C is for Corgi Creatures (Wild Animals, Jungle and Safari stuff)

The Corgi animals were in the main quite good sculpts with a bit of character, there were also a few dogs but they've been and gone as have some of the circus animals, so these are most of the rest...

Daktari, a popular TV series with - I think - one or two movie length spin-offs, produced several animals draped over Land Rover bonnets and the like, along with a cross-eyed lion who I think was called Clarence? The giraffe is one of many, they are all in the unknown HK animals box, as they are very hard to tell apart, and they mostly came in Chipperfield's sets, but some were in the larger Daktari set.

The legless yellow chap is a propylene copy of the safari guide, probably from a cheap plastic copy vehicle of some kind? The piece to find is the stethoscope.

Common animals from stand-alone vehicles were the Bull which came with a Lamborghini 'Fighting Bull', the Rhino came with a VW Beatle 1200CC East African Rally car with steering while the Jumping rabbit was the accessory for the Hillman Hunter also a rally car - London to Sydney.

Close-ups of the 'Kanga', a quick spray in the factory lead to quite a variation from pale ones to dark, and they have a little Joey hiding under there.

Tarzan, recently staring in a small scale 'deffinative' list is actually 54mm, with the sliding one - from the play set - closer to 60mm, colour variations in the PVC are quite marked.

Poor research (or cutting and pasting from that there interweb thing) leads to myth and legend, while a lack of question marks in poorly researched text leads to myth and legend being taken as fact. Never mind, he will take it from here now, he's taken enough already!

A hunter from another Safari/Jungle set got copied in Hong Kong for a cheapo cuckoo-clock as one of the two barometric figures who swing in and out with changes in the weather, his hands now testing for rain. The inset was previously published in Plastic Warrior and looks at other cuckoo-clock figures, with early composition on the left with a wooden one, hard styrene plastics in the middle and the copy on the right.

The figure is missing his rifle and I think he came with the Lions of Longleat set?

No Comment!

The Lions of Longleat set also contained this nice lion-house, very useful as a temporary HQ or for hiding a Flak or Pak AT-gun in a war game!

The lions are circling the hunter in the previous picture and are both different poses from the Clarence character piece, but come in the same colour material so go well together.

They were also much pirated in those Noah's Arks sets of the 1970's available as mail-order from Tabloid magazines or TV listers and from Bible book-shops.