B is for Blue Boxes . . . Blisters & Bags!

While I was emptying the house I grabbed the opportunity, last year, to put a large board (an old home-pool table without legs, Mum used for her puzzles) on the sofa, and throw a bedspread over it, to make a largish 'studio' to shoot the Blue Box packaging, and this; not so much a comprehensive post; more of an 'overview', is the result!

Going back to the early days of Blue Box, or even pre-Blue Box - the pink box with the Crescent gun copy is an unmarked generic and can therefore be considered a Tai Sang toy rather than a Blue Box toy, contracted-out to a western buyer - are these mostly simple closed boxes.

 

Fold-&-tuck lids, lift-off upper sleeve lids and some with perforated lines to allow for fold back display examples on counter-tops or in shop-windows or display cabinets. The farm set is probably a little later (1970's) than the others, which are mostly 1960's, the gun may well be a 1950's item.

The window era brings us the 'decker' concept, where pricing within a larger display is denoted by the number of levels (or the width of the tray/plinth) of each set, this is all 1960-70's stuff and the basic unit is a single-decker!

Here you can see on the left two versions of the smallest set, card base-insert is identical with the same figures glued-in to the same spots. One with a two-sided window on an otherwise normal box with fold and tuck ends, the other an 'ultra modern' (at the time) variation (it's still how posh gift chocky-things, soaps, small electrical gadgets and the like are packed at Christmastime today) with an all-over folded plastic case, stapled to the plinth-base.

Similar packaging on the larg construction set, while the smaller one has a stand-up card extension for more graphical information, and the larger US army set (bottom right) is about as deep as any of these sets got, so you can see there's no room for the gun, which you-know-who was falsely passing-off as Blue Box a few years ago . . . well I think he still is; they never corrected or deleted any of their nonsense!

So then we add a deck, and get double-deckers, not the buses, not the chocolate-bars! The extended display area of the cards is off the front face on the two small scale sets, while the larger scale US troops - with the same small scale vehicles and equipment - get multiple windows, one highlighting each element.

 

The smaller set on the far right will be returned to but note how ultraviolet (sunlight) has completely discoloured the back body of the truck, both medics and the stretcher-patient, but has left the cab/chassis snow-white. It's all in the batch of polymer, I've said it before, and I'll say it again!

Triple-deckers! The trays seem to be the same trays that were in the single-decked sets above, and while you get green (friendly?) OR grey (enemy?), the contents are otherwise pretty random, with truck, tank and gun trays in the grey set and truck, truck and gun in the green, and with random loads/bodies on the trucks, there may have been some more, and some less disappointing sets in this line!

If you were a poor kid on a sink-estate, and you unwrapped one of these at Christmas, you would have been more genuinely joyful, than some rich-kid getting his cabinet of Meccano or whatever.

 

And I know that; we can't complain, we had a pretty privileged, middle-class childhood, but money was tight, and we had friends who got pillowcases, not stockings at the ends of their beds, on Christmas mornings, but their toys were all broken and unloved stuffed into all these drawers, we looked after ours . . . not the packaging mind!

But yeah, the mighty four-decker! The one on the right (like a fair few of these) is near-mint from James Opie's collection, the one on the left is a mess, but it's mostly there, I have seen a few over the years, where everything is still tied-n with its elastic bands (smaller items were glued), and it's just in need of sorting/ordering properly (even the teeny helicopter), and the figures returning - they are with all the loose ones. Scale in both sets, like most above, is all over the place!

Modernity arrives in the guise of vac-formed blister packaging, earlier sets stapled to their backing cards, later sets heat-welded to them, with hanger holes sometimes present for the true 'rack' toy! Julius Caesar still has his chad intactum, as the actress said to the bishop!

The 'Battleground' set (also hanging-on to its chad) is another Tai Sang generic (possibly for FW Woolworths, it has the look of a Woolworths cheapie?), and probably pre-dates the supply of the hard-plastic brown figures to Tri-Ang Battle Space, so people trying to call the figures 'Giant' when they were only a jobber are missing the point, they are Giant, in or with the packaging, otherwise they are Tai Sang/Blue Box.

We've seen these before I think, and they are oddities, with the one on the left for Woolbro, the one on the right more generic, again containing 'Blue Box' items, but as generics - Tai Sang.

 

Ledapak is also mentioned and may be another recipient (of the right-hand set), or the maker of the vac-forms, which include the crude Fort Apache frontage. The left-hand set also looks pricy for what it contains, and I wonder if they were experimental marketing? Both also came from James.

On the left here are some standard rack-toy bottle bags with header cards, in the case of three; the header having a long-tail to form the backing-card at the same time, in the case of the little set with 45mm US soldiers, the backing card is a seperate piece slipped behind the product.

 

On the right are some of the second-tier Hong Kong cloners, copying the already poor-quality Blue Box, with 2^nd generation piracies! And they are there with one, two and tree decker's, blister cards, bottle bags and a closed box.

 

The only brand - on the right - is the Lucky Toys fire-set, they did a larger three-decker too, and (whispers) they are nicer sets than the Blue Box ones; much better build-quality! The camouflaged three-deck set should be the same colours as the pair of two-decks, but is sun-faded, contents/origin are the same. We looked at the Wild West set years ago - it's all on the Blue Box tag somewhere!

Finally, not Blue Box at all, but along with numerous ex-Marx tools, the Rado Industrial Co., trading as Ri-Toys seemed to inherit some Blue Box or Tai Sang mouldings, and certainly knocked-off others, so here are a few of their packaging types, taking us through the 1980's and into the 1990's with the central combat set.

And that's a pretty-good overview of forty-plus years of Hong Kong rack-toy output and the types of packaging at the lower level end of the market, if I say so myself!

 

Thanks to everyone who's ever saved me stuff, on this one, as I know James, Adrian and Trevor have given me Blue Box packaged sets over the years, John's helped me hunt them and bring them back from the far flung corners, Gareth let me photohraph his Marx/Sunshine version of the Wild West set for an earlier post . . . it's not that Blue Box are rare; they’re not, but there's a lot to track down as they were one of the biggest HK manufacturers for years and one of the first to own-brand, so there are tons of variations out there!