P is for Petrel's Plastic Parade

Looking at one of the wannabe Blue Box sets this time, and the first photograph is almost as poor as the double-decker 77xxx series Blue Box set from yesterday, however I did take shaded-shots of each window, so this will provide a little more in the way of visual information!

 

Badged to Petrel Toys, who we've seen before, sun faded on the face, and sold in 1968 (thanks to James Opie), I suspect from some of their other toys they might have been an importer/jobber or the phantom brand of a Hong Kong based shipper/agent/exporter, but more on that in a minute.

 

The set is clearly pretending to be a Blue Box -"C¦O¦M¦B¦AT"- set (that's my attempt at the explosion logo!), which were three and four-decked, but not split-window, which might (and it's a big 'might') have some significance as it's harder to sue if there is a difference in the 'appearance' of an otherwise common or industry wide packaging type?

The tank is a nasty little thing, there are several generations or iterations of it, it seems to be a copy of an equally simplified die-cast, itself several rungs below Zee/Zylmex on the quality ladder, and is best discarded loose, unless you need them for something like this Blog! While the figures are poor copies of late Blue Box GI's.

This is quite useful, and was re-issued a few years ago (I say that glibly, forgetting how fast time is going these days . . . it was reissued back in the 1990's!), lacking the silly blind/remote-controlled, bomber's turret of Marx, Blue Box, early Airfix and other toy landing craft of the time, it makes for a more realistic infantry/troop landing craft, with a coat of paint! The re-issues were a shiny-grey polypropylene.

I've cut the helicopter from this window so we can look at it below.

These seem to be poor copies of the bi-coloured vessels from Emson / 'Empire' (E), with the larger vessel behind being a copy of an old Pyro or Aurora 'box-scale' kit maybe? While the one in front is the old Tri-Ang Minic's being ripped-off again!

More of the figures and a couple of cheap Jeeps, they're not that bad for small-scale, but their lines are more Mahindra than Willy's if you know what I mean, a bit boxy at the front! And the wheel/axle sets look familiar from one of the many generations of the 1-Ton Hunber truck rack-toys.

Two helicopters which I'll return to in a mo', but suffice to say the silver one on the left looks mightily like the one in the Blue Box garage set!

This on the other hand is rather lovely and pretty unique! A proper submarine! It comes with two 1d/1¢ capsule-dispenser/Christmas cracker type, relief-flat crustaceans and, you can just see behind, his head poking-out, one of the Manurba Mini-Sub piracies!

The two similar helicopters (a more Soviet than NATO/US design) has two different plug-ins, one wearing skids, the other floats, but while that's interesting, the important bit . . . 

 

 . . . is that the Sikorsky H-34/Westland Wessex seems to be the actual Blue Box one, both in the Petrel set, and in these two unbranded generics (note the different plastic colour of each helicopter moulding), both of which have better-quality figures. Indeed, were it not for the paint, you'd mistake these for late Blue Box polyethylene versions, which they may be?

 

It's why I think Petrel are a phantom-brand or importer of some kind, their set's contents seem to be bought-in from more than one source, while the other two sets might be actual Tai Sang generics, manufactured for a contract (maybe with Cecil Colman, Codeg or someone like that; Cornelius?) or aiming at a price-point below the similar Blue Box sets.

And the fact that a 'Blue Box' helicopter ended-up in a rival product, aping their own, will be down to the fact they might not have known where the helicopters were going when they fulfilled the order for one of the middle-men, down at the docks, where Tong Wai-ki would have taken his suitcases of samples each morning, between trips to New York.