S is for Seen Elsewhere - Unknown Canoe

It's one of those facts of life that you get together with someone to do a 'mini-season' on canoes, you think you've done a good-enough ('for now') job, and then more keep dribbling in! I can't remember if it was a BIN or a low first-bid, but I picked this up really cheap the other month, and it's a lovely novelty Indian canoe, with Native American flats as crew!

 

I think these are some of the first shots with the new camera, more on that later, but in comparison with the one Brian Berke sent us - first as images for the mini-season, and then as this physical example in one of the two parcels he's sent recently - you can see the new one is the current holder of the largest canoe in the collection title!

It's a similar set-up to the small-scale 'hollow-horsed'/'Giant' type, with clips in the bottom of the boat to receive the figures, but here they are seperate, not on a strip, however I suspect some relationship, if only of the plagiarism/influence type?

Quite thick flats, with plug-in oars, both the figure and oar sculpt are repeated three times.

And obviously you can plug the oars in from either side, note the pond towing-eye at the 'front'.

Although having a lot of the hallmarks of Hong Kong production, I feel it could be early British (Tudor Rose, Merit, Lipkin or somebody like that?), but equally could be European, and is obviously in the same vein as the artillery shooting set (large scale flats) by Ideal/Kleeware? Any ideas?