I is for Introduction - Rack Toy Knights

I used to prepare 'mini-seasons' and pile them up in reverse order so they'd read right down the page, but I don't do it anymore, it's a faff, and you should all have got used to the non-English way of publishing on most blogs . . . that Blog on the Belgian Congo (not updated much these days) did publish down the page, but the landing page was always the first-ever post and you then had to find page 21 or whatever and scroll down to find the new one! The vagaries of the limitations of digital publishing!

Also this is going to be five or six posts, and the last post will link back to both the immediately preceding posts of which this is the first, and previously published stuff here on Supreme (and everyone else)'s similar knights, and 'Black Rock' castles.

I bought these ages ago; like 15 or twenty years ago? They were sub-scale and quite small for full-on play sets, and they were cheap, can't remember if it was a toy show or a car-boot sale, but I suspect the later as one is hideously sun-faded and damp-effected and was clearly left in a shed-window or something similar for some time?

We will look at the Army Base one in the next post, it has its points of interest, then we will get stuck into the knights with a series of posts. Not obvious in this shot though, is the fact that . . .

. . . one is branded to Toy Major, the other to the German firm of Simba (now Simba-Dickie Group), but make no mistake these are the same line, just different treatments of the packaging. Back when Mr. E. Sell (he who makes it up as he goes along) was in full flood, and long before he started talking shite about my Blue Box Australians, he was wont to talk shite about Supreme, and indeed, Simba and others!

And while I think I've undone the worst of it over the years since, these next few posts (excepting the Army Base) will underline some of the rules around the stuff, while remaining a bit confusing and leaving a few question marks to be cleared-up at a later date!

As to the above shot; Toy Major are more commonly a middle-man, or shipper/jobber between the manufactures in Hong Kong (now China) and both Western retail chains and other end-chain wholesalers in the US, UK and Europe, so when you find stuff with their branding, it means the end-user took it without new packaging as a kind of generic, albeit in the TM branding, while Simba (also, back then, a jobbing wholesaler, now a manufacturer in their own right, but we'll get on to that in a later post), have gone with their own branding.