P is for Prehistoric Paint-Your-Own

Checking the 'Paint Your Own' Tab, I see we have seen quite a few PYO dinosaurs over the years, and none of them seem to be the same, although I'm sure many of them get more commercial, decorated issues too . . . a comparison job for another day! In the last few weeks I've encountered two new lots, and bought one sample, so here's a quick report.

 

I'm pretty sure I shot this set in Smyths, as part of their small early-learning/craft section as you enter, four reasonable sculpts and six paints including all three primaries, only a fiver here, and Google says they can be found in Giant Tiger and Walmart over the pond.

 

These were in The Range, where we've seen PYO dino's before, but these are new sculpts (or new packaging?) and there were three sculpts, different from the previous pair. A T-Rex and Dippy/Bronty type were left on the shelf, but I got the third . . .

 

 . . . a Kentrosaurus or Chungkingosaurus, I think? It's not stipulated!

One of the new style of two-halves, glued together in the factory, soft polyethylene hybrid PVC replacement polymers, it's a lot of dinosaur for a pound-fifty, reasonably well-detailed/sculpted, and while a bit big for a Christmas-stocking, would fill a small hole under the tree!

Paints are a rather more specific set of pre-mixed shades heading toward the kingfisher school of decoration! But the brush is actually quite good, with a well-formed soft-bristle head, although the shaft is cheapo-styrene.

S is for Shelfies - Smyths

I was actually in Smyths the other day looking for Halloween stuff (there was none) and the displays were pretty-much the same as these shelfies, which I actually shot back in August, but which I didn't get around to posting in Rack Toy Month, so, basically - all still available from Smyths!

This has previously been seen in B&M, seems to be a generic, but similar to HGL / HTI stuff we saw here a few years ago, I think I now have some of these in the loose stash courtesy of Jon Attwood's donations or charity-shop bags?

 

These are the sort of thing which will start turning-up in charity bags in about 18-months time, so worth knowing, simply to attribute, at a later date; Epoch Games, also gets them in the Tag-list! Seems to be a variation of Buckaroo or the old load-a-camel game!

 

Unbranded generic here, and again the dinosaurs look familier?

A full display of Schleich, with fantasy, dinosaurs, wild and domestic animals, both boxed and single-pick items. You can't fault the attention to detail and realism, but the price takes them out of the reach of poorer kids, in a way Britains didn't really?

Just Play have these out at the moment, there have been so many chunky vinyls of Disney's main characters, there's a book to be written on them at some point, in the meantime this will help ID five of the many thousands!

Pokemon blisters and boxes, again several ranges over the years, all quite small scale, and running to many characters/poses, I think these were Mindstorm Toys, but probably licensed from Tomy or Mattel, both of whom have had the properties for twenty/thirty-odd years now?

Cartoon characters in Hot Wheels cars . . . and things! A perennial favourite with younger kids, I have a small self-published tome in the library by a Don Elliot (Comic Character Cars), which covers these up to the 1980's, from many makers!

Finishing-up this batch with bubble-liquid bottles topped-off with hatching dinosaur eggs!

P is for . . . No! Absolutely Not! W is for Wenno!

I shot all these in Smyths and wondered if Wenno was an in-house or phantom brand for Smyths, but a quick Google revealed they are a 2014-founded anglicised subsidiary of Shing Hing who's SH marked Matchbox copy 'Army man' tub we saw here a few years ago, also found in Smyths, so there's that! And we've seen two of them before, in another store.

These are not the same as the ones in the tub (next, below), and may have been around for a while, as I know I've had some come in, in mixed lots/donations, the larger pigs for certain, and it's a traditional cheapie in sense that there's quite a bot of duplication in the bag, but not many sculpts; 5 or 6, 6 or seven 7? But reasonably decorated compared to the old rack-toy farm stuff of yesteryear!

 

These are larger, and more like the Peterkin's we looked at the other day, with the larger scale poultry and rabbits etc. Of interest, and another similarity with Peterkin, is the use of smaller unpainted animals in with the larger one.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, who, on glancing at something on eBay or at a show, and deciding it's needed for the collection, have got it home,/had it delivered, only to find it's a piece of shite, and that I already have a better one? Well, that's because when you're scrolling dozens of tables at a show or hundreds of eBay or auction lots, you are visually overloading your brain, and snap decisions are made without the full facts.

It would seem the latest thing going round the cheapo-toy factories of China is to fill the tubs, buckets and header-carded bags with a few big animals/dinosaurs and a bunch of small ones, to overload the casual browser, in order to get them to think the contents are better than they might be, and take them to the till!

 

Obviously a tropical farm with those palm-trees!

The above two sets were seen in B&M over last Christmas and posted in another lot of shelfies, back in February, but here they are again, further proving the independence of the brand (mused upon then, too), and still looking reasonable, if not decorated to the same standard as the Schliech they were placed near! But then, at 12-quid, you'd be lucky to get two of Schleich's!

 

A couple of aisles over, and in the same line as the farm tub, was this set of dinosaurs, also looking quite similar in contents to the Peterkin set the other day, and other's we've seen shelfied here in the past, Tesco supermarkets carried a tub like this a few years ago, if I recall well? It has one huge dino', several middle-sized ones and more undecorated 'mini' fillers.

"Walmart Exclusive" is for Smyths!

Back at Christmas we had some shelfies of this set sent in by Terranova, to which I muttered 'Lucky buggers across the pond, Walmart Exclsive, fussa-russa....&etc.' and vowed to look out for them at Asda, then, still Walmart's subsidiary over here (I believe they've announced plans to off-load it?), but then the week before May's show (for which I should have been saving my pennies) I found this on clearance in Smyths for a tenner - it hadn't been there at all a few weeks earlier?

So not an 'Walmart Exclusive' at all, and while I thank Brian again for the earlier shelfies, we can now tick the close-up box!

The "Bonus" base is also the lid, so if there was no 'bonus' the contents would presumably fly everywhere, thus we see the 'fake-news' hype of highfalutin' sales-talk in action! I also said at Christmas that I liked the sniper, cable-tied to the lid, but not enough to hang-on to him [with the lid], so the lid went to charity with the tub, half-full of the duplicate poses.

Before sorting; the box has a tall wedge of card running-up inside, through the centre, but it's not that wide at the bottom, and to be fair to Lanard, seems to have less to do with 'padding-out' falsely and more to do with ensuring that the numerous contents are displayed in a tall, slim container, by keeping them pressed against the sides.

The figures, mostly based on the old Galoob X-panders figures as previously stated. The prone figure has a soft jungle-hat and would seem to be a more recent addition, and all of them have been 'de-spaced' and brought back to planet earth with a 'Fritz' helmet and an urban-warfare, light belt-order make-over! Weapons are still quite spacey though.

Two machine-guns are supplied loose (you need four!) in the set, they fit into two holes on the lid, and both a sandbag position and a small stand found among the contents, the latter is supposed to sit behind a rather lame 'sanger' made of three pieces, these are the colour-matched accessories 'sand' force get!

Bit's of artwork you may be interested-in; the figures in the artwork are a sort of fantasy/post-apocalyptic mix of cyber-punk ner'do wells bearing no relationship with the figures included whatsoever!

The other contents, the barbed-wire 'entanglements' went to charity along with the two sandbag barricades, but I kept the security fences, they are quite useful, as are the angle-iron beach obstacles/tank traps.

The tank supplied to red-force is a generic M1-Abrahms/Challenger-I type thing and was kept for it's similarity to other simple 'readymades', from the green-force armory; the plane went, but I hung-on to the helicopter.

Again - while a lot of this is typical 'padding' it hasn't been enhanced with a bunch of crappy farm fence, trees, cactuses or palms, which is another point in Lanard's favour? It's war you want - it's war you get!

The 'walker' is lovely - from the front! But from the back reveals it's cheapness, as a hollowed-out single moulding, likewise the revolving 'head' looks fine from above, but at least it's hollow is hidden while in situ. One day I will fill it in with two-part epoxy, add a few greeblies and paint it, before posing it with 28mm fig's!

The three part helicopter is a bit sci-fi but equally, similar machines are coming into service or are under development, so it's gone in the Heli-zone, the 'plane went - for obvious reasons - and you can see that the tank is simpler that Airfix's venerable old mouldings.

Trying to photograph - one-handed - a tank-hunter on a thread creeping-up on a robot killing-machine (when the thread is in the other hand) proved a bit of a tall order, so it's a tad fuzzy!

A is for Army Force Playset

A very quick one today, I know this has been a bit 'thin gruel' the last few days; but the issues with Internet activity, coming as they did when I had other things to do, have left it all a bit pear-shaped here at Small Scale World Towers, and you gets what you gets what I had to grab!

The latest incarnation of the Pioneer 'Street Machine' sets we've been following, as much as by accident as by design, since Rack Toy Month, this time in Smyths (who had the big set with one row of military among the civil stuff the other month), but imported by them - in time for Christmas - not Kandy, who usually handle them.

A is for Army Men - RTM '17 - Part III - Better Crappytoys!

Into the home straight with part three and I only hope some people have got something from some of these posts, because a lot of people write-off this stuff as half-a-carat shit, and they're not wrong, but intrinsically there is no difference between a mounted Swoppet knight and a cut-n-shut Crescent Mexican copy blob, from Hong Kong!

We return to those 14's for the first half of this post, but will also look at a few similar figures. I have in addition to the 14's a second set of very similar figures, the same pose is a little smaller and I think it's a size difference, not the differnet shrinkage rates of the two materials, but it could be?

Base-edge treatment, the plastic colour and the marking (less the numeral on the PVC figures) are all so similar as to point to the same source and neither sample is big enough to be considered 'all', which means the pose differences could even-out over time/with more finds? Hoever, see below.

The other common denominator is that they are nicely sculpted, well produced figures with lots of paintable detail visible, and apart from Chuck-Noriega with his linked-belt feeding out of his hip pocket, they are all pretty useable versions of figures previously seen in Parts I & II - I particularly like this version of the running M60 gunner, although I'd be the first to admit the SMG's both look a bit 1970's Italian police?

So . . . having looked at the Jaru set yesterday with the 18's and the same card-art as this larger set, we are faced with what looks to be a set with all-14's?

Firstly, although the picture is blurred for being a low-res publicity puff-piece, you will notice there are only two poses shown, one of which isn't in 14, 18 or 20 (yet) - the standing, no: 'running' firer ('a') in the sand sample, while in the green sample, some of the figures are reversed ('b')!

This is a Photoshop'ed mock-up! It proves nothing, but it gives clues, and is therefore useful nonetheless, providing you spot the 'deliberate mistakes' that is! The tank is the same as the Hunson set we looked at yesterday (very sharp 'boat-front' to the hull's glassis casting) which is one of the clues.

Now I have been seeing the Hummers in mixed, loose lots on feeBay for a few years now (there were at least two lots with them on there last week), and as it takes a year or two for this stuff to filter through, we can assume they have been around for a while now.

Next to the Jaru mock-up is a shelfie I took last week in the new Smyth's in Farnborough (farn-brer not -burroh!) of a set by, or purporting to be by a Shing Hing which has what looks like 20's with additional poses (standing firing ex-Matchbox GI is to be expected; given the rest of my sample!) but the tank/s is/are different, being the small ones we looked at the other day (from two sources with two sets of 'additives') and a scale-up of it with a more rounded front than the older one.

But, the colour of all the green components is another clue.

Shing Hing are also marketing a large tub with four armies (also currently in Smyths), and as far as these toys go it's a good one, we've got the GI's with ex-Airfix Japs and sets of ex-Matchbox 8th Army and Afrika Korps, so in one tub you have Tobruk and Iwo Jima - and for a 'tenner -  bargain!

But ignore the other three and check the GI's, there's the running shooter, along with most of the 20 poses, but with the 14 base marking, and having handled them I can tell you they were PVC.

Jaru claim to be one of the biggest middle-men in the importation and distribution of rack-toys (they don't call them rack-toys!), and there's no reason to disbelieve them and plenty of evidence of that being the case; indeed what we seem to have here, with yesterday's post and in among the truck and tank posts that preceded these, is evidence of that 'finger in every pie' position of Jaru's.

Reiterating a line from yesterday's post: "different contract: different mix", Jaru being the lynch-pin for all these pale-jade green toy soldiers, whatever the size, material or pose mix and whatever the accompanying accessories (which will be coming from different contract-manufacturers) and - ideed - whatever the colour of the 'opposition' if any.

I would put money on 14, 17, 18A and B and 20, all having some connection, with Jaru in the procurement chain somewhere? And going back a few years! In last years RTM post H is for Hangin' on the Hook! we saw that my 20's came in a purchase with PVC 8th Army, a different color from the Shing Hing set above and Brian B also donated the Ocean set with blue ones, but another two links between them all.

These (also from Brian Berke) are similar, and almost certainly PVC but will be either licensed or bog-standard'ish copies. The Soma (Mr. So and Mr. Ma) partnership was established in 1968 and was one of the bigger contract-manufacturers for the next 20-odd years before starting to use their own brand in the mid-1980's.

Unusually for Soma these are only marked 'CHINA' and while they undoubtedly use smaller contractors for sub-assemblies, they are big enough to have made these themselves - in their 'signature' figure-material.

I've highlighted the QA-coding both on the card (red arrow) and in each bag as a strip of 'ticker-tape' (yellow arrows), this is a trend that's here to stay.

Might as well have a look at Soma's other PVC output! I'd like to find the rest of the 40mm GI's, he's the only one I've found, the little ones we've looked at before, there were 12 and they were issued with generic push-and-go jets and prop-jobs - real infant toys; I sent them straight to charity (mid/late-1990's?)

As are their juvenile 40mm's which come as pirates, Wild West (above), Robin Hood (above) and the Sheriff with their men, Medieval and the Crusades, sports, Mermaids, cartoon/anthropomorphic animals, Ninjas, Manzinger-type Autobot things, Mexican/TV-wrestlers, fairy-tales and fantasy/ horror types (I think), in sixes or twelve's and often with a second, or subsequent issues in different colour-ways (there are three Hood's, yellow (above) cream and black - that I know of). I have a load in storage so we'll look at them properly one day, but there's plenty about them on the Wibbly Wobbly Way!

Loose-ends, left to right:

Marshall's were carrying these wholesale until recently, they look like figures in previous parts, but the tub suggests they are a tad bigger so they ended-up in this folder!

Bigger, better looking figures from XMT, follow the link for a made-up-brand! They look to be ethylene? It's not even an SMG is it; it's a hair-dryer!

These look very interesting, they seem to have some of the old Arco Rambo poses, along with a couple of the Jaru poses (including the running chap who's a very decent figure sculpt), along with the almost de'riguere these days Matchbox GI poses, along with a couple of helmet-swap Airfix paratroopers, all well-finished and looking to be at least 54mm, give or take, the bino-guy is a bit challenged in the height department!

♫♪♫Short People - They got little hands...And little eyes...And they walk around...Tellin' great big lies...They got little noses...And tiny little teeth...They wear platform shoes...On their nasty little feet...♪♫♪ - Randy Newman

Also I'd draw you attention to a letter from Tomas Korecek in Plastic Warrior magazine's issue 165 (March 2017) which shows bigger-still (75mm/1:24th scale) versions of the figures we've been looking at the last three posts, currently for sale in one outlet in Prague, but they'll probably be available elsewhere, in another colour, another card . . .