T is for Toy Fair '18 Reports - Le Toy Van - Budkins

Continuing with the 2018 toy Fair reports we come to something a little off-the-wall for Small Scale World, but in other correspondence the other day in relation to off-the-wall things I went on the record (albeit privately) as saying I'll Blog anything!

And . . . these are wooden, I like wooden toys, we'll be seeing more wooden toys in the future as the backlash against plastics gathers momentum and one of my favourite Blogs is the Wooden Warriors one!

Budkins from Le Toy Van, like the old peg-dolls of yore, but better! "Ah-Ahaaarrrrr, youse maybe should'av saved us furrr Tark Loik a Poirate Daiy!"

I found these right at the end of the show, and my camera ran out of memory, so while I have a few shots there would have been more. Silly really, - I took extra batteries I didn't use, but forgot to take a spare SD-Card, next time - I'll know!

That'll be Red Beard then! Accessories ARE plastic, with real cloth clothing, heads and feed are wooden, I don't know what the armature is made of under the clothes, and the hands are plastic with a Lego/Playmobile type grip.

The other ship (the hull of Red Beard's is visible in the first shot above), presumably Black Beard's, but called the Jolly Sailor - I think! Here plastic is minimal and while cramped and of no real scale, there is plenty of scope for mini-adventures.

Red Beard's in full, almost identical to the Jolly Sailor, except that the lower gun-ports are square-cut on the Barbarossa.

There's also a range of knights, and again the figures come in threes, with plastic accessories, the forts mostly wooden and the flags are self-adhesive.

The fort will suit any kind of figure and is no different to those issued with plastic toy soldiers in the past, here the interior (actually shot for the remains of the sticker-sheet!) shows deeper walkway on the battlements than you'd expect on the old pressed-hardboard forts, but the castellations/crenellations are almost too small for the Budkin figures and would suit 54/60mm figures very well.

There's a smaller fort which would be ideal for a Roman mile-post, horses are available (although I think you just plump the figures on the flat back, they don't really 'ride' the horse), and there were a couple of lovely siege engines, but that was the point at which my camera said 'Out of memory' . . . maybe next year!

Another assortment of knights, there's a bit of a mix of Norman and Teutonic in the detailing but they are toys for the 3+'s, so a bit of license has to be allowed for!

There is a pinky-purple line too, for those who have younger girls - I don't pander to gender neutrality in childhood, give them both a stick and one lot will make guns the other-lot; brooms, that's biology.

A famous Califon-eye-ay/West Coast feminist/PC type (whose name I forget, but who had made her name writing about gender, sexism and equality) came on the radio once (Woman's Hour of course!) to admit as much - she had tried to raise her kids gender-neutral and said the boys just used whatever they were given - to play-with - to shoot each other, then the girl would nurse them better! Thus it ever was.

Lovely range from Le Toy Van if you have younger kids or relatives; excellent forts either for war-gaming, or for cutting up and using as display backdrops . . . or shelving for your collection.