Zee is for Zylmex is for Motormax is for Redbox!

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!