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.

Saturday, August 10, 2024

P is for Potpourri of Plastic Peeps! Historicals and Ceremonials

There's no better-or-worse with these groupings, it's just the easiest way to begin the sorting, as most of the large scale collection is archived thematically. The small scale remains mostly alphabetical by company/maker, with only the unknowns thematic, but in the larger scales it seems better to separate them by theme, within which they are all equally valued, and equally useful, in their section of the whole! Today it's the more colourful soldiers from Chris's recent donation parcel!

This was actually a purchase from Chris, which was put in the box to save on postage, and turned-out to be a Reamsa cavalryman, Royal Escort Squadron, I believe, and doesn't seem to have been in the Gormasa-Soldis tranche of reissues? Now he just needs a horse, but as mentioned in related-articles passim, I think I have some somewhere!
 
Novelty Ninjas from Panosh flank a larger unbranded/several branded (generic!) figure, who is a more contemporary (or still recent) capsule-toy type. All three are manufactured in soft PVC style polymers.
 
From the left: a base for the via-Portugal premiums used by several French products, which had here, been paired with one of the smaller Kinder issue figures, which his locating pegs don't fit! A ceramic priest type, from Japan, a slightly damaged Marx Miniature Masterpiece knight - I have more damaged than not, and will have a modelling session with their polystyrene arses one day! Finally, a new sculpt of Welsh lady 'redcoat' to put the fear of god into French marines! She was obviously another (most of the previously-seen were) tourist keepsake, keyring
 

With sizer - a bit blurred, without sizer - a better shot! A home-casting mould Prussian, a naked lead figure around 40mm, he may have had a brand, but with everything that's happened recently that mental note has been lost, and what looks like a French (or Spanish?) copy of a Reisler (?) Band Major, he could be quite recent, he's very clean, and very flashy, almost a test-shot? The sizer is an Airfix clone.
 
Lovely novelty ceramic drummer, about 45mm? He's smaller than the others we looked at a while ago, and we will return to him/them, as more of the others came in a while ago, but have gone off to storage, so a better overview of them - as a genre or trope - is definitely in the pipeline!
 
And a nice bunch of slightly battered Oojah-Cum-Pivvy's, from India, via Shamus Wade, but being terracotta, they will restore quite well, both with superglue and modelling clay, while the powder/poster paint is equally easy to touch-up, so I will get decent samples of each uniform type from this lot. And again, many thanks to Chris for all the above.

3 comments:

Gisby said...

The 40mm nude male is 54mm, and is from Irregular Miniatures. (I recognized the style, and asked them) https://www.irregularminiatures.co.uk/54mmRanges/54mmNudes.htm

Hugh Walter said...

Cheers Dude! I think he's meant to be posable, I know they can break if you bent them too far/too hard, but I guess you bend them gently into your chosen weapon/pose then build up a uniform with putty, reinforcing the weakened limb/s? the little guardsman clone is about 20 'mil, so I don't think he's a full 54mm, but yeah, he may be around 50?

H

Gisby said...

With Metal figure manufacturers there isn't really a 'standard' as to how they measure height - Is it 54mm to the eye, the top of the head, etc? So they all vary a bit. (Just like people, or so they claim)