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.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

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)

6 comments:

Ross Mac rmacfa@gmail.com said...

Ah, so that old green die cast catapult I have was Lone Star. The Marx one I recognize from my 25mm Knights & Vikings set.

Do I not see at least 2 Elastolin copies mixed in the the Merten ones?

Hugh Walter said...

Hi Ross

Re. Elastolin...very probably...I did um-and-ahh over the exact source, but plumped for Merten, due to the level of animation and the bases!

The Marx 'Miniature Masterpiece' version of the catapult was also copied by Giant and other HK rack-toy types, as a small-scale piece.

Cheers,
Hugh

Peter Wake said...

I also have the green Lone Star version and a number of the Lone Star Harvey series knights, good post thanks

Hugh Walter said...

Hi Peter

Thanks for stopping-by, I covered the Lone Star 'Richard' figure here Merry Men

Unknown said...

Hi, I think the green catapult is Crescent, not Lone Star. Great site!

Hugh Walter said...

You're right Geeppe - don't know how we all missed that!

H