F is for Follow-up - Supreme / SP Toys as Halsall

I said I'd probably get one, and I went back for it the other day. I only bought the one, as Brian hasn't replied to my reply to his comment - There are three left and I'm over there next Friday if you want me to get them, I can bring them to PW, Brian?

Better shot of the carded set and a close-up of the two more anachronistic poses in the set, both actually taken from the Greek set, not the over-sized medievals. In the Greek sets they get slide-on hoplon shields missing from this issue.

The full set, painting is restricted to all-over silver and a moss-green on one side of the shield, which in the interior for three of the figures; exterior for the fourth.

The item which seems to have attracted Brian, and which I also quite like, despite being almost as anachronistic as the Classical Greek 'officers'!

It's a larger, early, banded medieval cannon, shoe-horned into the cradle of a catapult or ballista! Not as fanciful as it appears perhaps, as when these 'new tech's' first hit the 'high street' you're actual Robber Baron is more likely to afford one than the local Robin Hood, William Tell or Theiry la Frond! Consequently if the 'good guys' capture one, they may well need to house it in one of their old siege-engine frames! Hey - it's about imagination - they're toys!

You can see that as a toy it has been issued as a catapult as well, with mounting brackets along the back frame, and some sort of trigger at the front. It also had a 'recoil' pad in the centre of the cross bar to take the shock of a catapult's arm, yet the moulding also has the cradle for the gun, so was obviously designed with both versions in mind.

The other nice touch for such a dual-use equipment (where's the UN inspectors when you need them, is this a Matrix Churchill piece?!!) is that it's modelled as being mostly wrought-iron in construction, not the heavy timbers of earlier medieval or 'Ancient' siege machines - a surprising effort of design for such a cheap rack-toy, no?

If anyone has a picture of it in its catapult variant, that would close the chapter on it?

A re-shoot of the previous post's comparison/line-up, but with both the new set's figures and the ones I mentioned last time but couldn't find on the Blog. I still can't - so they must be tagged under some minor importer (I Blogged them about 3 years ago I think?), but they are the same as the Halsall set, only more poses and a more liberal application of paint in red and blue as two groups of protagonists.

There are so many now they over-filled their tub, so have left the 'Mixed Medieval' box and been given their own smaller box!