N is for 'Nother Noah's N'ark!

This is a bit of a rush job, but it adds to the earlier posts, however I'm not going to get the animals out of the bag as I seem to have a couple more of these and I think one of them is loose-complete, so I'll Blog it another day.

This is one of the more complicating sets, as the artwork comes on boxes with completely different contents! However, this is the one we've got, so this is the one we look at, with reason!

Far more packed into slightly more space than this morning's sealed set, including three bags of animals instead of two, 8 figures instead of two, large blow-moulds of rocks and props, palm-trees (6), play-mat and a couple of shrubs!

The bigger bits are all stuffed in the hull, which is upturned onto the deck (face-up on the bottom of the box), the four bags are then stuffed round the sides (on top of the two rock-piles) and the palm-trees rather sqiudged onto the top before the thing is taped closed - presumably while someone-else holds them firmly together!

Mix of medium sized animals, domestic and wild types and while you can see the legacy of Blue Box in some of them others are not the common BB types and painting veers more toward the colourful, the pelican looks more like a RedBox zoo animal. Scale is all over the place with the [2] lions around 1:60th and the [2] lionesses closer to Britains 54mm!

Clearly the four grey monkeys are two genetically-separate pairs!! The rest are common HK-fayre and can't be easily attributed to anyone. Again; mostly identical pairs; so this set has far more animals, but this morning's set had greater effort to produce interesting pairs.

As with the previous bags - multiple multiples, with quads and sextuplets, the sheep are definitely from different sources, the larger white ones being very 'blue box', while the little orange over-sprayed ones are also found in smaller generic carded sets.

Chickens are the later Britains type while the smaller animals are the sub-Blue Box copies we looked at last year. I haven't counted the pigs but there are about 10, in about four designs and the whole bag seems to have been diverted from a Home Farm packing-line!

The Home Farm having been just as much copied and mucked-about with as the Noah's Arks and as common in source-origin - Toy shops, early learning, mail order offers, catalogues &etc. Along with the same Blue Box, Pagget, and EJP boxings (among others - see below)

Larger wild animals and the set of eight Blue Box figures, we had two small tigers in the first bag, so that'll be Sumatra and Java covered? That Noah was thorough, I'll give him that!

Hippo's and Rhino's are identical pairs this time, but both the mouldings seen here made-up one half of the non-matched pairs we saw this morning.

As I said above, I have another complete/near-complete one of these sets and it too has three sets of props, two pale and one dark, so while I got them years apart and from different sources, they must have been from the same original batch! Usually you get two or four or in the case of this morning's sealed one, none!

I think you only got two sets in the Marx original from which these are copied - along with the boat, rock-piles and palm-trees. As I also mentioned earlier, the doors have been glued shut by some idiot running the glue-brush round the base of all four walls without thinking about the doors, which his colleagues carefully designed to slide - as they do on most examples you find, of all set types . . . a real Friday-afternoon job!

Instructions, not included in the smaller set we looked at earlier, and really only of use to the gluer, who ignored them!

And what's this . . . a logo? MRS? Well Mr. Walter; all that stuff about Tai Sang possibly being behind them all, which you pontificated-on earlier today, was bollocks; wasn't it?

Not really - this morning's was also carrying a brand; NMP, both are phantom brands, and to prove the point; share a ship's-wheel design-element!* Which - while it might give succour to TJF (40-years man-and-menace, you know!) and his self-abusing monkey-lizard, re- their 'revelations' about "Port Tain Sang" (still not worth looking-for on a map!) - only rather confirms that one entity is behind these two very different sets with relatively different contents, and/or those branded to more concrete makers or importers, with equally similar box-art or contents.

* Because it was all about the shippers and shipping-agents with these generics . . . geddit!

The set shown in this post can be found with the other, completely different figure set, a third common artwork has the Miniature Play Set Noah's Ark text on a bright pink plaque, with a vista of animals leaving the beached ark, after the flood, contents including some of the animals seen in the two posts today, but figures (a pair) having square bases like those common, poor copies of Blue Box farmers.

I've seen this morning's set with the common Home Farm triple-rabbit runner in orange plastic; I've seen this set with six single moulding trees (instead of the palms) like the two shrubs above but a different species, another with 8 identical brown monkeys, while a same-set box-opening recently revealed the same three-count for blow-moulded timber props and five of the grey 'swimming' apes.

These were very popular sellers, for many years, from probably the early sixties (or 'as soon as' after the Marx one hit the shops?) until about a decade and a half ago, hell; there's probably still a few hiding in the storerooms of older bible book-shops, or the prize-giving cupboards of Sunday-schools!

And they all follow [badly] the pattern of some or all of the Marx set's elements, e.g. ark, roof with twin gable-windows, larger gable over twin sliding-doors, long, thin ramp, large, triple log-props, piles of rocky-outcrop, a bunch of trees and/or shrubs, pairs of animals (domestic and wild), peeps - the smaller sets losing the larger elements excepting the ark, which in every case is a Marx copy.

Ergo; there was a constant stream of contracts for large numbers of dirt-cheap animals, figures and accessories, which would have overlapped as some items ran out sooner than others. More care was exercised over the contents of some; any-old shite was thrown into others.

Those contracts would have gone to any one of several hundred plastics makers with some downtime, and if they couldn't borrow the moulds they copied the mouldings, they used each-other's out-painters and bought their plastic granules and paints from the same service guys, hence dozens of sets of very similar animals,; while the boxes came from the same printers in different batches.

While customers/clients would have wanted a choice of artwork and a choice of pricing-points, result; lots of different-content sets in the same boxes and same-content sets in different boxes! Or . . . same contents / same box; different branding.

Blue Box, 'Hong Kong', 'Macau', EJP, MRS, NMP, Pagett Bros., RedBox . . . and . . . ?

But someone was pulling the strings for most of them and my guess is Tai Sang or one of their subsidiaries.