About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

G is for Getting There!

We've still got a few animals to cover, but these are the last of the figural sculpts, although...mostly animals, but in the cartoon or caricature styles of semi-human anthropomorphous!

When trolls get too small for hair! I think I have some of these very small ones in storage WITH hair, but these have eschewed hair for charm loops. The mouse has painted eyes, and is another common 'trope' with capsule toys at the cheap end of the market.

The capsule market has two parameters, first the size of the capsule which used to be in inches (1", 2" and 3" etc...) but is now in mm's with 30mm equating to the old 1" capsules and so on. The second variable is the target price, even now they start at 20p here in the UK (approximately E0.30 or ¢), so something as cheap as these would be in a 1"/20p mixture.

Long, long before Kinder did their little families or sets of catoonish animals, these had come out of both Hong Kong and Japan, carded in sets as well as singly from gum-ball machines, and other sets included dogs, pandas, brown bears etc... These cats are loosely referential toward earlier cats in animation such as Felix, Fritz and Figaro.

Couple of complete Res Plastics (RP) / Kinder figures and one of the most copied of all figures ever, the Britains farm hand, I have this figure in a dozen or more sizes and herds of versions.

Animated playthings, Marx had a set of Disney characters in this style and Britains briefly had the Twizzle Town figures, who's were first I couldn't say, but the bear on the left still turns up in cheap crackers, while the elephant-headed Mickey mouse (gloves/boots?) is from the 1970's and probably based on the Marx set. Kinder have produced similar 'anima[not]tronics'!

2 comments:

Al said...

You are a wealth of knowledge mate :) happy holidays

Hugh Walter said...

Thanks Al...I try! Hope the season treats you and yours well too and that your crackers have something useful in!

Hugh