D is for Donnnnn'Pushhhh Meeeeee!

After you've enjoyed the risibley funny sequels - which certainly didn't pan out in the real-life Iran, Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan - as empty-headed action-movies, it's worth remembering in the original, John Rambo (for it is he!) was a disgruntled, ex-grunt 'patriot; shooting-up his own neighbourhood!

On another site someone was asking about Rambo figures the other . . . month? A while ago anyway! So I've got this little overview together, despite most of mine being in storage, in fact; they never came out, but the narrative can still be expressed with what I do have!

The above shows the header card from a line of Maqueta Rambo (Rambo figures) rack toys coming out of Mexico, by Gemelo-Plast (Ruben Juarez Gemelo), who are using copies (lower centre) of older - probably Arco figures (lower left) taken from the marked Arco smallies (lower right) which we looked at back in the early days of the blog.

This was in the bag, another has a jeep, a third a jet-plane, and it's just a question of getting past it with a box-tick, so we can get back to the figures!

This is all the Gemelo's I've ID'd so far, each bag has a small mix with duplicates, so I can't be sure I've found all of them, 'bowman' and 'crossbow' Rambo's are missing for starters? Large lumps of - probably - polyethylene and I guess the odd red ones are 'commie-bastards' to be deaded? The standing firing is a simplification of an Arco (?) crossbow pose - you can see he still has the explosive arrow tip!

Here we have the smaller, definitely Arco and larger 'probably' with an Airfix figure for scale, below which we have a newer set, which while not portraying the Arco sculpts, do nevertheless carry an air of Rambo (or Platoon; is that meant to be Willem Dafoe's Sgt. Elias, second from the right?) about them. All the above - bar the Airfix cold-war warrior - are courtesy of Chris Smith I think, mine are elsewhere!

I've actually just grabbed these off the blog (so you should have seen them before!), as it (right-hand image, also from Chris) shows a bigger, baseless Rambo with bow, who may be a third iteration ofArco's, or another copy, but is of better quality that the Mexican ones, although is probably from the donor set for them?

On the left a set I found to explain another point sometime, credited to Black Temptation (an Amazon or Ali  Baba phantom brand if ever I read one!), we can see the first three of the poses (reading English-wise) are based on the Arco Rambo sets.

In the past we've seen a clear Rambo or Rambo knock-off in silver here, probably from a  rack-toy type mini-playset? While this crossover set mixed old Matchbox poses with Arco influenced figures and all the Reisler WWII prone figures!