J is for Jean Höffler - 2: Wild West Hong Kong

The second part of this trio of articles is the Hong Kong production and while I don't have many of these either, I have picked-up enough for a ramble through them!

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.

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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?