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.

Sunday, May 7, 2023

F is for Follow-up - Return to Infant Farms

We've looked at these twice now;
 
 
But there is always more to find, another chapter of the narrative to be told, and today we're looking at a 'West German' version from Magneto (more on them in a subsequent post), a name which could the one jhnptrqn remembered as his brother's 'French' set, on the original post;
 
The generic we looked at last time was clearly aping this set, even to the clear polystyrene lid, however this (original?) has a deeper box and floating tray, but is otherwise very similar. And it establishes the rules followed by the Hong Kong clones, to wit; three smaller houses with pitched roofs, one larger one with gable-ends and a slightly larger door, the towers with their bridge-piece and the designs of animals, figures and trees.

The sides of the box offer clues to information which my incomplete sample would otherwise not give-up, sheepdog and sheep, a pine/fir tree, a trough which seems to be a reduced-size version of the bridge and the fact that they were intended as beach toys as well as home-entertainment! It also gives suggestions of ways to use the few building elements to combine for larger structures or a church!
 
The roofs are glued on with this set, unlike the HK ones, where they are loose, and all the buildings are larger than their clones. While the 'sprulettes' which came in the box seem to be suggesting the four missing sheep were a softer polyethylene, everything else here is polystyrene.
 
It also looks like the Hong Kong makers we've seen previously here at Small Scale World may have invented the other figures, but there may well be a 'W. GERMANY' marked town set or village with the other poses?

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