J is for Jet-O-Car!

Bit of a rarity here, it is mentioned in the multi-authored 'Blast Off' (ISBN 1-56971-576-9, 2001, pp.117; and the index in that - otherwise excellent - book is shite, I think they added some pages and never updated the index!), and only shot at the show, it was way outside my budget, and it sold before I had a chance to photograph it (about an hour before the doors opened!), but fortunately the new owner let me fire of a few quick shots.

The Poplar Plastics via Thomas Toys, pulp-era, dime-store type Jet-O-Car, a sprung-loaded beast, ready to spill shards of shattered polystyrene down all the skirting-boards in three colours of brittle polymer! Which is probably why it's so rare now!

 

Loosely similar to the Pyro Rocket Car, but with the addition of a clear-plastic canopy and the aerodynamic rear wheel-well/fairings, the mechanism is similar to the Airfix racing car we saw here (well, if we didn't, it's in the queue!) a while back.

 

It's unmarked, which calls into question a few of the 'Kleeware/Tudor Rose?' items, as this metallic blue plastic keeps cropping up, and with both widespread mould-sharing, and copying, it's never as clear as some would like? It's very much a case of if you don't have a maker's mark, or the box, it's unknown, even if you're pretty sure?

LB is for Like Bullets!

Or at least, they would leap like bullets if they weren't missing their baseplates and springs, for now they are rather stationary but these LB follow-up's by HF had to have an iterative trope in the title and that was all I could come-up with!

 

We have seen these before and two of them were complete, with a spare spring on the third to boot, so they can all share the bottom pieces for any future jumping competitions!

 

In the order they arrived; so, that's six now, two Vichy robots giving-up before they've got going and four of the 'officer' with pistol, so it's starting to look like only the two poses were used, but I'll keep half-an-eye out for more - poses or colours!

J is for Jumping Jazzberry Jaguar

I picked-up a nice mixed lot of jumpers a while ago, I think we've seen several now already, but there's a couple of 'jiggler' type monsters still to come, in the meantime and as a continuation of one of the side-collections, there was this Pink Panther.

Not a lot to add to the pictures, but you want to try and get three lines out of it to keep the Google-bots happy, so extra images for colour variation against different backgrounds and note he's wearing PE-kit of 'singlet & shorts' and looks happy anticipating his violent acceleration along a random trajectory with a 50/50 chance of landing on his head!

Marked-up to Hong Kong with a haloed globe and the letters HF (heliotrope feline!), I test fired him and he leapt about three feet . . . and landed on his head! Testing was in the interests of research of course, I'm a grown-up, I don't play!

This chap came in with a mixed lot at some point, I think. His natty jacket and hat also happen to match the sucker-pad on the one above, colour-wise, and I thought I might have him in the four we saw a while back, but he's new (there was one with a top-hat in that other set), and is probably from another set of four from the same source as last time.

R is for Recent Addition!

Picked this up at a recent fair, nothing about it in the books, but you can't have everything . . . 

One wonders if it was destined for the 01741 Astronauts, or was there a range of more fictional Sci-Fi stuff planned? Anyway; it fills an obvious gap in the collection - Space Tank!

T is for Two - Hobbycraft Rack Toys

These are fun, one being a copy of previously seen stuff, the other a rather weird take on millinery! It's funny, you can go to one of these big-box stores regularly for several years and find nothing beyond a mould-your-own pirate fort to shelfie, or you can go three times in three months and walk away with something after every visit! I was in Hobbycraft the other day for a multi-compartment storage tray and left with three, and these two!

"Throw an egg in it; that'll make it Easter-bonnet'ty!" Yeah, seriously . . . but a nice set of mini dinosaurs married to a scenic space-taker and a couple of bits of greenery, Easter bonnet's are all about the greenery!

The two on the right are from forthcoming posts on kids comic giveaways, and while the Hobbycraft ones are similar they are 'new' copies rather than pantographed clones, and - it has to be said - of slightly poorer quality/finish.

The palm trees are fascinating - from a technical point of view - as they are a single moulding (that frond is growing out of the trunk), which must be shaped with heat, probably while still hot from the moulding process? The shrub is clearly a fish-tank thing with a weight-basket attached to bury in the gravel at the bottom of a tank!

And they both have this bi-colour single-shot moulding which pushes the paler colour to the extremities, which have looked at before, again coming our hobby via aquaria? 

While these are branded to Unique, who we've seen before as purveyors of fine novelty tat! They are smaller copies of the Henbrandt ones we saw here, the originals going to five poses, to which we added a sixth pose here.

I don't know if these knock-offs have copied all six sculpts as they are only sold in fours and all the bags had the same contents? That's it; a couple of rack-toys in Hobbycraft now.

I would add that House of Marbles are carrying the Henbrandt set in new colours, so we will see these again here at Small Scale World.

T is for They Keep Turning-up For Duty!

Those who have followed the blog since the start will know I like any excuse to return to LB's space sets and derivatives, and while LB is still contentious as a title, time will tell, and those still using LP will have to come-round in the end.

Funniest was someone still using IDL till well after last May (2020) who then quietly switched to LP and within two months was lecturing Erwin on Faceplant as to why it was LP as if he hadn't spent the 20-odd years since LP was coined, continuing with IDL!

He's trying to hang it on the Lik Be Plastics' hook, but it's Lik Be Plastics and Metal, so would be - under any rule of nomenclature - LPM, LBPM, LP&M or even LBP&M, it's none of them it's LB for Lik Be. Only for Erwin - a few months later - to lecture someone else on LP as if he'd known it all along! They are awful, that PSTSM-lot are awful!

Anyhoos, four lots of LB recruits have come in the last 12-or-so months . . .

. . . including a new Moon Exploration bagged set (from the Antipodes - I think he's still listing one), four more chromium-finished chaps and two pop-ups . . . we've seen the erasers already but they can be the fourth! Bag is LB marked and - along with the four loose figures - contents all have the usual LB base-mark, the others are derivative/pirates.

I'm not opening these yet, but a few shots to show that you get all eight astronauts in plain white and all six robots in 'atomic-green', all in soft polyethylene and all carrying the full base mark, but of interest is that the robots have all have their conversion to hangers for key-chains and the like, as have the pink ones in the blister-carded set seen here previously, so the key-ring iteration (see Wotan Bill's posts on Moonbase) was definitely an interim phase.

The four loose ones were in a mixed lot with some other stuff which I was more interested in (even though I couldn't now tell you what that was/they were as it's all been sorted away in the chaos here at the moment), the lot only added one figure-pose  to the chrome sample (upper row), but I stripped the paint off the other three to add to my 'plastic variants' sample, and the lower row is that sample, now.

Because these are coated with a powder (probably aluminium or a zink-aluminium alloy?), when you strip them (which takes about four seconds on immersion in concentrated ammonia - TFR [Traffic Film Remover] or Silver-dip), they leave the varnish/glue coating with which they were covered before coating; it  doesn't show so much on the dark figures but which is obvious on the paler ones.

I know people bang-on about 'vacuum-coating' but that's a different process found on more expensive toys from big-brands and which peels in sharp-flakes, this is more akin to flocking, but with a substrate which is naturally polished (as granules or molecules) and settles in a shiny coat, to the human-eye. I've said before - you can get a similar product ready-mixed in cans as an aerosol.

Upper row are the new additions, lower row are some of the variants of the same pose. Except, the new ones are actually replacing my older samples as they were worn, through handling, while the incomers were pretty mint, so it was all change of the old guard! Although the full sample is larger as I've kept a few each of the chromium ones and the brushed-aluminium-looking ones over the years.

If you think I'm cheating by counting the erasers as the fourth addition when they've already been seen here before, you can count the middle guy here as the fourth-addition instead, but he was actually in the 'Unknown Space Men and Humanoid-Aliens' box, where he's been for years! He's missing his base-section.

The other two, a paler pink - came in with a mixed lot of identically-mounted rubber-jigglers (also marked HF) and a couple of Imperial Toys-marked similar rubber stuff, all-else of which we'll look at another day. Clearly they are 'after' the LB sculpts, both robots and spacemen, but how many were so copied I don't know. And you can see that without finding the more-obvious robot, the astronaut would have languished in the unknown's box for a while longer!

All three of these are hollowed, relief-sculpted semi-flats in polyethylene, and I doubt the HF is for Hing Fat . . . wacky novelties? Not really them; they have nailed their colours to a different mast, and anyway, I suspect these pre-exist Hing Fat's dates by a decade at least, however I don't have another candidate yet?

19th June 2021 - Correction! The other - darker pink - one had only been in the unknown box since December (possibly why I didn't remember having him!) and had come from Chris Smith as my mind was on Mum's illness over Christmas, so apologies to Chris, they all came in quite recently!

T is for The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

It's also for trees, terrible timekeeping and troublesome assistant!

This was supposed to be, or to be specifically accurate; was originally intended to be - the third post on the golf day we had a week or two ago, but, I thought, it would be better used for National Tree Week, once I had become aware of NTW, given it's about the trees with this particular set.

Obviously, plans went awry last week and I never got all the tree stuff out, so it might as well have been used on Good Walk Spoiled Day instead, but, hey-ho, there are no rules to this Blogging malarkey, unless you're my critics in which case apparently there's a whole bunch of rule books but nobody's got round to sending me copies! Anywhoos - here's Carpet Golf from Turner Research, late!

Did I say troublesome assistant? Straight into the packaging like a rat up a drainpipe!

Box was shite, but I didn't get it for the box (which was in the kindling bucket for fire starting minutes after this shot) and a poor box means a cheaper deal! We'll get on the the trees and figures in a minute, but I also kept the two bunkers and the water feature; they may come in useful at some point in the future?

I did measure the figures, but I've forgotten what it was and put them away! I think it was about 110mm - judging from the fingers below! The figures have a lever action which enables them to putt, chip or whack large expanded-polystyrene balls about the place with gay abandon!

I've also kept the green-flag (which is red!) and it will join a plethora of other, larger, wood, metal and plastic flags & standards in a tub somewhere.

Working the leaver to show how simple it is - both the golfer and the mechanism . . . tada! They are manufactured from a very dense PVC which I came to wishI hadn't separated for the 'how' shot when trying to get them to go back together again; but they went in the end with a bit of brute force!

There were only two clubs in the box, there should be six, but - again- I wasn't buying it for the golf!

I was buying it for the bloody trees weren’t I!

Over a decade ago, when I worked for JB, we had a couple of these come through the stock, and since then I'd had it on the 'long list', and from time to time would check it on evilBay; in the end I got one. It's not rare and if you're careful you can pick one up for reasonable money, not for the 'pre-executive toy' executive-toy elements, but for the trees!

Britains style trees, (marked Japan interestingly), but in autumnal colours, which, when placed with a couple of Britains copper-beeches, can make a believable autumn scene, clearly Japanese acers; they can be your very-own Westonbirt! The bases are Britains as far as it goes, but the tree trunks are more original.

As it happens; I think I'm missing an orange sprig, the box suggests using both colours for each tree, and going by the obvious studs (anyone who's made-up these types of tree will know extra fronds can be placed on twigs/branches not directly intended for them!) the two trees are supposed to take eight and six sprigs respectively, which could be 7 & 7 colour wise? But I'll be looking out for a yellow one!

This also comes in the set, also 'Japan', it seems to be complete but could have used a couple-more spreads of greenery? Also clearly channeling Britains, not only in the base-shape, but in the fact that the side branches both follow the Britains 'system' and seem to be copied from the Britains Cedar, despite the main trunk being more original?

However, the similarities are explained . . .

. . . by the fact that an original Britains Cedar was available to someone at Turner during the design phase! I dare say they had more than one Britains tree to so peruse?