F is for Farm-hands and Feeder-fellows

This has been in 'Edit' since last January and a copy has been on my laptop's desktop for about 6 months waiting for me to get round to finishing the blurb!

We actually looked at Blue Box farm ages ago, so this is more of a ramble round some of the other aspects of the figures - all Britains piracies - than anything else, and rather unfortunate that they were in the queue while certain other thing were/are going on, but I can't shift a shadow, so I'll have to work through it!

And at least we've some new stuff to look at; I'm not showing you the same stuff with some bits taken out because I was making it up as I went along the first time!

So to the bit we DID look at last time, yer'bog-standard Blue Box farm-hand  copied from Britains with [some of] the same tools. So far I haven't found the hoe in Blue Box (or other) guise, nor the besom-broom but the rake, pitch-fork and stiff-broom are all to be found along with one of the meat sticks (see below).

Now; I used to think green bases = 'farm' and grey bases = 'zoo' sets, and that's not a bad rule of thumb from what you find, however during one of the tedious searches required to correct and correct again the wilder utterances of Erwin Sell I found a guy somewhere (no; I don't think it was evilBay, some other site? May still be findable) who referred to the right-hand figure as Redbox, as it was a stand-alone figure on a sales site, I have to assume he had seen it previously in that guise - to come to that conclusion.

As we've also discovered from the short war (they seem to have given-up on almost as soon as they started it?) and he and Paul Stadinger's misappropriation of the Vectis catalogue; both Redbox and Blue Box shared the output of both the main Singapore plant at Toa Payoh and the Hong Kong facility at Aberdeen, so it's fair to further assume that the figures are what they were in that - also deliberately miss-presented by the pair of them - catalogue: 'Blue Box-Redbox'.

The new question mark is over the chap with the yellow shirt, he only has a smaller 'HONG KONG' rather than the larger, fuller 'MADE IN HONG KONG' of the Blue Box-Redbox figures.

Also there are differences in the sculpture of the base, suggesting copy, or re-cutting? However, as the Singapore end were also responsible for the same chap with a moulded-on tool (the missing hoe!), all bets are off until a set turns-up with him in it!

The colours are reminiscent of Lucky Toys stuff, particularly the road-racing and garage sets, but they weren't known for soft plastic figures, although more of that in the near future and the more you look the more you find with HK!

And here's the evidence! Circles within circles and these are only what I have here, in storage I have one of the long thin boxes - we looked at ages ago - with 4x5½ click-shut bags, with probably 50+ variations of this or the other Britains figures, and many more 'unknown farm and zoo figures' including HK copies of Starlux - themselves copied by their near neighbours - everybody was up to it!

The smaller 50mm'ish figure with the red trousers is actually a very nice, finely-etched, sculpt, while the factory painted 35mm chap is from a more commercial issue of the pink one we've seen in sets before, but who also came in Christmas crackers, gum-ball capsules and the like.

One of the sets referred to above - because this has been in 'Edit' for so long, the set was re-shot for the mini-farm post back in the Autumn; hey-ho! This is the one trying to look like it may be Blue Box - it 'aint!

Below is a clean sample of some Blue Box livestock which came in a while ago, we'll look at the animals when I get my stuff out of storage, in the meantime there's always chance another Blogger may cover them, especially now he's trebled his output and raised the quality [of some] of his copy?