B is for Blue Box; Long Sets

To a certain extent these are the 'next size up; from the Mobile Combat Team sets we've looked at recently (and in the past, when we probably looked at these too . . . doh!), while there were stand alone and bagged carded sets, Blue Box adopted a tier system for their boxed sets with one, two, three or four tiers, however - if the Mobile Combat Team are to be considered 'standard' single tier; "These are double-plus good Citizen Smith!"

Different contents same box, just as with the Combat Team's, but here the contents include at least two vehicles and a bunch of scenic accessories, the scenic accessories are the same in both sets - one each of both blow-mould copies of the Crescent sandbag walls/entrenchments (also pirated in hard plastic by Marx in their Miniature Masterpiece range) and two sections of barbed-wire fence, held to the card with the same plastic piece used to glue in the vehicles.

However the lower set having a smaller second 'vehicle' (a small helicopter) also gets the motorcycle, a late one with the block underneath (where the glue goes!). Figures are a mix or British (ex-Britains), US and medics (both Blue Box original sculpts).

This is an earlier version of the same retail 'package', this time with three vehicles, no scenery and less figures. The lid folds up into a display card (with odd scaling!), there were probably a bunch of these in an 'outer' or liner; a shop-stock box, and one of the sets would be so displayed at the back of the box, to show the contents, with the customer taking a sealed one. Sometimes this one would be sold at a discount - once the rest of the stock had sold-out.

The contents of the earlier set from a better angle, I've seen several of these over the years, so it was probably quite a common one at the time. Mine's a bit tatty now but I saw a much nicer one go through Vectis a few years ago, very clean.

Box ends, the later set (77547) was sold in 1968, the older one (7406) might date from the late 1950's but is probably from the early 1960's.

Thanks to James Opie for the rocket-lorry set - and the date!