[Heh-heh! I'd written this up at the time,
so this was the Hong Kong shite which was supposed to go in front of this morning's
Citgo post, while the French stuff
was all found in the garage after I'd prepared this one and started the Citgo! 2022 additions in square brackets
or with strikethroughs]
A couple more days with no figures I'm
afraid, but these need to be ticked-off, a lot are or were rack toys and they were
a big part of our childhoods, whether the expensive Yesteryear's from Matchbox,
or cheap rack-toys, and whether toys or place-mats, mugs, ash-trays, linen
kitchen-cloths, tin waste-paper bins, bathroom tiles . . . d'you remember the
bathroom tiles! Yet; they've all but disappeared now?
I love these; they have that cusp of the
sixties look about them, half-psychedelia, half early-'70's glam rock, seen in
both the card artwork and the plastic colours. The only clue to maker is a
submarine-logo which seems to be made from WS
and while the card-back shows six vehicles; there may have been more.
It's tempting (and for some time was my
general thought on the subject) to think these are Yesteryear copies for the main part, but in fact there are lots of
sources, not least several French plastic Marques - as we shall [have] seen
in later [earlier] posts.
Here we have what appear to be three Mercers,
all plastic but all different when you study them, the support for the front
mudguard (fender) for instance has three different design-treatments, the seats
all differ, one has a radiator/headlight plug-in, one has only the separate
headlights and the third has that whole section as a single integral moulding
with the bonnet (hood).
15th August 2023 - The left-hand, better one, is now known to be a Henry Gordy 'Gordy Mite', see card here.
From a production point of view; the
plastic also differs with the Minimite
all hard polystyrene (apart from the tyres), the unknown all soft polyethylene
and the one marked Prosperity Toys being a mix of components in both plastic
types - it's also missing it's spare-tyres! [While the Minimite, arguably most likely to be based on the European one we
saw in the Fuilor post, has its spare
tyres in a different place?
[I've failed to find the links to the
similar stuff on Moonbase, despite an hours search, even though I know it's there somewhere!]
Two more, both unmarked, the white one has
the look of the Walgreen generics in
the first shot but not the whacky colours, and it's not on the card-back, while
we had the Matchbox version of the Rolls Royce as kids and the finer bits
tended to break (windscreen, headlights), which they are less likely to on a
soft ethylene copy!
I think this is a Renault? It's also a fifth or sixth origin/maker to those we've
already seen and gives an idea of the 'parts-list' of one of these. Pulled from
bins by assemblers working in a hurry; you end up with different coloured
seats!
This is also Hong Kong production, but is
as good as some of the better French examples we will look at later, branded to
both KMC and Mini Models, the polyethylene tilt/cover and tyres are added to an
otherwise well made polystyrene model, with the problem of the spoked wheels
(simplified on the proceeding models) here solved with clear discs.
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