I is for It Was the First of April!

OK, so yesterday's posts were both attempts at April Fools; the Airfix Space Tank is actually the Centurion card mucked about with in Picasa (I was pleased with the shadow of the firing lever! While the Revell kit is by an unknown artist and was kicking around on Faceplant the other day with no byline, so hat's of to the original artist - if anyone knows him, let us know!

 

I actually posted several edits on different groups or threads on Thursday as I worked on it, so with yesterday's shares it's got out there!

 

I'm still not comfortable posting, given everything that's going on, but i realise that life must go on, and if Putin's going to start WWIII I may only have  a few weeks to get 15-years worth of work done, so it behoves me to just get on with it, however there is still Real life stuff in the background too, but I'll get back to posting something!

In the meantime I did post some stuff over at the But Is It Giant Blog; the Giant 'Space Men' got their day in the sun with five posts covering the main points

Introduction
Giant Originals
Copy Type 1
Copy Type 2 (Woolbro etc)
Copy Type 3

 

While I also took a closer look at the three Roman cards, previously seen in the 'page' at the top of this screen.

 

980 - Roman Legion Chariot Attack

981 - Roman Legion Assault Group

982 - Chariot Race

 

If you go over there and scroll they will all be in the reverse order to above!

B is for Breaking News - Toy Fair Latest!

Latest announcement on the toy 'wire' is a range of topical kits from Revell . . .

The first in the series is reportedly going to be followed by a Belarus-1522 dragging a T-80BVM MBT with damaged 'cope cage', an Agromash-180TK towing a 9K33 Osa/SA-8 'Gecko' and a Western John Deer pulling a BTR-82A IFV, all common-enough sights around Ukraine these days.

R is for Recent Addition!

Picked this up at a recent fair, nothing about it in the books, but you can't have everything . . . 

One wonders if it was destined for the 01741 Astronauts, or was there a range of more fictional Sci-Fi stuff planned? Anyway; it fills an obvious gap in the collection - Space Tank!

AF is also for April Fools . . .

 . . . all fools or - specifically - this fool in April! The previous post was of course not Teresa May, but the Jon Pertwee (ex-Dr Who) era Wurzel Gummidge, done as a pencil top, although, as Jan spotted; he did look more like Eddy Izzard or even Grayson Perry!

Courtesy of Chris Smith who got the images to me in plenty of time for an April Fool's two years ago, I can't remember why I missed it that first year, but then Covid-19 intervened last year, still, I have said in the past (with fingers crossed) that "...everything will get up here eventually!", and now it's Jon-call-me-Wurzel's time in the spotlight!

I don't know how many there were in the set, or who imported them but for their third non-empirical mention in the last few days; I wouldn't mind betting it was HCF into the UK, they are similar to the Star Wars pencil-tops we now know were HCF imports!

The costume on the left is the day-to-day or episode-to-episode clothing, while the 'Tereasa May' outfit was for finest or something! Britains did the one figure with different plug-in heads! And they are marked Hong Kong down the spine.

AF is for Almost Feminine

I forgot to Blog this a couple of years ago! Chris Smith, friend and regular contributor to the Blog sent this during the 'height' of her power . . . 

Some fool made a whole bunch of Teresa May figurines . . . would I lie to you? He must have a warehouse full of them - unsold! Totally failed to get the big cat-print shoes right either!

PIOT is for Peace In Our Time

Happy Easter everyone, I thought we'd look at one of the least known corners of our hobby today as I happened to pick these up for less than a tenner in a charity shop the other day (I know, but those old dears have all the reference works out the back you know , and it was less than a tenner, so I did OK), and they are very hard to track down.

Neville Chamberlin's ill-fated trip to Germany in 1938 was rather brushed-over at the time, and all but forgotten in the heady chaos of 1940, and the shoe-in of Churchill to lead us in our 'finest hour' which became the prase-de-jour however, once Hitler had been dealt with and the threat from the East become more obvious, Chamberlain's ringing endorsement of dealing with strongmen was remembered for the first-class naivety it was.

By the early 1950's parents were regularly chiding their unruly children to bed with the threat of "Peace In Our Time with Mr. Hitler's ghost if you don't behave and settle-down quickly", Squaddie's going off to fight Communism in Korea scrawled PIOT on their helmet covers when the QM wasn't looking and then blamed each-other to get off RP's, while on Humberside striking Dockers even had rubber-stamps made-up in the tool-sheds to leave oxide-red PIOT's on mounted policemen's' horse's rumps during the less than peaceful ruckuses' that accompanied their Industrial Action!

So it's unsurprising to find that the nascent plastics industry soon adopted this cultural meme for the production of novelty figures of Mr Chamberlain with the offending letter he had waved all those years ago tucked into his headband.

The above figure (counting out the 'peace'es') has been credited to both Rafael Lipkin and Chad Valley, although - with its resemblance to Britains 'Twizzle Town' circus - I wonder if it was an early, undocumented experiment in polymer from the - then still - hollow-cast experts? The unpainted one (with body on backwards) could be a later issue but is more likely to be an out-painters cast-off, as unpainted he has no distinctive moustache?

Chamberlin was always depicted as a slightly lunatic character with his hair all over the place and the look of a childish simpleton in these novelties and by the time I was born (1964) the phrase was one every school-boy knew, but the cultural overtones had all but disappeared - along with the novelties - and it was just more 'boring' history!

This 'booble head' figure of Chamberlain (looking fruitlessly in the dirt for the lost peace) is in a phenolic or early styrene resin and could be Kleeware, early Airfix or whoever did the crazy-clown circus?

Nice to finally track them down and at less than a tenner - Bargain! Have you ever seen any readers?