I picked up the later-version Merit gun in the course of the year,
can't remember where or when, but it's probably in one of the 'H is
for...' posts, the same as the one we saw boxed a few years (?) ago,
but with plastic wheels rather than the wooden ones we looked at last time.
I put to one side intending to shoot the
two together, forgot to do so and managed to put it away back in the summer as
I'd uncovered the Merit box in the
garage doing the Rack Toy Month Blue Box
shots.
However I hadn't shot the boxed one which
was buried in the attic, so the photo's for the new one sat here for a few
months. The other week I dug out the old one, shot it separately and collaged
the two closest-similarity shots together, otherwise there would have been a
single image here; either way it would have been 'end of post'!
But after I'd finalised the above images I
then remembered I try not to post military stuff in Christmas week (try not
very hard if you check past Christmas posting here!), although these are
exactly the sort of thing you'd get in a stocking 40 or 50-years ago, so put
the pictures on 'hold' . . . I then got an eMail from Chris Smith who had no
inkling of the above, literally about 48-hours later, showing this silver Hong
Kong copy.
Anyway I'll schedule it for 12th night, which
is still within the 12-days, but suitably far from Christmas-week to salve my
soul!
What interested him was the fact that it
has Empire Made on one side and Made in Hong Kong on the other, clearly a
crossover or interim piece from the point where the Americans started to get
more heavily involved in the colony's toy industry and the HK toymen realised
they needed a less specific - or even less limiting - moniker on their toys,
less 'British Empire' and more 'we're here and we make toys'?
Chris also commented on the numbers of
copies you can find of this gun, and those who got Plastic Warrior's Charben's special
last year will see one (non-firing) on the cover, with red wheels, while we've
looked at sub-scale silver and gold-styrene ones from the Crown Colony here in
the past, a few times now.
Anyway, that got me thinking, and I dug
them all out and now we've got a full-post! Although, I must admit; the above
and the next three are re-used images; mostly from the Airfix blog.
While Chris's is roughly the same size as
the Merit version [point of order - if it's Merit
chances are the 'original' original will be someone like the USA's Pyro or even the UK's Bell], these other ones are all HO-OO
compatible, less than half the size of the big ones, but unlike the Charbens
copy, do retain a rudimentary firing-mechanism.
Woolbro contracted to have their guns sprayed gold!
These generic sets will give you two guns with
nobody to fire them or one and a rudimentary crew, although in both cases you
also get a ship!
This is one of my favourite HK carded sets,
dating from 1969 it has two men riding an Honest John tactical nuclear missile
into ground-zero, bright-blue paratroops, four of the little guns, a bunch of Airfix piracies, some Giant space-men copies and a Beechcraft
serving the Imperial Japanese Air Force . . . and if that's not enough to shut
little Johnny up for an hour or two; look at the artwork - it's the end of two
worlds! It's the Trigan Empire
invading one of their neighbours! It's the end of Blazing Saddles with a navy and space-rockets!
It's madder than a bucket of frogs on the
top-table at a wedding reception . . . there's a another Beechcraft, on the
tail of an intergalactic spaceship, in a sky filled with paratroopers, Dakotas
a Stratofortress or two and several Mirages, one of which - apparently serving
with the International Red Cross - is about to crash into the beach having been
brought-down by field guns!
Meanwhile, behind the plastic Beechcraft
something terrible seems to be happening to a Bruster Buffalo or similar carrier
prop-job? One day I'll carefully remove the staples and scan that card for
posterity . . . or comedy-effect!
My thanks to Chris for his timely email,
expanding this post from two, to eight frames, and thanks to James Opie for
several of the Hong Kong, small-scale sets.
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