W is for ♪♫♫ We've Got a Litt 'le Convoy, Made Out of Celluloid . . . CONN-VOIY! ♫♪♪

When we last looked at these I may have given the impression I had a load more in storage, we'll . . . I might, but I only found three and a few other related pieces? It may be that some are in an 'unsorted' stash somewhere, but I may have over-estimated the sample, against previously downloaded images!

These are the wagons I've found, I thought I had more (at least four more?) in the unpainted form, but these do mirror those previously seen, so I think there were the three main styles; round/hooped roof, angled/pitched roof and an open, board-sided wagon, with various loads, with or without a driver (or walker-beside) and with a canine, cattle or horse-type motive-power.

The cow is probably under-scaled, the dog (a chow type, but Japanese so not a 'chow' per se and hopefully not edible?) being over-scale and the horse being a pony or donkey? It's funny, these are touristy things, and seem to mirror the old tin-plate or lead penny toys which also often had a dog as the draft animal.

Paint them up and you've got your refugees blocking the roads in South East Asia.

Indeed - I suspect these have been just so painted, for war-gaming, although I'm pleased the artist (was it you?) left the ends and roof of the sedan-chair unpainted, as the thick varnish works well, and the woven-palm or giant-bamboo leafs effect on the roof is charming.

Here we see the base and the 'kung-fu' guy reused in a different context, along with a chap who's come loose from one of the other vignettes in this 'series' (which probably came from  a co-op of several craft-type outfits, a bit like Erzgebirge?), he seems to be carrying a rice hoe or flail, and may have been walking beside a wagon on one of the larger, based, scenes.

While here, both the previously seen females are reused to make a Lady and her maid-servant out for a trip on the lake - feeding the giant carp! Again I think this is a home-painted example, and I compared this to a couple of others here.

With a lot of the vignettes the scale can go right off and here we have the vaguely 1:76th scale cow stepping over a stream with an N-Gauge tree and a 1:1200'ish five-story pagoda! The cow has actually come-loose and I've posed him just shy of his glue marks!

These aren't terribly rare, and there's often a few on feebleBay, along with much larger versions of some (54mm-compatible rickshaws are worth looking out for), but there's often damage due to the nature of the material and their age - these are probably all 1950's? My horse-riding Lady has a damaged umbrella, the commonest problem.

The animals and larger cargo items are blow-moulded, the people, wheels, boat and smaller cargo items are injection mouldings, everything else is built-up from rod, sheet or strip and the bases are vac-formed, so all the main techniques for working with plastics were being fully utilised, in Japan, quite early, with the older celluloid.