B is for Best Show on Earth! 3. Ancient and Medieval

So; continuing with the plunder posts from the Plastic Warrior show in Twicker's a few weeks ago, and we're looking at the older eras depicted by toy soldiers, because it's all about the Toy Soldiers, or at least it used to be, these days it's as much about the spacemen or civilians, but you know what I mean!

 

Andy came over and asked me if these two Elastolin were worth a fiver, and while I'm no expert on the subject I said I thought they were given that they were two variants of the same figure, in good condition with the latter, rarer (or less common) moulding, only for him to frog-march me over to the seller? Before I knew what had happened, I was the proud owner of both? I'd thought I was just giving advice!

And they do make a nice pair, there are books published in Germany which go into intense detail on the left-hand figure, with endless colour variations, paint styles, base type hierarchy and so on, while the right-hand figure is unusual for being a harder plastic than the polyethylene of some other samples I have.

 

There are also French and Spanish copies of some of these, usually without the edge/rim to the base, and often silver or gold plastic, sometimes primary colours, usually unpainted.

 

A handful of 40mm Starlux medievals, who happen to split equally into blue/green and red/yellow armies for the purposes of photography, not planned as I picked them out of a larger sample. I have a few others somewhere, I think some have been on the Blog passim, so hopefully when we see them again, they'll be an even better shot!

Food premiums came in the guise of a Kinder Gaulish warrior and two Shredded Wheat 'Kings & Queens' series, I have lots of the latter, but don't know if I have all of them, and seem to grab them whenever I see them going cheap, and they are all over the place, so hopefully when I get them all togther there will be a full set - relief flats with the data on the flat back.

A nice handful of the early Cherilea knights, only bits and pieces, but there's a complete figure in the centre and enough bits for a second, sans helmet. I have managed to get several lots like this over the last few years (I know I have a whole archer somewhere), so when I look at them in full in the future we should get a better idea of them.
 

A small discussion was held about these, from which I gathered they exist, they turn up occasionally, they're interesting, but not interesting enough to buy, so I bought them! I wonder if they might belong with the previous swoppet types, from Cherilea, but currently 'unknown', the arms in non-matching plastic are heat-welded on.

Small scale from three sources and came in three donations I think with a bunch of Italeri/Zvezda Normans, a sub-piracy of Supreme's small-scale horse, a Giant knight and another Norman with a touch of paint.

 

This year's new set/s from Replicants were a selection of ancient/medieval levy/revolting peasants/belligerent civi's . . . they're not going to take it any more! Either side of which are two of the helmets from Airfix's 1:12th scale (six inch) character kits, being Richard III's on the left and the Black Princes on the right. As you can see they'll make nice enhancers for shelf displays or similar?

 

I've left them in the bag for now, but they are sculpted in Peter's usual, very animated, style and a nice mix of male and female types, with a lute player chivvying them all along with a Hay-nony-no, although the lady with a cleaver seems to have heard it before - once too often; you can have too much of a bard-thing!

 

Now . . . I have to get all these right, 'cos Brian Carrick put me right and then I must go and change the old post, which I could have/should have done three weeks ago, but life's too short and it's my 'eemies' who get excited about my odd errors, not me! These two ARE Guilbert from France, as is the horse, who is missing his tail.

 

This is a Colorado horse, which came with the Musketeer lot, also French, but maybe for Wild West? I have somewhere a bunch of painted French Wild West by several companies, in a little box which I think came from Sam of Sam's Minis, and I think they have been repainted, but I must sort them out one day, and hopefully there may be a rider for this beast?

 

These two are Ludorev reissues from the Rene Fisher lot below and like the lot we saw a while ago, one needs a new wire sword, which I will do in the fullness of time. I don't know about the half-barrel/bucket, which could be from anywhere, it looks like the kind of thing toy circuses make elephants or tigers stand on!

 

The Rene Fisher originals, which I think I called Guilbert (on advise) when we looked at them last time, I think we saw them all then except the Milady character figure, but in the meantime I had picked-up a third lot, which hasn't been Blogged yet, so we'll revisit Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan!

 

Bad rust on the two either end's swords, while an unstable red paint will need stripping which could lead to a repaint, but they are duplicate figures, so it'll be fun to give them a less toy-like countenance!

Thanks to all for everything last month; Peter Evans, Brian Carrick, Trevor Rudkin, Adrian Little, Andreas Dittmann, Gareth Morgan and Michael Mordant-Smith.