N is for Noah's Entirely Fictional Nonsense Boat!

After the Rain on Saturday I was starting to wonder if the drought might be followed by a flood, but I'm still here and no large wooden structures are going-up locally, cubit-by-cubit, but you never know . . . Link to [well meaning but deluded] loons and more sensible money-hungry Dutchman.

There are so many of these and the contents vary so much between same artwork presentations and different boxes there's no point doing more that paying lip-service to them until I'm able to compare them all (which will be in about 20-years time at current rates!), and these are in an odd order as I'm posting them in the order they were shot, which is this post (in the queue since December last), the next post (an overview of some of the figures) which was shot in bits over time and then another set, shot the other day from the storage archive, but probably slightly earlier than this one.

Sealed when bought, if they are not sealed they are not worth buying as the contents are so crap to begin with, if you can't assure yourself they are original, they won't say anything about anything, other than that there were loads of these sets issued by Bible book-shops, mail-order sellers, catalogue stores, corner-shops and 'all else'.

This is one of the latter sets, with a boat and two bags of pretty basic animals, Noah and his wife. No boat-props, no rock-lumps blow-moulded in finest ethylene, no trees or shrubs, no sons or their wives, no &etc.

Boat is in one colour, earlier sets (including the lovely Marx original) tend to two or three colours, but all the elements are here and at least the doors work on this sample - this afternoon's post has them lazily glued together, closed!

Contents of the 'wild animal' bag, the animals have probably been sourced from more than one source (in order to get the different poses as much as anything else) and this is marked with the tigers and zebras particularly. The monkey and turtle sculpts are identical pairs though.

I'm not going to try listing all the European donor-brands, but you can see they are poorer that the Blue Box originals or Arco copy-animals from which they were nicked, those fellow Hong Kong brands having taken then from Britains, Timpo, Elastolin et al.

Farm/domestic and oddments-bag! The figures are particularly interesting in this set as they are a crossover, we'll look at them in more detail later this morning, but suffice to say the Mrs Noah (with stand) is taken from another set of figures, to which the Noah seems to have been added, scaled to account for her base, but it's not as simple as that. I've seen similar horses with livestock wagons in Kamco train-sets.

The giraffes have definitely come from two sources, with different colours of plastic and different 'crazy-paving' stencils, the alligators/crocodiles (it's the bible so; crocodiles, I guess!) are subtly different and the elephants are both 'baby-elephants' in/from other HK play-sets.

The lioness is also commonly found as a black-panther, in which guise I've had one for a while now, while the tigers follow the giraffes in colour, as well as being different scales and both rather male-looking, with only one getting a white mane; or do tigers have beards? The rhino's have the same plastic colours as the elephants, and all four have had their eyes painted-in at the same time in the same orange-red (a Tai Sang / Blue-Box / RedBox trait?).

The other 'big' animals, all pretty common as 'unknowns' in loose lots, or carded to small sets of generics and again some may be from two sources (the kangaroos for instance), but the turtles are mere duplicates! The hippo's are slightly more interesting though . . .

. . . as they have the remains of a marking, which while not clear on either, both seem to include the date 1972, which would suggest this set is later; from '73 or '74'ish? It's certainly one of the commoner sets, and there's usually one or two on Feebay in any given 10-day period.

The larger domestic animals betray their origins as 2nd/3rd-generation Blue Box copies with Britains, Gem and somebody-else as original donors. And like the elephants - the horses and cows here are calves and foals elsewhere, in other sets!

The two figures again and the duplicated, smaller animals, we looked at a 4th (or higher) generation copy of the monkey with the circus set a couple of days ago; compared to that grey one, this is quite a good sculpt, but still not a patch on the original.

With the vast number of late version Britains chickens coming out of Hong Kong it's nice to see the old ex-hollow-cast 1st version getting pirated as well!