The commonest form of these are the brown
Indian and creamy-white Cowboy versions, which are usually unpainted and while
there might be a commercial aspect to these Indians, I'm pretty sure the
cowboys have been home-painted by a colour-blind hippy on 'speed'!
These are the same figures but the cowboys
came in blue, and they are the bare, undecorated version you normally find the
others in too. Horses are similarly marked and are found in B&W with the
cream/brown batches as well.
We saw the full sample of these when I
found them, or soon after, they were a Sandown Park show-find back in the
autumn. Lots of new colours but the same base marking, the cowboys having a
smaller pallet of tans to the Indians' explosion in Laura Ashley's studio!
Having got used to the cream/brown set in
passing (before I collected large scale), it's been fun finding the other
colours as I collect, and these have come in as ones, so can't be placed (well;
I could put the second one from the left with the crazy-painted ones . . .
after a clean!) but are still more colours. Note that some (two or three?) of
the cowboys have small recessed holes in them which might be release-pin marks,
but could have another purpose?
The marking is the same for all three
'batch' finds and the singles, being a full capital MADE IN HONG KONG and a
larger numeral, which - so far - have been limited to single-numbers; nothing
over 9?
The pose count on these HK issues is less
than the Jean originals, and I suspect two tools with cavity-numbers 1-8 and a
horse mould . . . 1-4 or 1-6? If you followed the link to TSHQ in part one,
you'll have found the horses are hard to tell apart but there are six in the
original set, I'm not sure how many there are in the Hong Kong output.
Going back to the painted Indians in the
first shot, this chap also seems to have been commercially decorated . . . and
modelled on a young Michael Palin?!!
Hong
Kong-Jean / Jean-Hong Kong
You may have noticed that so far I carefully
haven't used the words 'copy' or 'piracy' with regard to the figures in this
post, preferring to use instead 'output', 'issue' or 'production', this is
because I can't really say these are copies, they seem to be from the old
German tools?
There are some slight differences (the
grass on the spearman's base above is short-/miss-moulded for instance) which
could be excused by the age of the tools, slack-production/QA, or just
different cavities, but the main details, fine etched (feathers etc...)
sculpting and over-all size seems to be the same and I wonder if the moulds
found their way to the Colony at some point?
It's true that a skilled pantograph
operator can do same size copies, it's true that a high-tech operation could
make masters from high-quality moulds taken from original figures (the
hollow-cast guys do/did it all the time with Plasticine in Lego or
balsa dams), but it's equally true that people like Marx moved their moulds to HK all the time.
If it did happen, and I'm not 'calling it';
it's only as clear as mud, it would seem to have involved only part of the
tool-set, the common (or earlier?) [based] figures and one (or more?) of the
horse moulds, as far as I know the Hong Kong sets never come with HK-marked
versions of the wagons, guns, limbers, Tipis or the rather juvenile canoe
etc...?
Changing the base plate to read MADE IN
HONG KONG from W. GERMANY is the easy bit! I don't know, but I do know it's too
close to call.
===================================
Epilogue - I was looking at a Nigrin premium horse and an unpainted Jean knight figure with a blanked-off
base, a week or so later and it struck me that it might be the 'premium' tool
which ended up in Hong Kong (if one did), to wit; Jean themselves may have arranged a duplicate mould for producing
the variously, differently-marked premiums, having a set of single base-sections
with each mark (De Gruyter, Eri, Reindorf
etc... Peter Konrad's books list over a dozen and we've seen Korona here passim) which were easily
changed, that kind of thing? And that that was what ended up in HK or
even/ultimately Peru? The Premiums are only credited with three of the six
horse poses - I believe?
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