About Me

My photo
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.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

B is for Blue Box Alien and other Bollocks!

I hate Disney....have I ever said I hate Disney? Well, I hate Disney! Mawkish sentimentality, everything will be alright in the end, happy ever after, a mouse that's clearly been kicked in the nuts, school-yard joke level, simplistic characters, ruined stories that were relatively unchanged for generations before Walt got his hands on them...I hate Disney! I also hate Disney because they make sorting unknown (and known) licensed products a nightmare, they don't make their own toys, but do buy-in contract manufacture, and issue licenses.

In the early days they used to issue licenses which were so controlled they licensed the pose as well as the character so you end-up with 30mm ice-cream premiums in Portugal having the same pose as 70mm toys in the 'States or coming out of Swansea...nightmare! But these are more modern, carried by the Disney Stores back in the 1990-2000's and were manufactured by and marked to Blue Box.

Can't remember the name of this play set, I picked it up at a car-boot sale about 15 years ago, near-new. It may be in storage, but I think it went to recycling with just the figures retained. Lovely, big, red, Cyclopean, PVC lump of alien that will go with most scales and five dumb animals, already dated by the handsets they're carrying ('selfies' before the word had been coined?), did I say I hate Disney...

No comments: