About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Saturday, January 21, 2023

F is for Follow-up - Odd Germans

So, days after I posted the two unusual German Infantry (second image down) which Chris Smith sent to the blog in the Autumn, I spotted a trio on-line in Italy, but these three were die-cast alloy, not yellow plastic? Obviously I bought them before anyone else saw them!

60mm Figures; 60mm Toy Soldiers; Cáne Soldatini; Cáne Toy Soldiers; Cane; Cane Toy Soldiers; Die Cast Toy Soldiers; Die Cast Toys; Dover; Fanteria Ted; Fontanini; Fontanini Soldier; German Infantry; German Officer; German Soldier; Hugh Walter; Hugh Walter's Blog; Peltro; Small Scale World; smallscaleworld.blogspot.com; Soldado Ted; Ufficiale Ted; Westair;

We now have an additional officer who looks a bit like the chap - Simon Cadell - who was always playing German Officers when he wasn't being a rather wet manager at Maplins!

They are twice the size of the Peltro/Westair/Dover figures later claimed by Kinder collectors, and therefore a trio might 'be it', a small, probably transparent or windowed carton for tourists to purchase at a museum's gift shop? Westair still sell larger figures, now soft whitemetal, but singly.

This is not to say they are Peltro, but that could then involve (in a roundabout way) Fontanini/Fonplast and even Cáne? A reasonably extensive search of eBay.it has failed to find any more in metal or plastic, nor under any of the brands, but the fact that Cáne did several Italian sets, a US Marine set AND Japanese, yet don't seem to have been credited with a set of Germans yet, might be a telling snippet?

Can anyone check the back-cover of a PW from a few years ago which showed a shop display of various Cáne sets/sculpts under another brand . . . CGGC-Grisoni? Mine are in storage . . . again!

Back to the figures, their bases are slightly deeper than the plastics, with four shallow studs underneath (yes I should have taken more shots, but it's a bit 'up in the air' here at the movement, and I hope we'll be returning to these), but the same 'clipped coin' edge design, so the plastics are straight copies with thinner bases, and each is marked in Italian;

  •          SOLDADO TED
  •          FANTERIA TED
  •          UFFICIALE TED

Ted is for Tedesca, the Italian for German, so we have

  •          German Soldier
  •          German Infantry
  •          German Officer

Obviously more to discover on these, both the metal and the plastic, but I'm on the case, and if anyone can shed any light on the subject, it would be appreciated! Underlines above are for the dunderheads!

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