F is for French Figures I - Styrene & Cellulose Acetate

Add over another year to the dates below! I'd almost got these ready for publishing when Blogger decided to empty one of the folders and replace it with the contents of the one I was editing a few minutes earlier...I lost hart and sat looking at them for over another year! Anyway; here they all are....finally!

===============================================================

I took the first of the images for these about five years ago, three years ago I had a bigger photo-session and announced they would be forthcoming, two years ago I got round to 'collaging them up' in Picasa - by which time a few more had come in - and announced that they were on the waiting list, uploaded them at the library in Newbury about 14 months ago and apart from adding another collage of latecomers, they've sat in Edit ever since!

I don't now what the problem was...like writer's block or something! Anyway, this and the three posts going-in below (on the blog 'Homepage') are the long-seeped results. It's no more than an overview of what little I know about French soldiers and French manufactured figures of 'combat' or 'khaki Infantry' from the WWII-Modern period.

This post looks at the earlier figures, the second looks at later soft plastic production, the third has some Czech rubber and polypropylene re-issues and the forth is a few Starlux. There are throughout the four as many question-marks than as facts, and input will be appreciated.

Three from Clariet and one from Jim, the more interesting is the separate helmet on the shirt-sleeved pointing chap, mirrored in the production of Minimodels over here. I particularly like the sailor, he goes well with the output of Starlux, but is doing something useful (slotting the enemy) not standing around with a swab or ceremonial axe!

These nearly all need ID'ing, I recognise some old Aluminium poses (and a couple of these are also in soft plastic as Vilco on the next post down), the silver one here is in a styrene polymer. I'd say the dark-blue sailor is from a die-cast or plastic toy vehicle or vessel of some kind.

The forth one along from the left seems to be Cyrnos, but the chap to his left isn't, so they are probably re-paints and the Tirailleur (mid-blue, far left) is definitely a Cyrnos figure

I think the riders are all Starlux (though I'm not 100% sure) but I'm not so happy that the horses are, there's only the two horses and ones missing its tail, so a poor sample, but the riders are lovely.

The pale blue chap is Beffoid, while the officer in the middle of the lower bunch is marked Quiralux, so going on both base-paint and plastic colours, I assume most of the rest are? The last two on the lower row are probably home re-paints; there were a lot in the collection they came from?

These are half-and-half a mystery to me; top middle and right looks like an ex-aluminium figure, so Quiralux or Cofalux?

The centre shot are all Cyrnos sailors, 3 repainted as Nazis by the same guy who ruined the soft plastic chaps in the other post. Stripping paint from hard plastics (especially if they are earlier cellulose-based compounds) is so problematical it's best to leave them.

I think these are all Cyrnos as well (not sure about the baseless MG gunner? He's painted to match the 'possibly' Quiralux above) and a bit chunkier. These are mostly damaged, but still evocative figures with that 1950's charm that can't be faked. I have Sam of Sam's Minis World to thank for some of these too.