CMV is for Curious Multiple Verisimilitudes

I suggested, perhaps a tad facetiously, at the start of the month that the gods were smiling on Small Scale World as the year began, and that was before a certain parcel arrived from Hobbiton! Not only did the arrival of that parcel confirm the largess of the amassed deities, but at the same time what had been one of the 'co-incidences' became a weird triple!

Normally this would go on the Khaki Infantry page, but as there's more of a story to tell and as it's a while since we touched on CMV here, I thought I'd blog this here and tweak the images for the KI page another day.

The string of connections began when Chris Smith sent me these shots, ostensibly for the KI page, as 'just' three more CMV's, early in the New Year and while I was yet to catch-up with all the emails and such like. One-each taken from Britains Herald, Crescent and Lone Star sculpts with a nice background made from plastic flat or semi-flat trees from three, four; maybe five companies.

Less than 48-hours later, Brian Berke sent me another CMV shot of his sample of four ex-Britains Herald, three ex-Crescent and the same Lone Star sculpt, unpainted (there were paint remains on two of Chris's) and in (or 'photographing in'; see close-ups - below - for truer colours) a bright apple-green - above with the Crescent original 'Berserker' for size.

Brian also sent a couple of marking shots, one of which seemed to show a clear CNV, now my original manuscript notes describe them as 'CM/CMV, see also ABC and HK' which was how we looked at them in three adjacent posts ten-odd years ago, so I asked Brian if he could shoot the bases of a couple of others to confirm it wasn't just a squashed 'M', which he kindly did.

The upshot of which was that we got an MV as well as a clear shot of several CMV's leading to the conclusion that the N is an N! Now it's obvious that the M has been lost under the rough-machining round the edge of the base and a look at some CM's will probably reveal similar marks where the V should be (not the M-in-a-C's of the original posts though - they may be someone else!), while the M and N punches sit together in the little metal box the engineer carries them around in so it's easy to see how the other 'mistake' could have been made.

Note how these have photographed in a range of shades not hinted at in the group shot, this happens sometimes with plastics, there are different colours of Airfix 1:32nd scale US Infantry (to the eye) but trying to show it with flash-photography is bloody hard!

Close-up's; we've looked at similar errors here, Kong Hong is another, along with mirrored letters when the wrong set of punches is used; inverted or back-to-front letters are another fault you often find with these cheapies, and there's nothing terribly exciting about it all, but if you only find one and it's a first for your collection; the thing to bear in mind is that the manuscript note now reads 'CM/CMV/CNV/MV....'!

By this time I had let both contributors know of the synergy of their two submissions, and Chris (correctly guessing the make-up of Brian's sample) sent this as a follow-up - the same eight poses (upper shot) in a similar green but these are unmarked, the lower shot compares the three CMV's with their pose-counterparts, and it's a pretty sure bet they are pantographed sub-piracies being both slightly smaller, and slightly 'blobbier'.

Thanks to both Chris and Brian for what morphed into an interesting look at some Hong Kong rack-toy stuff, which I could have saved for RT Month; but with the collection here now, there shouldn't be a problem filling August!

And today's title? I not sure it actually makes sense, but it looked good, sounds 'clever' and sort of gets the point across!!