D is for Does Anybody Not Know What These Are!

If you follow Plastic Warrior magazine (subscribe!) you probably remember the excellent series of articles on theses written by Matt Thier a few years ago and recognised the figures straight away, if you are in your fifties and remember 1970's toy soldier production, you'll clock these instantly and if your shtick is British production you won't need me giving you an ID on the following.

But . . . if you get excited to the point of hysterical public orgasm by 1950's Spanish rubber while suffering 'knowledge-base' brain-freezes on endless samples of more recent stuff . . . well, luckily for the other readers; this isn't your Blog!

Late production Cherilea swoppets, the third generation, in their British Infantry guise with a clear nod to Timpo's figures and a vast improvement on the previous two generations, although; I prefer the toy-like charm of the earlier attempts while getting annoyed by the idiosyncrasies of this set!

The Brit's though are probably the best as their helmet with its two-colour flecked or marbled scrim-net cover is the best of these figures, and the weaopns are half-decent with the SLR, GPMG and SMG quite well modelled, the other two are a bit 'off-the-wall' though!

The 'Germans'! Grey and black . . . it's all a bit jingoistic now, but back in the day it was the acceptable way of doing these things, as the Germans have never gone to war is this shade of grey and didn't use the illustrated weapons; the anachronisms are what make them 'toy' soldiers!

At least the piss-pot with a cut-out on the rim works reasonable well for the WWII era 'Fritz' helmet.

I think these are meant to be US 'Doughboys' in an olive drab but as you can see the helmets don't work at all with them and you think they're half finished in some way, and of course these were in the shops year before the US armed-forces starting experimenting with the current 'Fritzie'!

They don't work any better for the UN troops, but at least the Soviet-looking RPG/A-T rocket-launcher is more explainable with a generic army of unknown origins than it was at the top of the page in a UKMF/BAOR rifle-company!

The weapons; top-left to bottom-right we have an FN/SLR, an RPG7 type (or even a half-decent stab at a PzF 44), a FN MAG/GPMG, Stirling SMG and a sort of Ingram/Uzi type 9mm automatic 'sprayer'. The GPMG is a tad oversized but quite recognisable, and for some time now (1995) a US service weapon too, where it's called an M240B, replaceing the M60.

Same torso, different legs! There are five leg poses and five weapon-specific torsos, although the nine-milli' body can carry most of the other weapons as with the far-left figure in the German shot above.