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.

Thursday, August 15, 2024

P is for Potpourri of Plastic Peeps! Wild West

Nearing the end of the surprise box from Chris, and we find a Sobre, but more on that at the end of the post! Wild West, large scale, small scale, plastic, metal, cowboys, Native American Indians, horses, premiums and cartoony stuff . . . let's see what was in the box;
 
All interesting; the one on the left seems to be a soft plastic version of an earlier hard polystyrene premium, it's not the first time we seen them, Betterware used some (Mayer-Lippenhausen and Commonwealth) for their little salesman's envelope gifts, the Australian (and others) Nabisco Dinosaurs are another. This chap is from the Siku sculpts/set, supplied in two sizes, painted and unpainted, and various plastic colours to various European premium issuers, so, here, is probably via . . .
 
. . .  the Dutch DS Plastics, they show them in their catalogue - code 455, as some of the moulds they inherited from Siku.

The many Hong Kong copies of Timpo/Britains/Crescent swoppets are common as muck, two-a-penny and usually pretty poorly executed, although there are better ones, and whole ones attributable to their packaging are useful, these two in the middle are unusual for being among the better, and all-polyethylene, where usually some of the parts are PVC, the locating studs/holes have larger diameters too, while the chap on the end is from a US maker; Ideal, and is meant to be a Canadian trapper I think? I bet the trappers of both nations looked pretty similar and paid little heed to a line on the map!

Home-cast casting of an Indian on the left, probably a Schneider mould, what is likely a Lone Star Metallion in the middle (Pat Masterton), but other makers covered them and the paint throws you off, while the chap on the right is similar to others I have, but I don't think I've ever seen an attribution for them either as Western originals (Spain, France?) or as Hong Kong copies.

I know the one in the middle is from the Crazy Clown Circus of Frazer & Glass (F&G) now, but he got shot with his extended family, which included on the left a horse which was marked, but I can't remember if it was LIDO (I think so) or AJAX?, while the metallised 'standard' horse of the family, is new on me?
 
Obviously we have seen metallised foot figures from the 'set', in different sizes, so I guess he went with them, but I haven't found metallised riders yet? I'm guessing it should be Tudor Rose or at a stretch Kleeware, and one of the earlier iterations of them?

To which, we can add four of the polystyrene foot figures! The painted Crescent/Lido chap may be from one of the West germen pencil shapeners, as he has  alayer of glue on his base underside?
 
The chap in the middle is my first, of a set I've been after for years, and have already missed-out on a boxed set of, coincidentally, the only reason I know what he is, which is an Exin Wild West figure. They are cartoon-styled, very-much like the Lucky Luke premiums, and I'm sure that was no accident, as Comansi handled the latter and both are Spanish companies, seeped in Spaghetti Western culture at the time?

Five more of the Lone Star shooting game figures, I think we may have all poses in both colours now, and a lot of them have come from Chris over the last few years, so when I get them all together we will have another, closer look.

A small sample of small scale Blue Box, it's all grist to the mill, with two of the foot figures and a horse from Britians Swoppet sculpts, along with a stockade-fort section, copied from the Marx Miniature Masterpiece fort.

Sub-Giant piracies from Hong Kong - always useful!

A small group of damaged Minimodels 25mm's, they will go in the tub with the rest of the damaged ones against the possibility of me having a conversion session one day, as being polystyrene (the reason so many are found damaged) they are easy to cut, glue, sand and fill!


The figures Brian Berke remembered were in Lucky Bags back in the day, and lucky he did, as no one else had! The colour scheme remains pretty constant, with the Indians in the warm/hot colours and the Cowboys in the cold colours. And I think this sample balances out the bigger sample somewhat, which was getting a bit Indian-heavy!

There are new cowboy poses here, and the pose-count keeps growing, I think we may well end-up with about fifty, five-each mounted and up to 20 foot figure sculpts, per. 'side'? Some of the Euro-premium sets ran to similar numbers.

While this was a lovely surprise, a bagged Sobre, from Sobreplast, a name new to the Blog and the archive, if not the Hobby, an old kiosk toy, of more substance than the Montaplex type envelopes we usually look at here.
 
The figures/horses look to be Comansi copies, but they may be actual Comansi, until I can compare with the real-deal's, I won't know, but the wagon is not the Comansi one, so I suspect copies. A really nice 'sopresa', cheers Chris!

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