P is for Papo - 4 - Pirates

Papo also have a nice range of pirates and while the larger ones will have limited appeal to followers of the blog (excepting that more and more people are coming-round to the scale creep through 58, 65 and eventually to 70mm); they are also doing a 'toob' of the 55% / 56mm'ish Mini⁺ range as well.

Full size (70mm) pirate'tess on a raft with the toob in the background; I can see a lot of applications for the raft with other figures and other scales, not least as a replacement for the hard to find Atlantic Odysseus' raft of the Argonauts!

This is the old packaging so they are called *Papo Mini, but are now listed as Mini⁺ as opposed to the smaller 'Mini' range (only knights and fantasy).

Pirate ship play set with a wooden vessel, I will try to track-down a decent sample of these before Talk Like a Pirate Day, but for now, these give an idea of the sample.

The 'budget' (read cheaper) play-set in slot-together, compressed cardboard depicts a tied-up vessel which has been turned into a sort of pirate club-house, but as the first rule of pirate club-house is that no one talks about pirate club-house; I can't say anything else about the ship/pub/fort you see before you!

Another view of the toob, sadly (and probably due to the size) they didn't have the smaller figures on display at the toy fair, so they couldn't be photographed, but that just leaves us with an excuse to return to them again one day!

The Mini⁺ Pirates in the catalogue, a lot of the images in the catalogue are reversed from real-life, which makes trying to ID them a tad problematical. The shark-man and lobster-man are - along with the skeletal fighter - more than a slight nod to Hollywood's Pirates of the Caribbean, and there are more marine-monster men in the 70mm series, with turtleman, octopussman &etc.

Whoever came up with the fat, topless pirate carrying a cannon like a bazooka (mirrored in the standard-sized range, where he's also heavily tattooed) deserves a long-weekend and a bonus!

There's more to come on the fantasy and knights/medieval ranges, but I think we can look at that in a while, we've had a good dose of Papo and there's other stuff in the queue!