting and fun to unpack and sort out. I've had an odd finger puppet in the collection for many years, a vaguely Kaiju looking monster.

One of the first things I saw when I'd lifted the bags of small scale Hong Kong Wild West off the top of Chris's parcel contents was another, a frisson of disappointment crossed my mind, because when you find a second of something, there's always the possibility that 'that is that', a one-off, of which you now have two . . . 

 

. . . but then I found a second, buried, and instantly thought 'another', then saw it was different and looking again at the first one, realised neither is the same as my hanger-around (who has a smoother 'skirt'), so immediately went to officially bloody chuffed with these! I further have a vague memory of a fourth now, in brown, but I may have invented it in my head?

But, yeah! When it comes to 1970's (or even 1960's/) rack-toy tat, these will take some beating! And I love them, cheers Chris!

Another oddity in the most recent lot from Chris was this, which is sort of a bull, sort of something more fearsome and nameless, Devil'some even, yet also cartoony!

 

I'm guessing it belongs to one of those double string things, with the discs at either end. Where it would dance up and down the lines, due to the holes in hands and feet. Like the skeleton and Devil-Santa we looked at in [a] previous lot/s from Chris. But it could be a sort of Jacob's ladder climber type thing - fun anyway, and new to Blog!