S is for Seen Elsewhere - Sci-Fi Library (1) Toys

I shot these for a Faceplant group, over a-year-and-a-half ago, and unlike the other shots in this occasional meander through my library, these were all cover-scans, taken at the time, rather than the more casual shots of the previous posts (see: Bibliography Tag), and most subsequent posts, which will take a year or two to get through at the current rate, with some duplication, because shooting them all was a bitty business, as they were recovered from the garage, reunited with the stuff in the house, added to on the hoof, and/or sent off to storage, in batches!

 

Beautifully illustrated with, yeap, a thousand images, actually more, and even more items, as there are a few multiple shots, however, the beautiful illustrations, a trope of all Taschen publications, is tempered by another trope of theirs, a 'coffee table' lack of text! It's really just a captioned guide to some of the loveliest Sci-Fi toys ever made.

 

And yes, I need both the figures on the cover! But they are likely to turn up in some mixed-lot from Adrian,  Chris, Peter, Gareth or Trevor (the guys who regularly save me this odd, ephemeral, unknown stuff), as they are likely to turn-up in a rummage tray, at a toy figure show!

 

 

In it's day a lovely book, albeit a cheap softback, it's now a bit dated, but still a useful reference work for quickly flicking through to find the robot you may be trying to identify, or to ID the robot a more generic toy might be based-on, so worth grabbing if you see it.

 

This is a lovely guide to what appears to be one man's collection, and from the given dates (1972-82), there's a suggestion other volumes may exist coving the 1950's or 1960's, but as I bought it for next-to-nothing as a remaindered import from one of the shops in the Charing Cross Road, or more likely, a vast, bare floorboarded, enterprise selling straight from the cartons, on the Wandsworth Road, or Lavender Hill (I can't remember, it was more than 30 years ago!), I've never known?

 

 

These two are less useful, being more in the style of the Taschen, but less well illustrated, and with a fair bit of duplication on the more common robots and spaceships from Horikawa, Masudaya, Yoshiya &etc. but the text is more useful, being as how, while both are also in the coffee-table style, they do have more author's input and narrative text.

 

Think 'Pulp', and this is the meisterwerk! But, it barely covers the tin-plate stuff in the five tomes above, concentrating more on the 'Western' pocket-money ranges of the 'Dime-Store' plastic-era's, bagged and carded toys, and the related peripherals such as board-games, home casting sets, hollow-casts and the like, with chapters on the books, magazines, comics and annuals . . . masks, helmets, costumes . . . cards and artwork, ray-guns, pin-ball machines and such like. But, the modern 'Bible' on plastics, with a very good chapter on Dr Who stuff, contributed-to by an old colleague of mine.

 

More of the same but with a wider remit and covering a bit of everything, it's quite a good primer, and worth having on the shelf, to try, if you can't find something in one of the others!

 

While this is a private, or semi-private publication, I think, very much in a recognisable US style of a certain kind of collectables book, I have quite a few of, now, cars, planes; usually a guy sharing his collection. And, in this case what he shares is quite thorough, but his collection parameters are quite tight, so it's very useful for what's in there - Colorforms, Matt Mason, Zeroids and a couple of others, but that's your lot!

 

While these three are, really, only 'shelf-fillers'! Some nice imagery, mostly borrowed from bricks-&-mortar auction-houses, who may or may not have a commercial interest in the title, post-publishing, beyond the name-checks?

 

But the contents of all three are common or popular stuff, aimed at the general or casual reader - the same-old-same-old, big name toys, few of us collectors have forgotten, or really need to re-learn about, and which now have whole sites, forums and wiki-pages dedicated to them, so/also, of limited use as research-tools and adding nothing to better works! The third is a more general title and could go elsewhere in these posts, but was included here for its connection with the TV-Movie related theme.

 

I still buy them, 'just in case' there's something new, interesting or useful, but usually when they are remaindered in The Works or similar, although, in recent years remaindered book stores have all but disappeared, indeed, on the high street it's The Works or nothing, but you can often find them on Amazon or evilBay for next to nothing, and grab them as shelf-fillers/box-tickers.

 

But PostScrip, the mail-order people, often have useful collectables books in their lists, especially the autumn lists, with all the coffee-table titles for Christmas presents! And there's Books2Door, which I haven't tried yet, have you; are they any use?

J is for Jimson . . . Firefly XYZ Mk. III

I really don't know what the hell's happened to Google, but apparently The Economist magazine was asking the same question the other day? Certainly, if you Google this, using any search-term, you'll be excused for being convinced it doesn't exist, and never did, even though, here is one, and it clearly does!

 

The box is a reproduction, and while the seller was good enough to point that out, and I'd been surprised at it's clean-sample quality, I wouldn't have known for sure; it's not got that comic-book artwork look, of the home printed ones from a few years ago, and if you rolled this down the drive on a dusty day, and then brushed it off, you'd never know it wasn't a Jimson original.

 

It's a big old chunk of half-Space Car and half-Space ship, and the scale - going on the figure - is a bit bigger than I might have been interested in, only a few years ago, but needs must when idiots try to drive!

 

And, while I would have been happy to just ID the driver, in the past, I've now got one to compare with any similar loose chaps in the pile! There is actually minor damage to the rear-right (facing forwards) of the canopy, but, luckily, it isn't actually obvious, at any angle!

 

This pair, sadly, weren't purchased at Sandown, but - as an in-context 'question time' - were seen on evilBay back in 2021,Rocket Racer behind, Explorer in front, and usually sold as generics - "Another plastic toy", "Another siren toy", &etc . . .

 

And, while they could also be Jimson, I don't know, Google doesn't know and Alphadrome seems not to, either! Pilots' say no, styling and portholes, say maybe not, push-and-go motors say possibly, plastic colours say probably, the little radar says absolutely! Obviously, the egg-shaped one is missing a green 'wing'.

 

Jimson stuff does appear in generic packaging sometimes, or seems to, you never know if they aren't close clones, but they also supplied Fairylite and others? Could they be the Mark's I and II?* Coding is 609 and 614, close enough for their similarity to each other, but a long way from Firefly XYZ's 101? Could they, despite the higher numbers, actually be earlier toys? I genuinely don't know - do you?

 

*That's not a serious question, I don't doubt there were never Mk I or II Firefly's, and the Firefly itself, has a very lazy XYZ moniker, before the 'Mark III'!

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!

Z is for Ziggurat!

Well, I wouldn't have bored you will my travails over the last few days, you don't want to tip your 'eemies' off, but suffice to say a cancer scare has been downgraded to a 'phew', with a slightly ominous "Get it checked if it doesn't go away" caveat. Anyway, to celebrate my lighter mood this evening, here's one of the odder things in the kit catalogues of the 1960's, Imai's M2000T SF Ziggurat, is it a plane . . . yes! Is it a tank . . . yes, is it a SAM-missile T.E.L., yes! Is it goddamned-barking-mad? You betcha!

I've actually been looking for it for several years, but I thought it was in one of the UPC catalogues and when I couldn't find it there, I was stumped, but it just turned-up in a smaller AHM one!

 

It seems to be a mash-up of Imai's Scud-A ('Missile tank BB3' tracks and road-wheels), some Thunderbirds elements and their own fictional SAM 5 rocket launcher parts, so probably around 1:24th scale . . . 'ish! Relatively clip-together, and you can have one for less than 2,000-quid;

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/404657806927

 

I don't normally like linking to evilBay stuff, as it doesn't tend to hang-around long, after it's sold, these days, but I think this may remain a hot-link for some time, unless there's an idiot out there keen to be parted from his money! And $4.98, would be the best part $45 today, a lot of money?

E is for Eye-Candy - Best of the Rest

After I'd done the first two posts/shots (posts below this one) I had a sort-out, and this is the rest of the odd's and stand-alone's, here at the moment, and an eclectic bunch they are too, but mostly bigger than the previous 'mini' Bots.

The large red one, to the left, is a huge blow-moulded, thick-walled, hollow PVC lump, possibly Japanese rather than Hong Kong, and probably 1970's, but unmarked, with plug-in PVC arms and ariels/helmet-guns. The other one, to the right, is one of the Arco-Mattel bendies, with plug-in 'ethylene weapons and a Hong Kong sticker on one foot. The other red one, between them, is unmarked apart from a 'C1' on one foot, and probably quite modern?

Four eraser-types (x2 silver, orange and yellow) which may have missed previous posts on the subject are front centre, while the right hand green one is another M.U.S.C.L.E. (also Mattel), giving us a scaler with the previous post's image. The other green one is actually more of an action-figure, in polystyrene, with a self-tapping screw in his back holding all the moving parts together.

The other articulated droid also has a screw in his back and moving components, and is a Manta Force Karnoid from Bluebird Toys, some - probably not this one - via Tomy.  While the yellow individual on the far left is more humanoid, but his head is all 'mecha', so if it's not a robot, it's an android of some kind. The best reason AI will have for keeping some of us alive, is to provide them with headless, locomotive bodies!

 

As a Brucey-bonus, and apart from the green one above, the only other 'styrene ones I have here at the moment, these are modern, marked China and obviously come in different colour-schemes, I don't know how many sculpts there are, but they are more like the previous 'minis' in size.

E is for Eye-Candy - Fantastic Plastic

These are the other bag, all rigid polyethylene, 'propylene or nylon/rayon low-friction bearing type plastics, and like the previous lot, novelty items, of the Christmas cracker/capsule-prize variety. The pink Dinobot is a Power Rangers knock-off.

 

Apparently, approximately twice as common as the soft, squidgy ones, it's NOT scientific! The large green one bears a resemblance to the Voltron ones we've seen here once or twice, he . . . it's also a parachute toy, as is the fat, dumpy, green one, front left. The green one front middle is marked Rigo China.

 

The two oxide red ones are similar to the Arco ones, but a bit smaller and different sculpts, but could well be from the same factory/sculptor/team of sculptors? While the blue one back left is a plug-together 'swoppet', missing an arm and marked ANT with a pictogram of an ant! The orange one with a base was known to be Ace Acme in the 'States.

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!

F is for Follow-up - GLJ is for Get Looking in your Junk pile!

Weekend Job! Just a quickie, but quite important as it's a new name which will enable all sorts to be ID'd, and, while the images here are a bit shite, you can look at the original post to get a better idea of the contents.

You may remember when we looked at these a while back; Original Generic Primogenitor, well, they weren't generics, they were fully marked underneath you just couldn't read it the way they were tied-in at the back of the card, in actual fact they are claimed by the G.L.J. Toy Co., Inc., of Syosset, New York.

 

The toys are dated 1978, GLJ applied for trademarks in 1979 and 1980, so must have flourished then, with various infant toys, rubber gorilla's (KK) and other stuff coming-up on search results, but that's the brand for those Toyway astronauts, and the various other mechanics, firefighters, GI's and farmers shown in the previous post, so you can dig them out of the shite pile this weekend, isolate them and give them title!

Aaaaannnnnnd, wouldn't you know it, a few months later, and for the ninth time in the last twelve months Woodsey has managed to find/post something, recently seen here, feigning complete ignorance, despite the fact he always comments here at Christmas, although he sometimes deletes the comment after I've got the eMail notification? It's getting boring, Paul. "What do you think, readers!"

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2023/12/slo-mobile-space-alien-set.html

Different contents, and a better-branded box, two discoveries over here, and a Google-search result over there, but don't credit your source 'ay?

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2023/12/slo-mobile-space-alien-set.html

GUTS! is for a Massacred Abbreviation!

Ground Troops . . . it's awful isn't it! But the strangulated MUSCLE and CUTIES weren't much better, however, Mattel obviously thought they'd found the magical formula for flogging polymer tat to kids via-TV advertising; with abbreviated group-names! These Guts being issued in 1986, so now sliding into a true 'vintage', they are nevertheless still quite 'modern' and easy enough to find.

Although you may recall I had one 'unknown' and someone had to ID it for me, but I've now tracked down the full set of Laser Fighters, so let's have a look . . .

. . . at what are a fun set of figures. We looked at a couple - which turned-out to be smaller piracies, a while ago from one of Chris's parcels, and - as I said - someone at the time told me they were Mattel GUTS!, but I can't find the comment, so it might have been a private eMail, meaning I can't credit them unless they remind me, but thank you however you were!

Each of the ten sculpts gets a name, they were clearly thought-up in a coffee break before the artwork was "OK'd" back to the printers/art-room and are consequently less than memorable, but they are nice figures, albeit with a real 1980's vibe as far as space-figures go.

They are rocking Cylon Warriors and straight-to-video, post-apocalypse B-movies, imagine some scrambler-bikes with rusty armour and fishing nets, the [Nevada] sky always behind a salmon-pink filter and an old crone with a broken-back who turns into a sexy space-babe after a camera-wobble and flash of white screen, only to seduce our intrepid laser-fighters and suck their brains out!

The weirdest thing is that not one of them is identically uniformed, with every helmet slightly different, every weapon very different and varying paint details are applied - half have painted boots (in three colours) half don't.

Two have black visors, but only the one black helmet - normally you would expect the sculptor to make a matching head or two and reproduce them first; for use on all ten masters, but here; each was separately done.

Packaging of the larger set; poorer kids could save-up for sets of five and as we saw in the above link, someone copied them and issued them undecorated as metallic PVC's, the same material as these originals.

Full set here in a slightly crushed box; not that pricey, for N. America, but if in the UK, you can get them cheaper on feeBay, to account for the postage, if you're patient!

A is for Astronauts . . . in a Tin!

Back to space! It's been quite an eclectic mix this Rack Toy Month; not as many foreign (European/ex-Soviet) or domestic sets as some years, but Hong Kong and/or China are synonymous with rack-toys, so it's no bad thing to have concentrated on them, especially when the whole month has been a bit 'on the hoof' and 'off the cuff' this year.

Also this is hardly a rack-toy, having all the markers for an overpriced museum gift-shop novelty, however rack-toy versions exist and it ties in nicely with an earlier post on small-scale space sets and continues the running mentions, this month, of Pioneer being behind or involved in a lot of this more recent (1990-2010's) stuff.

Astronauts in a tin, it does exactly what it says on the tin! Distributed by PMT Holdings (a quick Google reveals pooping llama key rings on Amazon!) and sold by American Holiday & Surf Shop, the exclusivity is unknown, but may well be so in this perticular packaging/contents configuration, although Google says single outlet (St Michaels, Maryland), so maybe not?

More of a rack-toy configuration (contents differ somewhat; see below), and now branded to XY (Xinyu), and the last time we saw Xinyu here it was in the context of AFV play-sets containing Pioneer die-cast vehicles, so the persistent link is there! Astronauts have a plain finish in this set.

The contents of my set, as manned stations the satellites are all subscale although the landing module could fit two Airfix or Giant spacemen (in the imagination - not phyically, there's no door!), but not the 40mm figures in the set, however as unmanned science or communications satellites they can pass for HO-OO-compatible gear? Shuttle and rocket though are clearly sub-scale generic die-cast/plastic fare.

A third configuration, unknown, some image I saved ages ago from Amazon or Alibaba, branded to some phantom nonsense (there are 'branded' suppliers on Amazon whose names have clearly been generated by AI shoving lumps of syntax (or random letters) together - Watinc, Ainolway (think about it!), Oocome, Cvcbser, Trswyop?) and again, new items but only one figure.

The current offering from Amazon is a top-end set with just about everything seen in the other sets (differen rocket) and then some (claims 44 Pieces), branded to deAO, I have had Toy Major stuff from the same brand-mark, and they clearly came direct from an Amazon warehouse, so an in-house phantom-brand, I suspect!

The 'meat and two veg' here at Small Scale World is always the figures, and here they are, referencing the coloured patches on early (and much sought-after) Kinder spacemen, and about the same size as Kinder's smaller offering, I suspect only coincidence, and around 40mm, polystyrene.

Now if these were Pioneer, that would make a third set, in a new plastic type, so, again it points to the caveat I gave earlier in the month that as a die-caster, Pioneer (if it is them again) may have been buying in the figures themselves.

It would make it much harder for someone like Galoob to sue for the combat infantry knock-offs, for instance, if Realtoy sent them to Pioneer and Pioneer fingered a minor third, fourth, or fifth-party who had already moved on!

That some of the other - die-cast - contents have come from Pioneer I have little doubt.

O is for Original Generic Primogenitor?

This is a bit of fun, bi-lingual (English-Spanish (or Italian)) but with no branding or clue to branding, however it seems to be either contemporary with, or - more likely - an earlier iteration of the figures later cleared in header-carded bags by Toyway?

It's probably a little beyond the Rack Toy classification, through contents and price-bracket, but it's still a collection of Hong Kong/Chinese plastic-tat, so in to RTM it goes! I took two sets of Photo's so have picked the best of each for this post and here it is in its entirety.

The packaging was a bit dog-eared, and while I straightened it somewhat with an iron, it was a temporary fix for the photo-shoot. Note how different the two vehicles are in the press photograph on the back of the card.

Close-up; the figures were obviously pegged-on randomly, as there are two pairs here where all four poses could have been used, something to keep looking for, as their finish is different from the Toyway ones.

The vehicles have a lot in common with the set of three 'fliers' from Blue Box, but here have those strange motors which if you push them too hard, slow down! So you give them a steady push and they sort of grind themselves off the kitchen counter at snail's pace using an 'inexorable momentum drive' engine!

In the artwork they have red or sky-blue transparencies, but mine both have blue-black canopies which show little of the crew-interiors, and if there is any clue to brand it would be in the logo on the bonnet, which is a meaningless W-plus!

Direct comparison on the left, a reminder of the Toyway's contents on the right, the two vehicles and the flag don't seem to have been carried across, but the hillock/rocky-outcrop and both items of ground-equipment have been, while Toyway always include the four poses.

The main difference is that the Toyway are plain gunmetal 'silver', while the generics have a coat of flattish or 'silk' finish silver paint. The blue / black / pink & red detailing is the same on both issues.

On the base we have clues to both unknown firefighters and mechanics we looked at a year or two ago, plus other figures which may or may not be in the same hard polystyrene, the farmers are common is a dozen versions of softer polyethylene and I have yet to encounter hard plastic knock-offs of the Airfix US Infantry, so as always with these art-room/press images; one can't take them as evidence of anything, and with no brand it's not proving much-else!

I suspect these will be found in old 1970's catalogues; Kays, Littlewoods, Index or Argos, here in the UK, whether the Spanish had similar I don't know, they could be seaside whinging-stopper's too?

A trizion lenta seems to be with slow traction but it could be with slow friction in Italian if the 't' is a poorly printed 'f' - A frizion lenta? And was this an early Pocketbond import?

08-07-2023 - US imports (with a different sticker on the bonnet of the 'saucer') are clearly marked (C) G.L.J. Toy Co. Inc., Syosset, N.Y. and 'Made in Hong Kong'. According to the US Coastguard (the wonders of Google - and the fact GLJ seem to have been in inflatables (and bendies!)) they also had Offices at the Toy Building 200/5th Avenue.