I can't remember if the takeover of the Zylmex factory and tool-bank came out in
the initial rebuttal of the nonsense from TJF and his onanistic monkey-lizard
back in 2016, or if it had already come out, but suffice to say the demise of
the Z's was good for Tai Sang!
I'm fairly sure this is an Argos code but it could have been Index? Not that it maters particularly;
these sets were available elsewhere at the time (early 2000's? I'll probably
have the date in the old book manuscript, or the Argos pages to scan sometime), and an outer liner is A) not pretty
and B) hard to get a paragraph out of, which I seem to've done . . . phew!
I'm also not sure where I've got the idea
(die-cast site somewhere?) but I believe Zyll
produced some of these (or the Motormax
brand), right at the end, and Redbox
took over the stock as well as the tools etc . . . certainly the logo
bottom-right would appear to be a generic's 'phantom' sub-brand, bearing no
relation to Zee and not much to Redbox, although it is an R, while the
only thing tying this to Redbox is a
small, white, paper sticker on the back.
Figures were rubbery PVC copies of Matchbox American Infantry; 2-each of five poses, these have a very muted
camouflage, others [in the collection] have more obvious contrast between paint
and plastic, we may have seen a few here in the past, but I also think a second
marque has been associated with them at some point - bought in?
The lorry has hardly changed in 40/50
years, the wheels have had a redesign and the markings/decoration are sharper!
We looked at the various half-tracks once
or twice here at Small Scale World (most notably in this overview)
with both Zylmex-marked and blanked-off
belly-pans. The tanks are for another day, but those of
a certain age will remember them butterfly-clipped to a piece of sloping
landscape in their window-boxes, I have several AMX30's somewhere, which had obviously gone-cheap at some point!
But there are others in a tub with the knock-off mini-mites (Cragstone or Kresege?) and Tomy minis.
The helicopter is an improvement on some of the earlier Zee Toys stuff!
These are still out there in various
configurations depending on the contract and Redbox are better labelled on this exact set, or were a while ago
in TKMaxx. Now; there are too many
question marks in this post, but I shot it because I happened to have it in
front of me the other day as everything is in a bit of turmoil here at the
moment (boiler died yesterday!), and there is one more question mark - I
mentioned in the previous post they might be Macau not HK production . . .
There is somewhere, some data tying Tai Sang and Zylmex to die-casting factories, or a factory in Macau, yet you
never find that mark on any products by any of the marques (Tai Sang-Blue Box-Redbox or Zee-Zyll-Zylmex), so I'm not sure about
any of it; however they (or some of them) may have originated in the Portuguese
colony rather than Hong Kong? As all marks are now 'China' and most of the
tools still in production; I guess it's a moot point!
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