P is for Perfect Plastic!

I don't, as a rule, 'rate' Timpo, Britains, Airfix, Marx, MPC, Starlux or Elastolin, nor the tranche of smaller companies immediately at their heels, simply because they were huge, popular and ran for a while, churning out millions of figures, from, often, ever-changing line-ups.

 

This is not to say I don't enjoy them, or appreciate them, just that it's box-ticking stuff which is all over the internet, in all the books, and the first things to be waded-through on Blogs or forums! Tables often groan under the weight of them at shows!

 

But, I do have a soft spot for the smaller-scale output of Elastolin, Merten and Starlux, so it's always nice to add a few to the master 'samples', and I bought this little lot at Sandown Park the other week, all Elastolin, and all 'clean', with no damage, little or no play-wear, and the correct weapons.

 

Romans

 

Huns versus Rus!

 

 Normans / Anglo-Saxons

 

Medieval

The sculpting of the plastics was a high-point of toy soldier production, although the price of Elastolin was always at a point where the use of the word 'toy' was a moot point! I do have a reasonable sample, indeed, a Journalist, sent to my home many years ago, went through it, and talked me out of one of the better Normans! But they are regularly added to, and one day they'll probably be used to illustrate the A-Z blog-entry, when I get round to it?

P is for Philanthropic Polymer Pile

I haven't been as quick or often through the Charity Shops, this last eighteen months or so, work commitments, eBay bottom-feeders and a couple of store closures making it a less lucrative quest these days, but I did manage two quick tours of Farnham and Fleet's charity shops last week, while I had some time off, and I found these.

 

This was a quick round-up in Fleet

 

Box tickers for the tubs of generic play-set accessories, but also a new figure, funny how, despite forty-odd serious years of this, there's still new figures, in every bunch of plunder, every donantion, even a random bag of charity stuff! Jame's Opie always asks - primarily of lead hollow-casts and solids - how many figures (actual pose mouldings/sculpting) have there been, and the answer, from where I'm sitting, is millions - one is including copies and colour or paint variations.

 

A couple of slip-cast kittens, with slightly 'Disney' or 'doe eyes', but a rather interesting glaze technique, I thought? And mostly because they are often in mixed lots of cats, or pets, I now have quite a side-collection of china, bisque or chalkware cats. These are priced 3/6 each (three shillings and sixpence, 42 old pence, about 16p in new money, at the time?).

 

A pair of Toy Major Dino's.

 

A right old mix here, with the Ray marked Smartstudy and Viacom 2021, I assume not a Finding Nemo thing, but some other franchise, maybe Baby Shark?

 

And then, the next day - to Farnham!

 

Given the cost of these new, or 2nd-hand with box, I'm guessing a tenner for the three, while a swallow, was also the best I was going to get for what, to me, are box-tickers, to compare with plastics in the future? Not 'Britians' but W'britian from the US.

 

Simply marked 'China' and probably from some toob, or tub type thing, but a nice sample of ocean or shore-dwelling mammals, from the left; a Sea-lion, Mantee, Seal and Walrus.

 

It's Christmas! A nicely executed bit of poured-resin, possibly from Italy, but I don't know, as they are unmarked where visible, and have green-baize discs on their undersides, hiding any clues which might be there?

P est pour Poupette-à-L'Épingle

♪♫♪ Like a Puppet full of Piiiiiiinnnnnnns ♪♪♫! As mentioned yesterday, or seemingly the day before (I've had a few days off with a crock-ankle, and have lost track of time!), I have had some success with hedgehogs for the tree, again this year, with two from Gisela Graham, one from someone else and a duplicate from a few years ago, which I haven't shot, it was the bottle-brush one with little black-wooden feet sticking out.

 

These came in a few weeks ago now, and one is furry like a soft-toy, but on a wooden former so more solid than it looks, the other is another of the all natural materials, like the nut-husk ones which started this particular niche, a few years ago now, and is one of the Gisela G's.

 

This is the other Gisela Graham, and while it has the same bottle-brush face as several of the others (there's about 15 now?), the body is made of gold-chrome finished wire bag-ties! Which came as a relief, because my eyesight's so bad these days, I thought it was a delicate twiggy thing, like the nut-husk ones, sprayed with gold/silver chrome, and actually it is one of the more substantial ones.

 

It struck me, that these display an amazing property of humans, all of them look like hedgehogs. They don't look like mice, or voles, or rats, or tailess squirrels, they don't look like gophers, or moles, coypu or rabbits, hares . . . beavers or lemmings. They don't even look much like echidnas, despite being mixed collections of glued together scraps, or painted blown-glass, they all look like hedgehogs!

 

And that is down to our imagination in how we construct them, and our cognitive ability to recognise what they are then supposed to represent. When we're not butchering each other, or ripping each-other off, which we do most of the time, almost everywhere, at every level, we are capable of wonderful things.

 

And yet we stand here, on the brink of extinction, voting for the wrong people, running-down our public services, allowing our infrastructure to fade, failing to tax the super-rich or regulate the tech giants, and we wonder why our hearts feel so bad?

P is for Plastolin Plasticine!

These may be the only examples in existence, or rare survivors of a small production run, we just don't know, but they are listed on the new Composition Page, so I need to get them up here, in order that a wider audience is made aware of their existence!

 

The label reads;

 

PLASTOLINE

Model Manuf: Co:

Set X1. Gestapo H.Q.

With Officer at Desk

NO.03.

Plastoline - Hand Made, enamelled,

Hard and glossy, copyright, patent.

 

And one has to assume the '03' is the number in a series of similar vignettes? There is nothing on the 'web to suggest any of it was ever patented, and copyright's a long shot, given some, most (?) modellers could copy it to a much higher standard!

 

This is the item described above, he has broken-off at ankles and stool, the shaft if which has been lost. The whole made from Plasticine, probably hardened with Banana Oil, otherwise known as 'Dope', or isoamyl acetate (also known as isopentyl acetate), painted and vanished in a deep gloss to give a lacquered appearance in the 'Old Toy Soldier' style.

 

Also in the box is this WWI'ish (?) machine-gunner, listed as (3) in the list below, as WWII, and which differs from the previous example in also using embedded wire for the machine-gun, not that it's prevented the gun from curling slightly over time.

 

Which, by a process of elimination, and considering the fact that no other suitable figure was in the unknown 'Question Time' post, also dealing with this make's figures, here, must be the number two item - Mexican irregular from the wars of the turn of the last century?

On the underside of the inner box, we have further clues as to the originators of these figures (the Mexican is really quite good, albeit a tad 'footless'), with this label, origianlly in Biro, but added to at a latter date in pencil;

 

(1)GERMANY-GESTAPO   -   C 1940

(2)MEXICO - IRREGULAR   -   C 1900

(3) GERMANY - M. G -    C 1940

(1) By  .  D. BROWN .

(2) By     M, LEECH .

(3) By  .  D  BROWN .

IN PLASTOLINE  .

 

So the clues, would suggest that a D Brown, and M Leech, attempted to manufacture, in Plasticine, a small range of figures with a commercial bent, when and for how long were they in production is anyone's guess, except those who might actually know?

 

And the three figures from Chang-Kai-Chek's Imperial Chinese forces, and the odd chap in a respirator, seen previously, were also stuffed in the same box. Anybody know anything else about them?  I believe, although I haven't found them yet, that there were adverts in the back of the periodicals of the time - Military Modelling, Battle, and/or . . . the other one . . . Campaign?

J is for Jurassic Busy Book

A return to Phidal, there's been a big restocking in TKMaxx for Christmas, and while most of them are sets we've seen already, or sets I'm not interested in, this seems to be new, except it's dated 2022, but isn't the one we looked at here, which was dated 2021 anyway! Although with the same 'Phidal' bases, they will go together well.

 

 Cover.

 

Contents.

 

Tyrannosaurus Rex - Giganotosaurus 

Velociraptor - Atrociraptor (best dinosaur name ever!)

 

Allosaurus - Dilophosaurus

Dimetrodon - Parasaurolophus

Therizinosaurus - Pyroraptor 

All from the other side.

Two of these play-mat scenes (top right and bottom left) might make useful background sheets for future photography, but due to the polymer lamination of these sheets, it'll require careful ironing at low temperatures to get all the folds out, but I have hung on to them for now.

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!

P is for Performing in the Spotlights Candle Light!

Why has it taken me nearly eighteen years to work out you can use basic HTML tags in the title bar? Doh!

 

Just a quick box-ticker, I bought these at a Squires garden centre, last autumn (2024) and got them lost in Picasa somewhere, a set of novelty circus candles, by Smiling Faces, a bit cartoonish, but fun cake decorations, with wooden icing-spikes!

 

 

That's it really, they are what you see; a set of Novelty circus candles, by Smiling Faces!

 

P is for Papo's Pot of 40mm Plastics

Picked this up, reduced, at a garden centre a while back, I visited a couple this afternoon and picked-up some useful tree decorations, but nothing Halloween, nor any new toys, or novelties, but I like to keep an eye on them!

 

I think we saw these when they were first released at the London Toy Fair at Kensington Olympia, but that particular lot of shots may still be in the long queue . . . Doh! Anyway, we've seen the 40mm Pirates, probably not all of them yet, but most now? These are the farm!

 

Horse rider and horse, I think we've had her come-in with a mixed lot at some point, so she can go in the swaps pile, once I've everything together and sorted, the poultry, however are a tad big in my opinion, they could chase that calf 'till its heart gives out!

 

Heavy horses.

 

Everybody else! That's it box, or Toob, ticked!

P is for Public Presentation of Pure Nostalgia

I can't remember why I was in the Fleet Library back in April, probably looking for someone, but I happened to see what was in the 'Christmas Toy Display' cabinets, and found this. I also noticed Fleet and Crookham Historical Society, seem to have been renamed Fleet and Croockham Local History Group?

 

 [They've loaded back to front again, and I can't be arsed to switch them all round, it's only NTS imagery, and it leaves the chocolate wrappers down the bottom, near the Internet image of similar stuff, so it's sort of sorted itself out]

 

Definitely remember the Monarch seed packets!

 

It's funny how many of them I recognise, I'm only sixty-one, but a good half my life is 'ancient history' to almost everyone under thirty! Rudolf Hess, I met him twice, in my duties, yet, he's history, proper history to every single person born after about 1985, and many born in the years immediately before.

 

This went through Facebook the other day, it's frightening how many have gone, and how bland the choice actually is these days, I tried to buy a Topic the other day, and couldn't find one, Googled them, and they've gone! Just like that, partly my fault for not buying enough, "Use them or lose them", under Capitalism, the customer's never been right!