T is for Three of a Kind & Then Some!

A post which is neither as complete as it might have been, nor as short as it would have been if it was complete as originally planned, so a real bit of a curates egg, despite having a tight parameter, subject wise! Hoping the opening line is suitably cryptic - let me explain;

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.