October 2012

In the Blue Box farm post the other day I stated that the blow-moulded rock formation was stolen from Starlux, but on Saturday at the Birmingham Toy Soldier Show, this turned-up, and it's not Starlux!

It is - in fact - Elastolin by Hausser, and a composition piece aimed at 70mm figures from the 1930's/50's. This doesn't mean there wasn't a similar Starlux piece, but I think this may be the piece I was thinking of, so here delivered for a full comparison!

Original Here

All he's waiting on now are some toasted soldiers - brown bread...but not dead!

Let's get the sad news out of the way first;

Big Tex 'Bought-it'

Then we'd better get the 'Adult' stuff dealt with;

Chen-yang Wang (Artist)

Don't click on the image/link if you are easily shocked, a prude, or in some other way tied to religious mores or small-mindedness of some variety...it's art, apparently!

Meanwhile Scott B. Leach has got some of his cartoons on to Penn's Sunday School;

Atheist Toy Soldiers

We've seen a coloured 'Flag' - here's a Black & White version;

Valerie Leonard

This on the other hand seems a bit silly;

Chocolate from Stephen J Shanabrook

Auction

Speaking of Vectis (as I was earlier today in the PW149 post) and of the hand-painted Marx Miniature Masterpice items kicking around the hobby a few years ago seems to have been quite timely, as the regular 'Please buy our Olympic shite' eMail from Airfix-call-me-Hornby arrived today with news of a Vectis auction, which is to include some early Airfix archive material.

To be honest, I could only find one item of any interest, a James Bond Autogyro, and they're not that rare. there is some nice original artwork for sale, but with a ready-made 25lbr being described as 'very rare' (loose, mind!) the cataloguing needs to be taken with a pinch of salt!

Auction Listings Here

of more interest is that in the section on 'Plastic Issues - Connoisseur Selection' there are two of the hand-painted Marx sets up for offer...far more interesting than bog-standard kits!!

Shows

Herne

Peter of PB Toys has dropped me a line and reminded me that his Autumn [Kunststoffiguren Börse] plastic soldier show in Herne, Germany is fast approching, full details will be on his site...

Details Here

...but the address for your diary's is 04/11/2012, or two weeks this Sunday.

Birmingham

Which means that a week this Sunday will be Dave McKenna's show in Birmingham, details will be the same as previous years, but the basics are;

When - Sunday 28th October 2012.
Where - Clarendon Suite, 2 Stirling Road, Edgbaston.

So to the last of the Blue Box articles for a while, these are - like most of BB's production - taken from a number of sources, including Corgi, Dinky, Britains and Starlux, and my sample is pretty small consisting of the contents of a much-mashed Blue Box 'Home Farm' in the larger scale. Missing most animals and probably some accessories, it therefore looks mainly at the figures and vehicles.

The combined-harvester and bucket-mounted tractor will be copied from die-casts in the larger size (Corgi or Dinky?) and come with two slightly different drivers, the tractor driver is a lift from Corgi, I don't know for sure where the combine operator is taken from.

The calf is also a Corgi item which we looked at the other day I think? If we didn't we soon will. I'm not sure where the lorry is stolen from, I think it may be a Blue Box cut-n-shut with the Corgi trailer and a different push-and-go cab-unit?

Although looking a bit Britains'y, the cart may be based on one of the smaller makes such as Barratt or Taylor? but the figures come straight from Britains oeuvre, and we again find both based versions and the plug-in base we've been encountering through all the recent Blue Box posts. I particularly like the card load!

~~These do seem to be unique to Blue Box?~~ Triang Spot-On - see comments. Blow-moulded farmhouse (upper two shots) and barn (lower pair) with front and back views of both, these were also included in the small-scale versions of the various Home Farm boxed sets.

More blow-moulding including the copies of the Starlux* rocky outcrops (bottom left), sacks (scaled-up from the Corgi elevator sets, two hay-ricks of indeterminate origin (due to my ignorance - Britains hollow-casts? Triang Spot-On again) and - in injection ethylene - the fence panels taken from Britains and copied by just about everyone in Hong Kong who ever issued a set of farm or zoo animals...and quite a few found themselves in bags of toy soldiers!

* 31/10/2012 - I'm sure I've seen these as Starlux mouldings in their usual dense plastic, however I tracked down the original at the Birmingham show, this weekend just gone, and it's Elastolin, so I may be wrong on the Starlux thing?

Update Here

One of the older names in British manufacturing they were formed in 1823, but would not get round to making toys until after the second World War, having purchased Burnett Ltd., (Ubilda) just as war was declared!

Chad Valley ceased to trade in 1978 with the name being purchased by Woolworth's in the 1990's (?), where amongst other products issued as that brand were some re-boxed Corgi play-sets! I don't know what happened to the name when Woolworth's folded in 2008/9, but presumably it has been acquired or is on some claimants negotiation-list with the receivers!

These are probably the item they are most known for among Toy Soldier enthusiasts, and I believe there was quite a range, mostly of ceremonial/parade type subjects. The two foot figures are almost certainly from another (Light Infantry/Rifles?) set of foot figures, and a mounted figures is missing, probably facing to the right as you look at the box, and maybe a Lancer, Horse-guard in blue or RHA...I'm just guessing now, with a little help from the box-lid!

The latest - larger size - issue of Plastic Warrior has come out and is full of all the usual interesting stuff, which this issue are;

* An article on the tie-in between Daz soap powder and Crescent by Gerald Edwards
* Swoppet ACW overview from Karl James (which very much adds to this Swoppets Article)
* Tom Stark reviews the output of Heritage Toy Figures.
* The introduction on a forthcoming set of articles about Linde Wild West figures and their 'relationship/s' with Elastolin/Huasser, Jean and Frank ('Muckefuck' - no...you'll have to read the article!), brought to us by Andreas Dittmann - who has helped me many times in the past and is a fount-of-all-knowledge when it comes to German (and wider European) production.
* A report by Michael Maughan on the new Toy Soldier museum at Silloth, Cumbria
* Vectis Aution Reports covering rareish boxed sets by Britians, Timpo and Cherilea
* Herald ethnic dancers by Daniel Morgan
* The Dewars and Johnny Walker figures from Marx with the 'missing' figure found by Mark Hegeman
* Fred Barratt show Boxer Rebellion conversions form Mike Blake
* Men of '76 from Kent Sprecher of ToysoldierHQ fame.
* What the !&*$? has a poser on Huskies (dogs not toy cars!)
* Book reviews
* Coverage of other new products from
- HaT Industrie
- Victrix
* Plus all the usual small-ads, news, views and letters on figures from around the world (Eagalwall [Dan Dare], Goodman [Cherilea copies] and LJN), a follow up on rocket-launchers from the last issue and more Russian figures (Publius and Basevich),with a Cherilea shot on the front cover.

And the next issue will be the 150th!

Following on from the Charbens/Skybirds post last night, here is an actual refueller, this is the Thompson Brothers Mk Vc Aircraft Refueller as used by the RAF in World War II, and these photographs were taken in 2008 at Beltring, shortly before the beast was sold to a museum; Yorkshire Air Museum

Four-view images for anybody who'd like to try drawing it up for scratch-building, the simple shape actually lends itself to resin, should anyone feel there'd be a market for such a model?

A couple of three-quarter views and some other shots, I must say I was rather taken with it, it's not what you'd expect to see down the local High Street, but why not!

You may remember a while ago when I was looking at Skybirds figures (S is for Skybirds) and accessories, I mentioned that they might have bought some of their bits in, as the searchlight they used was the same as a truck-mounted one on another makers slush-cast lorry?

Well - this is the lorry I was talking about, I believe it is Charbens, and you can see that the searchlight is the same as the Skybirds one. Charbens would go on to use a Die-casting process with a mazak type alloy/compound, and the two lower shots are of later mini-scale vehicles from that range.

While mentioning Skybirds, here are a few more shots, courtesy of Mercator Trading who were carrying them at a recent show. We've seen a better tanker-refueller (also thanks to Adrian - I seem to recall!) but the 'under-wing' refueller is new to the blog and a harder model to get hold of.

The boxed set of figures is also really nice, I'm not sure how you are supposed to differentiate between the officers and NCO's though, there are only two poses in the box?

So to the second to last post on larger scale Blue Box (for a year or two?!!), and a quick look at the mediaevals, these are all piracies of other peoples best efforts and it makes you wonder how they ended-up with such relatively unique stuff in the WWII range when everything else was so clearly plagiarised!!

The foot figures; top left are taken from Jean in Germany and the set on the right are ~~all~~ a mix of Elastolin and Merten (? see comments!) poses; also Germany, these don't appear to have run together, and certainly I've never seen a boxed set of mixed examples, but they are all of an age and era where they all look as old as each other. I suspect the Merten copies came first and the Jean pirates followed?

I've not found Merten cavalry copies, but the Jean-lifted sets do contain the chaps illustrated above, mostly (like a couple of the foot figures) using the wrong end of a stumpy lance...to point the way? The horse is also ex-Jean and those of you who recall the Cowboy post (Blue Boxes) a while back will recognise from the painting and the plastic style (and the 'donor' maker!) that these are contemporary with the Wild West range.

They also had two generations of siege-engine, and for a complete change they are copied from ~~two~~ three other western manufacturers! The one at the top ~~and the red one~~ being a copy of the Lone*Star die-cast and seemingly issued with the Merten rip-offs, while the Jean clones got the lower brown machine which is a copy of the Marx catapult, and the red, Crescent knock-off. (2024 - Thanks to Colin Penn and Peter Evans for the Crescent clear-up)

For those not used to Blogger, the 'index' to the right of the page, about half-way down allows you to find similar posts by their content, just click on the label (word) that best suits you search needs. I have tried to label by

- Country of origin of toy
- Country represented by toy
- Maker
- Material
- Scale/Size/Ratio
- Era represented by toy
- Whether subject is civil/military
- Other 'themes'
Etc...

Re-annotating the index is still an ongoing project, in the meantime to save on space (there is a limit on the number of characters and the numer of labels) I have started using abbreviations, which are as follows:

- AFV = Armoured Fighting Vehicle
- Plymr. = Polymer (type of plastic)
- NTS = Non Toy Soldier (subject matter)
- Gdn. = Garden/Gardening (subject matter)
- Flwrs. - Flowers (subject matter)

All other abbreviations are part of the recognised name of a company or organisation.

I've reproduced the 'tag' list/index here to have a play, this will become dated though! Also when I first published it ~~four hours ago~~ [Yesterday!] it was about a mile long due to hidden coding which meant something else outside of the normal sidebar and produced yards of 'space' so I've cleaned it up a bit, corrected a couple of errors and taken the brackets out - they are to be found in the full version and tell you how many articles with that index 'tag' there are.

1 Ton Humber Mini Trucks