Not even a box-ticking tonight, just a 'showcase' of a couple of nice boxed sets I photographed on Adrian's table at Sandown the other weekend, what strikes me as a younger, plastics collector, is A) How little you got in some of these sets and B) how unrealistic/inaccurate a lot of it is.
Generic box for modern'ish 'Combat Infantry' from
Crescent, is it just me or do they look a bit Scandinavian? The mortar is a nice looking piece I haven't seen before, while the two-tone finish of the tin-plate sentry box is less common than the plain red or green you usually find it in.
The
Ranch Set from
Timpo, again...not much in the box, two guys surrendering (?) and four fence pieces which together will make a compound large enough for er...a cow (not included!). Still, they were simple times and one hopes little Junior would have enjoyed the sight on Christmas morning...the glossy colours would have been a bit brighter 60-odd years ago, especially against all the dung-brown and pea-green walls of post-war Britain's houses!
But comparing them to the pre-war sets by
Britains - for instance - still leaves you wondering...it may be that this was the smallest of a range of sets all titled
Ranch Set, that was the case with the garage sets the composition mechanics come in, there were four sizes of set, with the largest having one of everything, the smallest; just enough for a scenario or two, in the days when imagination was everything.
Close-ups of some of the components, the shrub must have been a common piece as it turns up lose, quite often, while the tree is lovely, if needing fettling before it will stand up - I do like a good tree!
Well my early Crescent window boxes had 6 plasyic figures and no scenery so not like the big Britain's sets of decades before my time and not nearly as exciting as the painted Marx miniplaysets.
ReplyDeleteThe first guys look pretty American to me but I'm looking at the picture on a small tablet so I could be missing details.
Enjoyable post, thanks.
Thanks Ross - I think what I was trying to say was that with the later plastic at least you got better-looking figures with your two tree stumps or catus! Although; with some of Cherilea's output...doh!
ReplyDeleteThis Timpo ranch set is very early, probably 1945-50, and are mostly (all?) from moulds Timpo bought in from Stoddart - a pre-war company which never started up again afterwards.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dave - I knew it had some significance, but didn't ask Adrian while I was photographing them! I believe it's been in one of the better books on the subject (Joplin's 'Civilians'?). I also meant to add to the text that I didn't think any of them made it to plastic....that explains why!!
ReplyDeleteH