Category Archives: Playmobil

Weekend 556.0

Posted on by — Leave a reply

I just finished maintenance on Playmobil365.com. My tribute project celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Playmobil is 9 years old! Updates included link hygiene, comment culling, platform hardening, etc. The BIGGEST update was retrofitting categories to EVERY post. This was an old ambition and finally used some downtime to tackle. There are a couple of vignettes and now you can easily isolate the posts and photos related to those stories. All of this was done as early preparation for a 10-year anniversary project (details soon).

If you’ve never visited Playmobil365.com there are tons of tributes to classic video games (Pac-Man and Sid Meijer’s Pirates), 80s bands and artists like A-ha, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Paul Simon and Howard Jones, Disney animation, artists, imagineers and theme park attractions, football clubs like Southampton, Morecambe, and Metz, writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Jeff Bridges via TRON and The Big Lebowski, places like London and Bermuda, and Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, and Haruki Murakami and FINALLY pop culture references like the nod to Garth Marenghi and Stanley Kubrick.

DM me if you can name the movie tribute to Miyazaki and Shinkai and the book title of the tribute to Murakami.

>>> BONUS: Sweet, sweet, sweet tyre pron.

Speaking of…

There have been some significant 20th and 50th Anniversaries the last few years- Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, NY Islanders, and Walt Disney World.

Modernity in miniature

Posted on by — Leave a reply

(1) I’ve clipped the blog post title from a chapter in the excellently written British Rail Architecture 1948-97 by David Lawrence.

“For centuries architects have used miniature versions of their designs to communicate their ideas to emperors, oligarchs, magnates, civil servants and audiences who must be engaged to ensure a project is approved for development. They may be the device which convinces a client to provide substantial investment for a project.”

“Many modelers will choose a station as one of their first buildings because it is a simulacrum of the interface between trains and human activity. It is an archetype for all stations. In this way the model — in fact an assembly of sundry materials and adhesives — is an imaginative threshold into the tiny world of the model railway, inviting the modeler and audience to step, like Alice in Wonderland, into a perfect version of an imperfect world.”

>>> Source File

(2) Continental’s BIG CITY H-O Scale Modern Architecture Series (Flickr)

I have the ‘Entrance Building’ (Model No. 104) which inspired this photo at Walt Disney World. What do you think happened to Continental Models at 1 Dupont Street in Plainview, NY?

(3) Artist rendering of the new concourse for Liverpool Street (1987) from British Rail Architecture 1948-97 by David Lawrence. I love the vintage engine. It reminds me of Playmobil 4052.