W is for Wild Animals

And what's wild about them is the attention to scale . . . and the attention to realism!

Sorting out the images for the third Show Report on HGL's offerings this year (coming this afternoon) I though "Oh, are they still doing those", only to find I hadn't Blogged them, so here's a set I got some time ago, like several years ago . . . I think?!!

So, the smaller of HGL's standard tub-sizes (I have a rule of thumb - if the height is less than about two or three times the base diameter, it's a tub, more than three; it's a 'toob'!) and filled with a very strange assortment of animals in larger (Papo/Schleich size) and smaller 'mini-mals', along with a couple of medium-sized to boot, and while some of them a really very good and 'up-there' with the aforementioned 'premium' brands in quality and sculpting, others are quite cartoonish.

The elephant managed to get left out of the subsequent close-ups, so I'll just point out that while a bit tusk-less, he is an ideal size for a war-gaming elephant, albeit a tad-too savannah 'African'?

Looking at two of the better models, the cheetah is really quite superb (clone of Safari's?), not enough spots, but then 90% of every cheetah ever made from Nuremberg flats, through hollow-cast and composition and up to the present-day didn't/doesn't/hasn't had the right spots, so that's not real criticism!

While the tiger (about twice the bulk in the wild) is less than half the size, but an equally nice sculpt, and again the stripes are better than many. A lot of effort has gone into these two; design, manufacture and decoration.

Of the smaller animals I thought this mandrill/baboon stood-out as being some way away from same-old-same-old, although the right-hand image was saved from 'delete' to balance the collage and should have been re-shot!

The zebra and giraffe, as well as being in intermediate scales to the lion and cheetah on the one hand and the smallies on the other (the elephant is in a scale of his own really!), are also poor sculpts with toy-like expressions.

The lion is OK, but looks familiar - an old Elastolin-clone? Something like that!

When I dug these out I wondered if any of the smallies would be from that lot we looked at a few weeks ago, but, no, although in the same 60-70mm size/dimension bracket, they are all new or different sculpts.

I think - from the mix of scales/realism that this is a construct of animals from different sources, or clearance from different contracts, brought together as a budget-buy, and when you consider these sets sell for 4 or 5 quid retail, that can be less than one Schleich tabby-cat or rabbit model!