Novelty Headquarters Inc., and Others - Space Alien Clones

We've already seen these as I only have the three examples and they have all been used in comparison-shots on the previous two posts! However, to get the boxes ticked, we'll have another look at them with a bit more info' and some theorising.

So these are they; it has taken all of my 40+ years collecting to get the three, which equates to one every fourteen-odd years! I fact they've all come in, in the last 30 years, so about once a decade, although, technically they aren't [or 'weren't'] rare once, as we'll see in a minute.

But the slow drip of them here in Albion points to them having been either the very cheap gum-ball machine capsule prizes (1p or 2p machines back in the day) or the budget Christmas cracker's - 1 per cracker, 1 cracker to every few boxes?

Mark is, as you can see, a small, crude 'HONG KONG', in semi-readable condition.

And they are copies, probably from crude re-moulding, hand-finished, rather than with a pantograph, simplification of the blue-guy's rifle, and the missing butt of the pink guy's, coupled with a marked reduction on size over the originals and loss of fine detail, suggest a crude method of copying? Especialy as they've then been given the same size bases as the Giant donors, something which would have been equally reduced by an off-set pantograph.

This has been on the PC since I got the one before the one before this, and I think it came from a defunct Blog or website, it may be off eBay (some early images were very poor) but it illustrates the point that in the 'States you could get a bag of 100+! For what, .25/35¢? And say 5-20 bags per outlet, 500 or 5,000 outlets . . . somewhere; a mountain of these has disappeared into thin air! As have the Giant originals!

Except we know they are in landfill! Ephemeral rack-toys, from the budget-end of a budget-genre, they were discarded, hoovered/vacuumed, lost in the garden or playground, down drains (there'll be a bunch of 'em in the Sargasso garbage patch!) and whatever was left, eventually went in the bin.

Another old crap image with some LB (Lik Be) robots rounding up the Novelty Headquarters Inc's invasion force!

Now, these are the same colours as those in the bag, not the same as mine, which may point to mine being a 2nd generation piracy, 3rd generation if you count the Giant ones. The US ones also seem to have retained a bit more of their stature, although the red one on the left has a poor weapon, so it's probably down to the base-mark, which I don't know, however I suspect two runs of the same tool.

===============================================================

But is it Giant?

Neoooow! Not in a million-billion-squillion-gazillion-years Pal! Yer 'avin' a larf, in't 'cha!