S is for Shot at the Show

As I prepare for today's toy fair at Sandown Park, one of those dozen-odd dates which help the collecting year click over, here's a nice game I shot at last May's show, Spear's Games 'Targets in Space', a clockwork automated shooting game, which is almost a miniaturised fairground sideshow booth!

 

It's all about the artwork with these old things, isn't it?!

 

Reproduced on the inside with the far-distant sky, cut out for the target-wheel.

 

A large clock mainspring, behind the metal plate, is wound via the butterfly-nut.

 

 

Eight targets with variable scoring, not exactly random as you would learn the sequence!

But you could change the cards around occasionally.

 

Not the best image, but an old auction shot shows the rather futuristic, and robust sidearm, with pretty lethal-looking metal-shafted darts, used to achieve the task of blowing alien critter transports off the ring, or at least, folding them behind it, on their spring-clips! 

 

I love the spaceman, he's that classic Ajax/Archer type with the rubber ducting for stretchy knees and elbows! Cheers to Adrian Little for letting me shoot the other shots.

LB is for Lanky Bods

Back to spacemen and a whole bunch of Lik Be's lanky chaps have come it recently, along with a few other items of interest, indeed, all these posts were going to be one follow-up until I started editing them and realised it was going to be 30 or more images, even with maximum collaging!

 

Having inherited a lot of Woolbro stuff in the purchase from Jame Opie many years ago now (and many thanks to him), these were a must as soon as I saw them, and so that's what happened! They are the slightly smaller copies in bright colours, unpainted with flat/smooth bases,.

 

Price suggests 1976-78, as a box of Airfix HO=OO figures was going through 18, 19, 20, and I remember; 21p, around the same time? And dare I say seem to be aimed directly at competing with the Nasta Industries sets we saw the other day, both in the artwork and with the contents count/style?

Two of them are seen here in blue and yellow, between the older copy to the left and what I believe are my first two of the iteration carried by Solpa in Greece, they are smoother-etched than the other clones we've seen here (except the really small blobs), but I've only seen them online, so I'm not 100% on that.

More of the Woolbro type here, gunmetal, orange and green join the blue, an online image I didn't bid on as I didn't really need anything in the lot, although the robots were interesting, they look modern and will turn-up on their own for a lower price!

And another evilBay image here.

They look unloved.

While this set has the hollow-based copies, which from the painted forms (far left in the five figure line-up above) go right back to LB's own origins (late 1960's), but here seem to date from the late 1990's, with unpainted figures in a colour I haven't encountered these clones in before, and a CHINA mark?

Obviously more of a summer beach/lawn toy, with the figures not the central theme, but mere targets for the gun, which fires space-rockets . . . Fluorescent, Barbie-pink, space-rockets; what a bargain!

I've also picked up some originals over the last 9-months, and while the white ones will be checked against the master collection with the rejects offered as a complete set for swaps, the chrome ones will contribute to two sets, the very shiny-silver (most of the far rank) and the darker 'antiqued' (near command group), with any duplicates paint-stripped to add to the neutral granual sample we've looked at some before.

The idea being to end-up with four sub-lots; all eight marked as bright & antiqued, an unmarked set of eight cake decorations from the 1990's, and a larger lot of the plain, stripped plastic ones.

Again, no reason to bid on this lot, although I have gaps in the unpainted samples, there was too much other junk in the lot, and one or two of the green and red ones (which I still need some of (painted and unpainted)) looked a bit tatty?

Better known as a Naval artist for the USN, Fred Freeman was also a prolific magazine illustrator through the middle of the 20th Century, and his sci-fi stuff often used the X Craft-Mercury-Gemini suits worn by our LB breadrin'. Here he has them in something akin to a B29 cockpit, with 'vidscreens', in orbit over the moon! It won't surprise you he's well-known for his submarine art, either!

Then this big, bad, burgundy, blow-moulded, beautiful, blooming, bastard turned-up! Obviously a parachute toy (I may have one or two and not previously noticed the connection?), he's been shot separately for that page, about 120mm, but it seems there’s still no end in sight to additions to the LB for Lik Be output and clones!

Just replace LP with Lik Be, it's only three more letters and a gap, you don't NEED to use LB at all, if you really don't want to, fuckwits!

T is for Three of a Kind & Then Some!

A post which is neither as complete as it might have been, nor as short as it would have been if it was complete as originally planned, so a real bit of a curates egg, despite having a tight parameter, subject wise! Hoping the opening line is suitably cryptic - let me explain;

I picked up the later-version Merit gun in the course of the year, can't remember where or when, but it's probably in one of the 'H is for...' posts, the same as the one we saw boxed a few years (?) ago, but with plastic wheels rather than the wooden ones we looked at last time.

I put to one side intending to shoot the two together, forgot to do so and managed to put it away back in the summer as I'd uncovered the Merit box in the garage doing the Rack Toy Month Blue Box shots.

However I hadn't shot the boxed one which was buried in the attic, so the photo's for the new one sat here for a few months. The other week I dug out the old one, shot it separately and collaged the two closest-similarity shots together, otherwise there would have been a single image here; either way it would have been 'end of post'!

But after I'd finalised the above images I then remembered I try not to post military stuff in Christmas week (try not very hard if you check past Christmas posting here!), although these are exactly the sort of thing you'd get in a stocking 40 or 50-years ago, so put the pictures on 'hold' . . . I then got an eMail from Chris Smith who had no inkling of the above, literally about 48-hours later, showing this silver Hong Kong copy.

Anyway I'll schedule it for 12th night, which is still within the 12-days, but suitably far from Christmas-week to salve my soul!

What interested him was the fact that it has Empire Made on one side and Made in Hong Kong on the other, clearly a crossover or interim piece from the point where the Americans started to get more heavily involved in the colony's toy industry and the HK toymen realised they needed a less specific - or even less limiting - moniker on their toys, less 'British Empire' and more 'we're here and we make toys'?

Chris also commented on the numbers of copies you can find of this gun, and those who got Plastic Warrior's Charben's special last year will see one (non-firing) on the cover, with red wheels, while we've looked at sub-scale silver and gold-styrene ones from the Crown Colony here in the past, a few times now.

Anyway, that got me thinking, and I dug them all out and now we've got a full-post! Although, I must admit; the above and the next three are re-used images; mostly from the Airfix blog.

While Chris's is roughly the same size as the Merit version [point of order - if it's Merit chances are the 'original' original will be someone like the USA's Pyro or even the UK's Bell], these other ones are all HO-OO compatible, less than half the size of the big ones, but unlike the Charbens copy, do retain a rudimentary firing-mechanism.

Woolbro contracted to have their guns sprayed gold!

These generic sets will give you two guns with nobody to fire them or one and a rudimentary crew, although in both cases you also get a ship!

This is one of my favourite HK carded sets, dating from 1969 it has two men riding an Honest John tactical nuclear missile into ground-zero, bright-blue paratroops, four of the little guns, a bunch of Airfix piracies, some Giant space-men copies and a Beechcraft serving the Imperial Japanese Air Force . . . and if that's not enough to shut little Johnny up for an hour or two; look at the artwork - it's the end of two worlds! It's the Trigan Empire invading one of their neighbours! It's the end of Blazing Saddles with a navy and space-rockets!

It's madder than a bucket of frogs on the top-table at a wedding reception . . . there's a another Beechcraft, on the tail of an intergalactic spaceship, in a sky filled with paratroopers, Dakotas a Stratofortress or two and several Mirages, one of which - apparently serving with the International Red Cross - is about to crash into the beach having been brought-down by field guns!

Meanwhile, behind the plastic Beechcraft something terrible seems to be happening to a Bruster Buffalo or similar carrier prop-job? One day I'll carefully remove the staples and scan that card for posterity . . . or comedy-effect!

My thanks to Chris for his timely email, expanding this post from two, to eight frames, and thanks to James Opie for several of the Hong Kong, small-scale sets.

DY is for Dah Yang

Not often we have bone fide Taiwanese stuff on the Blog, I'm sure some slips by under the 'generic' label as Hong Kong/China, but Taiwan (whatever Beijing thinks) is quite a different place, and these are a lot of fun!

Equally - not often we have ray guns on the Blog, but it has happened before, although I won't know until I publish whether I tagged them as such? Also - do you think the gun is based on the artwork (nicked from a comic, annual or pulp paperback), rather than the artwork reflecting the toy? It's all a bit Dan Dare or Buck Rogers!

Dah Yang; new to me. The gun has a double mechanism of cap-firing and dart-firing and looks to be more modern that the card-art would suggest? This is a 'proper' ray-gun, with the dish-thing that makes it really lethal, the stacked-disc ones are all show and no firepower, I read it in Ray-guns & Ammo Monthly!

They make handguns too! Not only does this one have stacked-discs, but it's got the in-line tube/ring things too; Ray-guns & Ammo Monthly has very little good to say about them! But it's a repeater, and in enclosed spaces?

Just imagine; if only we could get every teacher, shopkeeper and bus driver to have their own - legally held - ray-gun, how safe the world would be?

R is for Regular Round-up!

Like yesterday's football/footballers; for many years we didn't really look at paratrooper toys here, but a couple of years ago I did  an overview of what I had here at the time, and since then with a lot of help from New York and keeping an eye-out, we've had quite a few re-visits.

I still haven't found the 'in storage' box, but I spotted a few buried the other day and it may be with them, so perhaps before Christmas I'll have united the two sizeable samples and we can have a better look or over-view of the genre - a favourite here, now.

How they come in! I bought these in Basingrad on the 9th, two from Wilkinson's/Wilco, the other (Phidal Peter Rabbit) from TKMaxx, the monster [snake!] skeleton was really for Halloween, but you've seen it now - it'll look great with skeleton armies though! Phidal are going to need a couple of days now, there's around ten sets, or part-sets in the queue, and anyway it's the paratroopers we're looking at now.

So, N is for Not That Unique Are They! We've looked at their 54mm solid paratroopers here and we've looked at the blow-mould poses as both a blow-mould and solid by other brands or under other brand marks, but under Unique - as I said - these sets of four are in Wilko's at the moment.

I have a set of 12 in the storage lot which I think also came from Wilkinson's but about eight or nine years ago (possibly the green-carded set), while an earlier set existed. The drop in contents reflects inflation, but a drop from 12 to 4 in one step has a whiff of greed too, especially if you were running the twelve for 15-20 years, prior to the sudden count-drop!

A drop to eight would have been a better start, and if you're dropping to four, why not issue one of each colour?

This is a make-weight for the post, the recent D&D Distribution catalogue shot showing the currently common figures we've seen here under several brands already, they are the ones with the closed canopy and single-shroud which I don't like very much! Also, someone needs to have a word with the copywriter!

We've also seen these several times but I couldn't remember if we'd seen a four-blister one, I know Brian B has sent shelfies of Jaru 3-blister packs and I've bought or shelfied two- or three-blister cards, but have we had a four? We have now! Kandytoys of Exeter.

From the archive comes Norton-Thomson's 1988 Lion Group 'Pocket Money Toys' catalogue, and a different take on the paratrooper toy altogether; they are fired into the sky by a long, rigid . . . err . . . 'member' placed . . . err . . . between their thighs, the . . . err . . . 'snake's head' engaging with a steel spring and catch mechanism . . . well endowed lads, but - ouch!

"Most inappropriate toy in INGERLAND EVER!"; he spittle-flecks down the 'phone to the Daily Wail's 'really important news' desk, for lesser bloggers to re-post! Also issued under TNT branding as The Sky Devils Paratroopers as code M7626A.

RTM is for Rack Toy Month - S is for Soldier Shoot

So first post for Rack Toy Month and what I consider to be the quintessential rack-toy - carded knock-off toy soldiers and a dart-firing gun! There's also a bit of synergy involved as it's only a few days since we looked at the Lone Star equivalents, only this time it's not ganging-up on Native Americans but rather blowing-away generic khaki infantrymen!

And instead of 'Careful; You'll have somebody's eye out' corks, we've got 'Careful; You'll have somebody's eye out' sucker-darts.

The bag with its rather leery header-card, I think both the font and the colour-choice places this firmly in the mid/late-half of the 1970's, it's that vague attempt to re-create the zeitgeist of the psychedelic-sixties, with a dodgy sheet of Letraset lettering!

Figures are copies of the Crescent 60-millimetre khaki infantry figures - in fact the reason I bought this (at March's Sandown Park show) was because I think I have the figures loose and it's always nice to tie loose HK into a set, even if there's no maker . . . it's a start!

Simple 'Hong Kong' mark in a spaced DIN-type font, set into a tablet-shaped recess under the heavy base. The pistol looks like the sort of toy which managed about 20-shots before the slackly-applied glue failed and the whole thing fell into two halves - we had toys like this when we were kids!