S is for Swivel Like Swoppet!

One of the final innovations in the Deetail range, these are quite good fun, four points of articulation with rigid legs meant you could get them into some awkward poses, like an Action Man (GI Joe) with lose elastics, but they can also be posed with the minimum of thought into very realistic fighting positions.

Called Champion Knights, they appeared in 1993 and ran until about '98, alongside various late production of the older ranges and the short-lived Robin Hood set. Currently still around on feeBay and the like, they were never as numerous as the silver knights or Turks, and it's worth sourcing a good sample and laying it away like fine wine!

A general shot or two to give a feel for the figures, in a massed mêlée they do look rather good, although the simplistic shields were a total let-down!

There were four torsos, each available for the longer time in two (reversed) paint schemes, gold on silver or vis-versa. See last frame below for the coloured versions.

I never did a shot of the helmets (but another shoot was pending once the book took shape), so I'm not sure how many mouldings there are, but it looks like six heads were available?

Four leg mouldings were attached to the torsos, these only had the one style of decoration, gold highlights on silver.
The running with foot on tuft of grass was a rather clumsy throwback to the days of lead horses!

Six designs of plug-in crest (3 feather-plumes, 3 'designs') were randomly glued into a hole in the helmets and given various paintings, with Friday-afternoon and Monday-morning figures added to out-workers differing treatments of the paint, there are a fair few variations to track-down, and these are just a taster.

The highlight of this range has to be the weapons, I really like them, particularly the battle-hammer. It's a pity the people who make replacements from time to time don't copy these instead of the dirt-common ones that ran from the 1970's through to the 2000's

The disappointing shields, only half of them pay any attention to the rules of heraldry, and even then not terribly convincingly...this is what happens when you leave the fine details to your Chinese manufacturer, instead of holding on to the design-reigns!

The mounted figures were not only all-new mouldings, but they got an all-new horses and a new design of base, although the old bases were used as well, whether this was early in the run or at the end I don't know.

Colour variations - although there were only the two horse poses, the variation in decoration meant they still looked good together, or even in numbers.

Right at the end they got a 'simplified' paint scheme of coloured surcoats, with grey detailing on what had been the armour plates, mail neck-protection etc...

Because this was such a short-lived series, the final boxes often had both types in at the same time. The helmet crests also become single colour every time.