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.

Friday, December 20, 2013

C is for Corgi Cops (and Robbers)

So we looked at the generic police the other day, but Corgi loved their TV and Movie tie-ins, and it's some of those we're going to look at now

Top left we have the wheelchair-bound Ironsides, below him are two characters I thought were from one of the James Bond related sets but actually they are from the Man from U.N.C.L.E. set, they flick in and out of the windows on the pivots, driven by an internal mechanism presumably attached to the axles. They are another unit that keeps turning up in large numbers as ex-shop stock or unused out painters stock?

Going across the bottom we have two shots of the three near-54mm figures from the Starsky and Hutch set, sadly no Huggy-bear, who was clearly my favourite character and - if I recall correctly - does star on the model cars packaging! Above them is Theo "Who loves yah baby" Kojak, another figure who gets some variation of face from model to model.

While the chap who also looks like a Bond character (top middle) was from a lesser known US cop show Vegas which was shunted to an odd hour here in the UK, possibly on only some of the then independent ITV stations? Was he Johnny Vegas?

John Steed and Purdy from the New Avengers, she gets a variety of turn-ups on her slacks. the blue chap who I also thought was a Bond, also turned out to be someone else, but I can't remember who, he may be listed in the overview I'm going to publish as the last post in this series, but I'm not sure, he may be Kojak's sidekick (and he may be a bond character!)?

These are all James Bond characters with the two figures from the ejector-seat Aston Martin, another bond firing over the back seat and the Corgi Junior version of the Aston, missing it's unpainted ejectee, who is in the unknown seated box in storage...I think! Left-handed gunman.

Poignant post as one of the stars only passed away the other day, and without being too irreverent to the memory of Lewis Collins who played Bodie (William Andrew Philip!), this has to be one of the campiest sculpts of a 'hard man' character ever. Ray [Raymond] Doyle (Martin Shaw) looks like he means business with an SMG and their boss George Cowley (Gordon Jackson) is shouting orders in his usual deep Scottish brogue. Bodie is also a left-handed model?

How we loved this (The Professionals) as older kids, it was quite something after Dixon, Softly Softly and Z-Cars to have a hard-hitting series of law-enforcers, with guns, operation just inside the law, that wasn't made in America!

Like the Starsky and Hutch set these figures are near enough 54mm and come from the later, larger 1:32 scale car range.

More the this iconic British TV series;

The Professionals - Chapter and Verse!

2 comments:

Ed and Bettina Berg said...

Really like the early Bond stuff Hugh! Even though the Aston Martin isn't flashy, it's as much a pop culture icon as the 1966 Batmobile.

Hugh Walter said...

One of the few Corgi's my brother and I had was the full sized version, that had everything, ejector seat for left-handed Chinaman, flick-out tyre (tire) shredders, oil-slick mechanism, and MG's!!! Quality Toy!

H