K is for Knights

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)