Does anyone know these cats?

Hi All,

Hoping to get some information on where these Cats are from?

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Thanks :)

The rex is a common "chinamal". The other one is much higher quality though... is there no stamp?

Saarlooswolfhound wrote:

The rex is a common "chinamal". The other one is much higher quality though... is there no stamp?

Hi Saarlooswolfhound,

Thanks for the response. Where would I find information online regarding the "chinamal".

The other one has no stamp or writing on it.

Thanks

jdk42 wrote:

Saarlooswolfhound wrote:

The rex is a common "chinamal". The other one is much higher quality though... is there no stamp?

Hi Saarlooswolfhound,

Thanks for the response. Where would I find information online regarding the "chinamal".

The other one has no stamp or writing on it.

Thanks

Chinamal is not a brand, it is a neologism or an invented word we use in our community to describe a figure made in China of a relatively low quality which brand is often not known. It derives from Chinasaur, a very popular (invented) word used by dino collectors to describe a cheap and often inaccurate or outdated looking dinosaur figure. Again many are from unknown brands but Toy Major and other brands fall into this category. It does not always has a depreciative meaning, we have on forum some collectors of this kind of models, I have myself a good number of them in my collection of foxes.

Roger wrote:

jdk42 wrote:

Saarlooswolfhound wrote:

The rex is a common "chinamal". The other one is much higher quality though... is there no stamp?

Hi Saarlooswolfhound,

Thanks for the response. Where would I find information online regarding the "chinamal".

The other one has no stamp or writing on it.

Thanks

Chinamal is not a brand, it is a neologism or an invented word we use in our community to describe a figure made in China of a relatively low quality which brand is often not known. It derives from Chinasaur, a very popular (invented) word used by dino collectors to describe a cheap and often inaccurate or outdated looking dinosaur figure. Again many are from unknown brands but Toy Major and other brands fall into this category. It does not always has a depreciative meaning, we have on forum some collectors of this kind of models, I have myself a good number of them in my collection of foxes.

Thanks Roger. Is there anywhere I might be able to find some more info on this particular cat then?

Unfortunately I can't help. I even asked other collectors who usually do not use the forum but I couldn't get any information.

The rex cat is from this set, though currently the set is incomplete on TAW and has a few cats from a different set listed in it as well (the last two do not belong to the same set). Nayab was the guess on the maker of these, but they were sold under a lot of different branding and usually marketed as "party favors."

The tabby looks really good, I'd be curious to know where it came from as well!

Might the tabby be a New Ray? It reminds me of figures in a set my daughter had, back around '08.

Jill wrote:

The rex cat is from this set, though currently the set is incomplete on TAW and has a few cats from a different set listed in it as well (the last two do not belong to the same set). Nayab was the guess on the maker of these, but they were sold under a lot of different branding and usually marketed as "party favors."

The tabby looks really good, I'd be curious to know where it came from as well!

Nayab manufactures to all those companies so the way is listing them as Nayab. Do you happen to know to which set the last two cats belong?

Roger wrote:

Jill wrote:

The rex cat is from this set, though currently the set is incomplete on TAW and has a few cats from a different set listed in it as well (the last two do not belong to the same set). Nayab was the guess on the maker of these, but they were sold under a lot of different branding and usually marketed as "party favors."

The tabby looks really good, I'd be curious to know where it came from as well!

Nayab manufactures to all those companies so the way is listing them as Nayab. Do you happen to know to which set the last two cats belong?

EDIT: Apologies, on closer inspection, I take it back. They aren't the ones I thought they were. They DO belong in that set, so disregard what I said! These little cheap cats are hard to keep straight. However, a few are still missing from the set, so I'll add those on the corrections thread.

that first one seems to be exceptionally well made and with good painting.
Where did you get them from? perhaps that could help in it's identification?

Jill wrote:

The rex cat is from this set, though currently the set is incomplete on TAW and has a few cats from a different set listed in it as well (the last two do not belong to the same set). Nayab was the guess on the maker of these, but they were sold under a lot of different branding and usually marketed as "party favors."

The tabby looks really good, I'd be curious to know where it came from as well!

Thanks so much Jill for the info. Any ideas where I could buy these?

jdk42 wrote:

Thanks so much Jill for the info. Any ideas where I could buy these?

Unfortunately Amazon doesn't seem to have that specific set anymore but I did find it at Wal-Mart (some of them have slightly different colors from the ones I got). I don't know why it's $15 though! AliExpress has a cheaper version though it looks like it is painted even less well.

I will say to be aware that when I bought my set, it didn't have that cat in your photo in it, even though it was pictured. It had a black and white standing cat instead, and I had to hunt down that cat separately. I have no idea if that's the case with all of these are not, since they are all from different places. I found the one I was looking for on Etsy.

Here are how these cats are marketed by Nayab. This is what they show to the custommer companies. Then, specifications are adjusted according to the custommer needings. They can be sold with different colors, different assortment, different number of models, different materials and that's the reason why we see so many variants of these cats. There's no way to list all variants on TAW so the most sensate way is to list as they are presented by the manufacturer, in this case Nayab.

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Thank you, Roger! I found the link again on TAW to the Nayab page, I had forgotten that as well. Seems I had forgotten many things about these tiny cats since the last time I looked at them closely!

Jill, I cannot even tell from the official picture which one is which figure.
The only I thing I know is that they are 12 and I count 13 and spend most of the time thinking: "Something is fishy here!" ... or better, in my language "There's a cat here!" which has the exact same meaning. Something is wrong or we are suspicious about something but we can't tell what.