R is for Rainbow Warriors

The Quaker Oats 'Sugar Puffs' breakfast cereal premiums and Tom Smith Christmas cracker novelty Gladiators!

We've done them here before (link), there are comparisons on the Airfix Romans' page (link) and I helped Dave over at PSR with images years ago (link), but I really like them, keep collecting them and will return to them from time to time because they ARE eye-candy!

One of each; just to remind you of the set's contents. You get/got five foot figures and three mounted for an eight-count, probably in one tool with a three or six-cavity second-tool for the horses?Sorry; only realized just now it's the old image - new one next time!

Several of the foot figures make useful auxiliaries/allies (the three at the back) while the chap with a round shield looks more Persian or Asiatic. The other guy makes a half-useful slave-driver on-board ship, but is otherwise the duffer in the foot-figures!

With the mounted, only the one in the center is worth collecting for 'army-building' (and steppes/Franks/Goths rather than Rome?) the others having obvious gladiator armour (left) or a ridiculous shield for a rider - on the right, not that they can't all be thrown together with a mix of Airfix, Atalantic, Revell (Elastolin sculpts) and Giant (Marx/Britains) with newer stuff, to make Spartacus's mob!

I took this shot ages ago, and have forgotten why I numbered some of them! But I'll have a stab at most of the notes.

1 - Definitely a Tom Smith colour as that's how ours came in when we were kids, it's a sort of fawn-grey.

2 - This is a metallic green of the sort more usually associated with hard-plastic space-stuff from a decade or so earlier.

3 - Pfffh . . . I obviously had something world-changing to say about 3, once!

4 - This is the same colour as the late Airfix cream figures, and it is cream, not yellow! This is not to say Airfix was involved in their production, but that if two companies were involved, they were probably getting their granules from the same wholesaler.

5 - As per 3, can't remember what I was going to say, semi-translucent . . . which it is? The only pink one? Can't remember!

Ah yes - The Ford Mustang, available in every colour except black! Just the one sculpt for the horses! The whole point of the rainbow-shots is to allow you to consider the origins for yourself; my own feeling is that the only firm that produced the same wide range of colours was Hilco, or at a push Cherilea, both ending-up connected anyway?

But if the Quaker issue were the commoner, primary-colours, and if Tom Smith got access to the tool and farmed it out to a contract manufacture (Tatra or similar?) years later, even the colour range might not be much of a clue?

The obvious gladiator pose is the Retiarius, and the pile behind are the miss-moulded short-shots, the four in front are those with passable tridents, although - as you can see - the first on the left is not fully-formed. I don't often use the term, but finding a decent trident is 'rare' in the true use of the term!

And kids would not necessarily have known he has been posed as having just thrown his net? On a plus side, given both the size of the figures and when they were made, is that he's a very good likeness for a sub-Saharan African with cropped 'afro' hair, a heavy brow and full-lips.

The bases are very Airfix!