C is for Coincidences, coincidences!

It's funny how things sometimes come together; if with divine purpose it's synergy, if without: coincidence, I think this is the later, as it falls at the last, but it's worth recounting anyway . . . the blurb has to come from somewhere.

Back in December the 169th issue of Plastic Warrior's magazine dropped through the door with - among many other things - a British issued (Selcol) version of a Lido medieval set; King's Knights. So far so good, last weekend I went to Sandown and saw these, they were quite reasonable and the seller told me these was another mounted hidden in the pile - twice before I took it!

I thought; "ohh, they must be those ones in the last PW, I'll have them to go with my Lido (and Selcol!) unpainted sample". Meaning to Blog them after I'd looked-up December's PW; I shoved them in a folder and left them on the desktop last-night (Wednesday).

Of course; this morning PW 170 fell onto the mat (review; next week - hopefully), with a letter from someone referring back to them and I read it with interest to see if they mentioned what I thought I'd 'discovered', but they hadn't (phew!), only for me to look up the older issue this evening (Thursday) and find that the Selcol's are either unpainted as per the Lido, or all-over painted and I hadn't discovered more than that there are HK copies, which I already knew!

What I thought I'd discovered was that the British ones were from Hong Kong, but I hadn't bought the British ones (I thought I was buying), I'd bought some more HK piracies! So I turned to Kent Sprecher's ToySoldier HQ where there is a little more clarity with the painted ones shown as copies (he's added a lot more to the page in the last couple of years), however, while my horses are clearly marked 'Made in Hong Kong' . . .

. . . the foot figures seem to be in every other way, the same as Lido's, just with paint. The foot figures are soft polyethylene, the horses - hard polystyrene.

Kent's site gives a nice time-line of the company's many incarnations and the moulds seem to have gone every-which-way and I wonder if the knight's mould might have ended-up in HK? It would be easy to add the 'made in...' stamping to the mould-tool, while other Hong Kong clones exist (see pink chap below), but smaller and/or marked - as tended to be the case, or 'as you'd expect'!

Anyway, I then went into the attic just now, to get the Lido knights tub, only to find it's not in either of the medieval boxes because - as I remembered after the fact - I'd give them their own tub (Really Useful 3-litre CD box, brilliant for 4x5½ bags) with each pose (US (or UK) and HK) in a separate bag together, as they are a favourite of mine, the toy-like quality appeals to me and I buy them whenever I see them - I'd just forgotten the painted ones!

So, here's a few, all Hong Kong, although all bar the pink one seem to be as Lido/Selcol, I thought I'd posted them here before but I don't seem to have, so we will return to them when I get the tub out of storage. In the meantime there's PW 169 and 170 (and earlier issues for sure) and Kent's page to help!