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, June 8, 2016

M is for Marx Miniature Mash-up

Both a lovely thing and a bit of a shitter! A 'lovely thing' because it contains very fine polystyrene animals which have - mercifully - not been damaged, yet 'a bit of a shitter' as it's clearly designed (as if the word even pertains here!) to exploit a TV franchise, by grabbing whatever is to hand and shoving it in an existing format box, with no thought other than to make a few bucks!

The box follows the format of the late window boxes; we've looked at here before now - several times. Quite dramatic artwork with the zebra-stripes, it is guaranteed to catch the eye and generate pester-power for a purchase! 'DAKTARI' writ large only increases the desire to 'own a bit' of the child's current favorite TV series.

But hold on! No people, no vehicles, no recognisable characters; human or animal . . . just a bunch of European-looking deer and some giraffes, all from the Noah's Ark sets. Also; a quick investigation of the contents reveal that they are not the soft [unbreakable] plastic usually associated with these window-boxes, but rather the very frangible polystyrene of the earlier Miniature Masterpiece Ark sets.

Of interest though is the attempt to add interest to the contents with pop-up, card cut-outs of the grass-clumps. Although the two largest ones at the back have been ignored by 'staple-machine person' back at the factory! I should add that the three types of palm and the 'tropical' plants are soft ethylene however.

The missing: 'r'

The deer! Least said soonest mended forgotten! If any of these walked the plains of Africa, it was a Hollywood Africa, probably filmed in Yugoslavia!

Made by the Taiwanese arm of a US company, shipped to and packed in Hong Kong for onward transit to the British arm's marketing men to 'tie-in' with a TV series set in Africa.
I still think you'd be bloody disappointed when you got this home and broke half the animals getting them off the cardboard they've been grimly glued-to with something looking like Evostick . . . rubberised, brown snot!

The carbon-footprint of this item is frightening enough given what we know now, but the intent to rip-off is more worrying, and points to reasons other than oil-crisis' and Eastern competition for the demise of some Western companies; they were taking the piss out of their customers!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Clarence the cross-eyed lion is sadly absent, but then as the actors were filmed in California and Florida with only stock footage of 'African scenery' used then this fake international offering of the BBC series is right in line with the show itself. Wasn't there a very nice Corgi diecast Daktari truck to compensate for this mish mash?

Ross Mac rmacfa@gmail.com said...

I'm not sure about the spotted beast with horns but the other 3 are passable toy renditions of the whitetails that live around here, a mature stag, a young stag and a doe. (the white of course not showing with tails down)

Mind you no one would have tempted money out of me for a box of giraffes and the like unless they included some great white hunters in pith helmets and natives with spears.

Hugh Walter said...

Exactly Ross - you want a man with a rifle and a couple of semi-naked 'zulus' with spears as an absolute minimum!

Anon - There were several Daktari or Dkatari 'type' things about, but one hopes Marx weren't relying on their rivals to support the set!!

H