As I think I've said before, I have a
problem with these, as they are clearly 'astronauts' (late Program Mercury suits, with the strapping carried over to Program Gemini, not the earlier, more
common, Mercury suit with a diagonal
zipper/seam?), but, they are carrying firearms, which in my mind makes them
'spacemen' . . . it's a thin demarcation-line but you have to have them or you
could never put anything away!
I first covered these here, briefly and
small-scale only, nearly 11 years ago (December 2009), and - after hitting it
big with larger-scale examples (an eBay lot and the legendary Barry Blood's
sell-off at 2009 or '10's PW
magazine show) followed-up that post with a guest slot on Moonbase Central. Since then we have returned to them a few
times as the odd lot's come in, and the logo was revisited . . . yeeaahhhhsss; I
had to have a good look at the logo a little while ago!
Known as IDL, ID or ID Ltd. for the longest time, in around
2001/2 (or a bit later?), work - by several people - in several issues of One
Inch Warrior led to the general acceptance of LP as the maker/mark except in Pennsylvania and Florida where IDL continued to hold sway until a few
months ago! I'm now calling them LB,
as we know they were produced by Lik Be
of Chaiwan, Hong Kong.
These are the original set of eight
different sculpts, they are surprisingly inactive and even a little two-dimensional,
but they were some of the first unique figures to come out of the colony with
little of other 'western' figures about them and are well sculpted, well
proportioned (for a bunch of six-footers) and nicely finished.
They are manufactured in factory-painted
hard polystyrene and were glued into various window-box sets, which - similar
to the contemporary Blue Box sets -
came in one, two and three-tier versions, and deeper boxes with accessories.
Consequently they always have the remains of the glue and/or the paper from the
backing card left on them.
Bases are usually a blackish-green, but
some paler ones turn-up and we will look at the smaller ones later.
Quite soon they were replaced with
polyethylene soft plastic figures, and other colours were introduced (which
make them more 'spaceman' less 'astronaut' - in my books!), and we see here
soft plastic figures mirroring the gun-metal of the originals, a flat grey,
green, white and red examples.
Some were still glued into the tiered-sets,
while others where clamped by card cut-outs, or held by rubber bands, in the
end they came in styrene-blister packaging, but by then . . .
The all over multi-coloured painting had
been reduced - briefly - to a three/four colour on the front of the figures
only, which lead quite soon after (it seems) to the final unpainted versions
and here we see all three versions, in their probable order of issue, time
wise, each in white (the creamy one in the middle is sun-damaged I think; not a
colour variation).
Unpainted samples I have found so far;
white, black, blue, red and green, although (going on the robots - next post)
there may well be pink and pale green examples out there, and maybe the earlier
flat grey or even gunmetal?
All the figures so far (above four images)
have the same LB (LP) mark on the base underside along
with a blocked MADE IN over HONG KONG, they don't have the same numbering of
the robots (next post) and probably date from the 1970's.
There was a late re-issuing of the figures
in the 1990's (the originals must - from their suits - date from the early
1960's) of unmarked (left hand) figures; I bought a set of these between 1997
and around 2002 for the editor of Plastic
Warrior in the Ballon Shop in
North Camp from a large counter display tub (of the sort used at the same time
by Imperial the US 'jobber'). The
marked one is probably the 1980's iteration and is more 'worn' than a true
colour variant.
What is notable about them is that they
were a return to a hard plastic, but it's not a styrene (the marked one may be,
actually!), so probably a polypropylene or Nylon/Rayon material (?) and their final
indignity was to be cleared from the factory with no chromium-plating in what
are probably neutral-granule colours (two on the right)
Alongside the Lik Be originals, their metaphorical (or sometimes 'actual')
cousins in the colony were churning out copies, and there are two generations
of based clones, these are the better versions, although measurably worse than
the donors (as you can see; measurable by eye!), with the earlier ones aping
the full paint of the proper chaps, and then unpainted figures being sent out.
They have a simple HONGKONG base mark, in a
similar but less well defined hollowed-base cavity. I suspect the set shown on
the right were once supposed to glow in the dark, but it's an unstable additive
and is yellowing and fading-out of a semi-transparent neutral plastic.
The other set are sub-copies in around
50mm, and can be found in gunmetal samples, or multicoloured batches. They only
copied four of the poses though, and while I suspect they are HK product, they
could be from somewhere else, being unmarked?
The French produced a lot of this kind of
piracy as 'bazaar' (rack-toys) as did the South Americans, while to a lesser
extent locally-produced knock-offs or unmarked HK stuff was available in
Greece, Italy and Spain? Speaking of Greece; Solpa carried unmarked, cruder-still copies of the LB figures, but they had more poses
cloned.
The other clones are the novelty
sucker-toys (top, far right), shown with what I believe are early/late pairings
of - from the left; LB (LP); same-size clones; 50mm clones. I
only have the one sucker-figure, but there are several generations of them and
we'll look at them with the robots - next post. The lower shot is one of each
type/variation of the larger-scale figures, found, so far!
The feebleBay purchase which got the 60-mil
collection off to a fine start; my desk-top in the spring of 2009, further
colours and some of the piracies came in Barry's little grey bags, that May!
X-Plane, Mercury and Gemini suits;
