Lost in the Toybox: I'm Dakin It

In the late 60's early 70's there was a company called Dakin that made this line of animation figures. I can't quite figure out if this is the same company that later made stuffed animals and Jurassic 'little animals,' though it appears to be so. They tended to have hard hollow plastic bodies and many had hard feet that acted as a 'stand', though the limbs and heads tended to be more pliable, and of course jointed at the shoulder and neck. The majority of the line were Warner Brothers characters, but they seemed to include several 'lesser' animation lines, like Hanna-Barbera, Popeye, and Rocky and Bullwinkle. Never Disney, of course. Some of the more 'human' figures, like Yosemite Sam or Olive Oyl, would include articles of cheap cloth clothing separate from the body mold. I remember them as being somewhat ubiquitous in gas stations; lots of people bought them as 'mascots' for their cars or trucks. Our cousin Monroe Jr. (Pop's nephew, but he was old enough that Pop treated him more like his own cousin), also a truck driver, had an amazing collection in his room at Aunt Melva's, that he quite rightly never let us fiddle with. I wonder whatever happened to those?

Anyway, we kids wanted them all, of course, not possible financially or always available, but we got these above few over time. We had no real idea of who Cool Cat was (the 'final star of the Warner Bros. Original theatrical cartoons'; in other words, not on TV yet, and maybe a sparse comic here and there) but cool enough; we were much more familiar with Daffy and the Roadrunner and Coyote. I can't remember at this distance whether we had a Bugs Bunny or just really wanted one: my brother John would probably be able to tell me (well, no, we didn't have a Bugs; did I dream it?). We always thought they were a little off-model, but with merchandising the way it was, we took what we could get. Here's a selection of what was available.