I shot these first, of the two post's worth, but they ended-up as the second post for reasons I've already forgotten, half the bagged/carded stuff, and a bit of detritus at the end, but all good stuff!
Sorpresa . . . Italian for
Sobre, Spanish for surprise! And
Natale Luigi (
NL) is a new one for the Tag list. I remember ten lira being about half-a-p in 1977, so it's not going to break the bank, not even the piggy-bank, pocket-money being the target of very small 'lucky bags'!
Apologies to Peter Burgner, I was chatting to him about this find, which he'd observed at a distance, and I said they were the same figures as the
Lucky Clover sets, but they're not. The foot figures are larger, while the mounted are the standard 'Giant' size.
Still a useful find. I suspect two sets of mounted are missing from the top of the card, and while you could do without the shop-keepers stickers, they do at least date the thing to the mid/late-1970's, the sort of thing which was sixpence in d-money, and became 5-new-p, briefly, before the oil crisis 'invented' modern inflation! Who remembers when 1st class post was 3p!
While we had the Sorpresa/Sobre equivalent in Lucky Bags, at the larger end, here in the UK, these were the equivalent of the smaller ones, cheap polymer stuff, sourced in Hong Kong, or occasionally, especially with tin-plate, Japan.
A painted figure, marked Hong Kong, of the same size, against the unmarked bases of the figures in the bags, which came-in the same day. All Britains copies, and these 35mm's were cracker fodder, too.
Alkastep; a scruffy card, and a ripped bag, but a sample is better than no sample, and it means we can look at the figures. All marked 'France', on the rear-edge of the deep bases, these are to be found as other premiums I think, or were supplied as such to third parties, without rebranding?
Post-
Giant wagons, the buggy was branded
National and others, the small gun-team a cracker prize, while the larger gun and limber combo' was issued with unmarked copies of
Giant's ACW and Napoleonics. The other three are more generic.
The
Poplar-Quaker Foods-Tudor Rose wild west set, really just looking for colour variations or gap-filers now, they aren't rare, and most mixed lots/donations, or show plunder has a few! They could mostly use a god clean, common with these, that obviously got a lot of play back in the day.
Likewise, the
Crescent hollow-cast and
Bergan/Beton copies, these are two
Airfix late type (back right, the Indian has been given black, fabric-tape chaps!), and the rest hard styrenes which may also be
Tudor Rose, in the case of the mounted certainly, the foot figures seem to have been carried issued by several unknowns, at some point.
