O is for Other Bits...Bunkers and Barriers

Looking at more Marx Miniature Masterpiece play-set accessories tonight, mostly what would be considered 'defence stores', but also the little bits that make the sets such a joy to open.

The face-bunker! What was that all about? And a few of the many Hong Kong copies, in the end the 'nose' was dropped from the copies and a sort of covered side-entrance/trench thing added, but by that time the moulding was a bit of a blob!

There were other versions of the low wall thing, I have a couple in pale-blue from a Disney set somewhere.

 Various wooden fences and palisades, the barbed-wire entanglements which would never stay together - strangely, some of the HK versions are better at standing up than the original!

The pile of rocks is probably the commonest accessory after the sacks and barrels, and came in hard or soft plastic, in many colour variations, and was - like a lot of these items - scaled down from the larger scale sets.

The commoner flag-pole I mentioned the other day, a soft-plastic crater from a late space exploration set, and the smaller of the tent designs. I have the larger ones somewhere, but couldn't find them the other day, so I suspect they are with the loose figures in storage?

Bottom left is the basic Wild West range of accessories, there are three versions of the hitching-post, a bark-sculpted one (front) with a sag, a smooth, straight one (back) and an intermediate one. Most of these can be found in hard or soft plastic, and luggage was apparently evenly distributed throughout the wild west!

The main shot is the other common-to-most-sets stuff, with the exception of the two model railway items at the back, which are not common at all - unless you're a vintage US HO Railroad collector? The sacks are a Merit lift and along with the barrels in the Wild West shot came in most sets...indeed, the Charge of the Light Brigade set we looked at the other day was notable for not having a bag of sacks and barrels.

The shot at bottom-centre is not really belonging to this post as it's a more set-specific collection of bits, but is interesting because my Battleground set which we looked at back at the start of the blog and which was a sealed set, had no recoilless rifles, leading to my confusion with all the ammo trays/bogies. That with 700-odd visitors a day now, no one has spotted the omission enables me to correct myself! Someone forgot to put the two weapons in the set! Also of note is that the mortar in this lot has a painted base.

Both the Crescent sand-bag sentry-posts were pantographed-down and copied by Marx in painted polystyrene and then blow-moulded by Blue Box, we have looked at them here on the blog somewhere.

The little 'shell-scrape' revetment/defence to the right is actually from the 54mm swoppet-type figure with all the accessories, but is missing it's .30cal mount legs, so is more usable for other things, though damaged.

The redoubt!