A is for Ajax, Archer, Bergan, Beton . . . Not!

This pair was donated to the Blog by Brian Berke a while ago, he found them as old store stock ages ago, so many thanks to him.

Marked MADE IN HONG KONG down one leg, the horses are nicely finished but poor copies of the old Bergan Toys horse, although the riders are from Ajax poses, and a quick study of the horse - especially the mane - reveals it's a copy of the Ajax copy of the Bergan horse, specifically the Ajax 'Large Horse and Rider' range.

The un-carded bags don't have any staple holes or tape marks, being heat-sealed like old bread-bags! Therefore they probably [almost certainly] weren't mounted on a larger backing card either but rather; sold from a shop stock box, or transferred from a generic shipping carton to point-of-sale 'bin' type thing?

One of the bags wasn't sealed very well at all, and had opened itself with a little help from Royal Fail so the Indian can run free, his black Mustang carrying him majestically across the central plains his ancestors enjoyed; the cowboy will remain a prisoner where he will be unable to wave his 'legally-held' firearm about with quite the gay abandon he might otherwise claim a constitutional-right to so do!

Left over from a post a while ago (the shot was in another folder and I forgot it!), these are cheaper Hong Kong copies loosely based on European posts, the upper pair being found in a similar bag to Brian's two; it's a copy of the Britains Trojan horse with a swivel-waist Indian harking back to Crescent I think.

Below the 'mint' pair; are a few that appear vaguely related, from the right; a same size - as the Indian above - cowboy, again swivel-waist, but with heavier leg sculpts and factory paint. To his left are two smaller swivel-waist clones, following the pose, paint (and plastic colour in the case of the middle figure), these will be copies from a smaller firm of the larger figure, just to grab a slice of commercial-pie!

The middle guy being a direct clone, while the chap on the left only has paint on the upper half and seems to be an earlier version of the unpainted foot-figures we looked at here and which were carried in Baravelli sets Indiani e Cowboy - I noticed the other day that that's still 'Barabelli' to the PSTSM!