MASH is for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital

4077^th is for a lot of fun! If any service-based comedy (and there are lots, it's the perfect set-up for a situation comedy) comes close to Dad's Army in my heart, or pokes the nostalgia-button quite like Mainwaring, Wilson, Pike, Jones & co., it's MASH, and there have been several sets/toys over the years based on the long-running TV series and Movie, this is one of them . . .

. . . the Hong Kong (or Macau? See next post) maker Zee Toys (Zyll, Zylmex)'s sets, nominally 1:87^th, the figures are a reasonable 1:76^th while some of the vehicles scrape in at under 1:100^th! This set contains the latrine vignette and some of the more common Zylmex vehicles, and was found and saved for me by Peter Bergner many years ago, in fact; the year I started the Blog!

We saw the Jeep recently when I was putting them on the Airfix page, but here's another! The truck is a sub-scale thing, but which goes quite well - size-wise - with the Indiana Jones German lorry from Galoob! It's red-crosses are looking a bit tired! The figures have been home-painted and consist of two guys emptying 'thunder-boxes' and two guys running, who double-up as a stretcher-bearer in one of the other sets.

Peter actually found the missing, folding-propeller unit a while later and brought it to the last show I did before the move here, sadly it never got married to the helicopter and they went into storage separately, and while I know where they are, this has already gone away again and they'll have to wait for a future Chinook round-up - they weren't in service for Korea, but we'll ignore that!

The little Bell 47 / UH-13h Sioux is a delight, one of the first convertions I ever attempted (with some success) was a pair of - rather crude - outboard stretcher-beds on the Airfix Westland Scout which I made from stretched-runner and loo-paper when I was about eleven-years old! This, too, is a bit small, but it does the job; so long as you make the "chugga-chugga" noise as you swing it into the valley and line-it up with the little hillock!

The latrine!

I don't recall now if it was a joke in the series (or the movie) but picture the scene, the camera reversing in front of them in a long panning shot, Radar and one of the officers are walking down from the main camp, deep in chat about that episode's plot-thread; they arrive at the enlisted-men's door and in goes Radar; the officer turns to his own door, mid-sentence . . . cut to aerial shot of interior; the conversation continuing from where they left off! Maybe there's also a chalk-line on the floor?

The doors are cut to hinge-open but it's an old, un-played-with toy and I didn't want to force them. The 'wriggly-tin' roof would make a useful scratch-building piece in any fixed-position/defense-work modelling, or a parasol on an Ork war-machine!

The pre-issue, publicity material all show the half-track in place of the latrine - more usually available as a smaller blister-carded set (as seen on the PSR page) - but it was dropped for something more connected with the tie-in branding by the time the set hit the retailers, note also: the 'group photo' shot is different between mock-up and finished artwork; often the way - catalogues and packaging are only ever a guide!