N is for November's Sandown Park - Wild West, Animals and Odds

Winding-up the Sandown purchases from a month ago now, and it's mostly animals, and the Wild West, with a few odds & sods, cartoon, TV-Movie stuff and the like, to look at this time.

 

I have two beliefs about this set (which was a gift from John Begg, I think), one is that it's from the same series as the #445 Mobile Task Force, and Space Explorer sets issued by Gordy, Woolbro and others, this being one 'sock' instead of two, and a generic issue with no branding-overprint. The other is that we were bought a set each from Webb's the Newsagent, in Hartley Wintney, by Mum, one wet weekend, in the holidays!

 

There was a two-sock Fort Cheyenne under the 445-code, but that had a version of the fort, and different figures/horses, so this may be a lookie-likey , and leaves the first belief questionable for now, the second belief is 100%, I well-remember the colour samples, and trying to wiggle the horses hooves into the carpet fibres to keep them standing up!

 

I bought a second pirate set from the same chap as last time, and it's already been opened and shot for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so a couple of months after the last one, and there are already two folders ready for next year!

 

A  mix of HK smallies, including several sub-piracies of the 2nd version knights, in red, I'd had a few yellow ones but I think these are new, usually you find both the Giant originals and the copies in silver or black. They probably belong on the horses to the right, but this is how they came!

 

Someone tried to 'mend' a broken tail, by rolling a scrap of faux-suede up, very tight, setting it alight, and stuffing it up the horse's jacksie! Given how common these are, and how many would come in even a small 6d set, that was a hell of an effort! Probably a 'favourite' horse? Kids are a bit like that, you can have fifteen white horses in the bag, but if one's slightly grey and becomes your favourite, you'll move Heaven & Earth to keep in going!

A rather tatty 2nd generation copy of one of the Hong Kong dogs we looked at in a couple of round-up posts a year or two ago, and the smallest King Kong in the world! Certainly the smallest I've seen, who wasn't moulded into a resin Empire State Building keepsake!

 

Probably a 1d-1¢, gum-ball capsule prize or Christmas cracker novelty, it really is tiny, less than 20mm! In all other respects it's the same as all other HK gorillas; soft polyethylene, with a basic MADE IN HONG KONG mark.

 

A sample of broken Cherilea dinosaurs, which Adrian gave me from his bits box. Useful nevertheless, against colour variations, or even to combine with others into dodgy Dr. Moreau subjects at a later date? I mean they are so rare these days, due entirely to their brittleness, that some are better than none, and they will be added to a bigger sample with some better ones we have seen here, previously, at Small Scale World.

 

Two Britains copies, a rather nice Hong Kong Herakd clone, from Hong Kong! And a damaged sub-scale rendition of the war-dancing Swoppet, also from the colony of intellectual property crime!

 

Kinder, all 1980's, I think. If you were to 'age' Kinder like comic-fans age their stuff, these would be 'silver age'! The head and hat, is from a slightly different set to the complete figure, I think, while the fire-appliance with two mini plug-in firefighters was late 80's, and I actually kept a few of the tractors at the time, so there's a tub of these to add-to, or cannibalise from, to make whole examples.

 

Damaged guard from Cherilea's executioner set, another Invicta dinosaur, a couple of Esci Americans and a partial pig, in the style of the Xandria key-rings, but all 'ethylene, and probably from another source?

 

Four 'funnimals', and all probbaly Holly rather than Lik Be, certainly the llama-like and squirel-thing come in a set with the known Holly guitar-turtle, while the cow was issued by Mail-Order outfit Colonial Studios, with a set of otherwise realistic (Briatins copies) farm animals.

 

This is just marked Hong Kong, but is not a bad rendition of Disney's Pluto, and holds-up against the Marx, Heimo, and early-Schleich stuff of the 1970's, a lump of stable-PVC, I guess the ring is the remnants of a key-chain?

 

More of the cartoon mini-animals often credited to Kinder, but which predate Kinder by a decade or two, and were issued as carded 'families', as gum-ball machine prizes and through other such novelty avenues. Kinder would issue similar 'hard plastics' in the 1980's, but usually larger models.

 

UK Cereal premiums, haveing other outlets elsewhere, here they were all cereal, with two jig-toys, three of the Aristocat figures and a Brian the Snail from the Magic Roundabout, and while we now know Brian could have been a Wavyline promotional, I think in this shade of blue, he might be a European ice-cream premium.

 

I think we might have the Little Baby Jesus (or Moses?) in red here, a rather tatty Marx Snow White (from Swansea?) and a lovely survivor of Japanese blow-moulded lightness, in the probable 'styrene copy of an earlier celluloid Santa Claus.

B is for Big Box of Bounty - Wild West . . . and Pirates!

You can't know everything, and I learnt something pretty fundamental last week, while I was sorting-out Chris Smith's latest parcel to the Blog, to share with you lot, but let's look at the Wild West component first!

 

A card hoodlum, rearing on a tamed mustang! The hoof needs glueing, one of two miniscule victories by Royal Fail's vandalisation Elves this time, he's lost his Stetson too, but one supposes, some time ago! The Man in Black, a pound-shop Lee Van Cleef, looks a lot like some Supreme output, but is not from their well-known series, nor, as far as I am aware, did Papo ever do more than one modern cowboy on horse, which is a clue . . . ?

 

A Hong Kong, 45mm copy, of a Gulliver copy, of the Atlantic Sioux Camp seated brave, and another of the probably Euro', possibly premium, Indians (no cowboys have turned-up yet) set, of which I have quite a few now, but that Chris has probably found more of, than me!

 

The 40mm, AHM, Culpitt, Injectaplastic, Jouets Super Plastic (et al.?) set, and it's extraordinary that despite collecting these for years (as a small-scale collector), both poses and colour variations continue to turn up, I'm still looking for an Indian archer (and most of the accessories), I knew I needed the dancing guy in orange trousers, and the standing firing cowboy is a new (4th) colour variation! They will both get bases from other figures in the larger sample.

 

The Crescent hollow-cast/Lido Wild West chaps, and an oddity! On the left, grist to the mill, he's a bit bashed, but will still join the sample, to increase the size of the sample, against future looks/comparisons; we've seen several variations of the set over time.

 

In the middle, an absolute mint, 'Germany' marked, novelty pencil sharpener, an incredible find, and so generous of Chris to sent it here? And remember, as well as some of the better KT sharpeners, it was Chris who found the Ichthyosaur/Dolphin hybrid sharpener!

 

While the third chap could be Wild West, a clown or a farmer, and may be Hong Kong, or . . . French? Anyone recognise him? He looks like he should have a wheelbarrow, and may be a French farmer? He could be a Marty clown; paint and plastic are right, but also looks like some of those old hollow-cast cowboys with their furry sheepskin chaps and soft felt hats, so got sorted into this lot for now!

 

These were on the top of the box, so I spotted them straight-away, but baseless it's hard to know if they are French or Italian cheapies, or some Hong Kong knock-offs? But New to me and Blog for sure! Obviously taken from the Britains Herald 'Swoppets', solidified, does anyone know what bases they should have?

Small scale, Chris is very good at keeping samples of these separate, it's the only way to use them for research, the larger bag is a clean-looking sample of 'Wavymane', and while there's "always" a clean looking sample of Wavymane, I never turn away from such things, as it would be churlish, and you never know when a completely new horse type or figure pose might have been buried among them by a previous owner!

 

The smaller bag is more mixed, while the real odds are spread out in front, and include useful wagon parts for the Giant/post-Giant pile and the National and others' pile!

 

While up a band (25-30mm), we have, from the left; two Torgano Indian boys (or, from the rest of the set; boys dressed as Indians), both missing their bows (very delicate), and a Comansi horse, although, with the flash, and saddle-spike, possibly a Sobre or similar knock-off? And a small handful of the Blue Box smallies, to the right.

Finishing off with three interesting pirates, or 'a potential pirate', in the case of the right-hand figure, another one new to me, also with elements of Supreme/SP Toys output, but is he a cowboy, a pirate or a civilian of some kind? Possibly, a rather ephemeral figure from one of the many 'big box' pirate ship play-sets, over the years? Or, does he belong with the glossier, obvious cowboy (or detective?!) figure at the start of this post - I don't think so, but you have to look at every angle? Simply marked 'CHINA'.

 

On the left is a new-to-me, off-white, colour variant of the Thomas/Poplar pirates, we only looked at the other day, on the last Interrr'nationaaal Taark Like a Poirut Daye event, while in the middle is another of the revelations of Chris's box . . . 

 

. . . a marked Papo pirate, from the 1990's, who has nothing in common with the current range, which has been in the catalogue for years now, but that clearly provided the donor-sculpt for the smaller, Supreme pirate with similar blunderbuss?

 

Now, Papo themselves only claim to be 'nearly' 30 years old, so this (1999 CHINA) must be one of the earlier products in their range, and - I've just spent some time trying to Google them and only found the current set - so, I guess, A) they were a short-lived line, making this uncommon, or uncommon outside France (?) and B) the rest of the Papo set must be the other donors for the Supreme set?

 

And while I'm sure some people knew all or part of the above, nobody seems to have Blogged it, there's nothing on the Forums (or Papo's website), and nobody has pointed it out/corrected me, on all the occasions I've Blogged the Supreme set, which is now neither as old, nor as cool as I thought it was! Now I know, it's gotta'be about finding the others, and did Papo originally do the six SP Toys skeleton 'enemy' too?

 

And, all this is not to say I shouldn't have known, I have the early Papo catalogues somewhere, mostly donated by Peter Evans or another friend of the Blog (have they been in a show-report in PW magazine?), and, I guess, the set must be in some of them? But many thanks to Chris for sending it, and everything else above.

M is for More from London, Third of Three Plunder Posts

Finishing this run of plunder-posts with a right-old mix of Wild West, ancient & medieval, pirates, Sci-fi, cartoon, TV and Movie stuff, and as always, some interesting stuff, some stuff you'll be familiar with, but perhaps juxtaposed with stuff they're not usually compared with? I mean - waffling for the opening paragraph - these posts get the traffic, and people seem to enjoy an assortment of new images with some interesting items buried in them!

 

Red-on-red, what am I like! From the left; European, probably French 'bazaar' figure, small, Comansi 30mm, probably Novalinea, but in a colour and tinney polymer I'm unfamiliar with, possibly a sobre knock-off, or supplied as a premium?

 

Hong Kong Timpo'esque cavalryman, but from the legs, obviously copied from the Hong Kong rip-offs with their plug-on boots, a small Britains piracy, I have a lot of these but always in one's and twos, so probably 'Lucky Bags' or Christmas crackers?

 

A modern PVC figure who seems to be a short-short with truncated lance, and one of those from hollow-cast cowboys, who were Lido over there, and might have been Tudor Rose over here, nobody seems to know, but something must have gone with the hard plastic set of mounted Bergan/Beton-Airfix copies, with the Thomas/Poplar being for the soft plastic issues - but nobody seems to know for certain? And the only TR catalogue image I have is for another set altogether (the large scale stuff), a situation complicated by Hong Kong's own output!

 

An assortment of wagon crew, it's more about finding the last colour variations with these now, and I have many more riders/drivers/guards than I'll ever have coaches/wagons for them!

 

Discussed before, a major job one day, sorting all these out, and not much data you can trust, from a small, mixed sample like this, so they tend to go/be put separately,, against themselves being sorted, once I have worked out which torsos go with which legs, heads and accessories, information you can only get from comparing clean samples to bagged/carded sets.

 

The one on the left is a better pose, and if clean; interesting, while the two to the right look 'correct', but running-waving guy is well-dodgy! 

 

Nice from hollow-cast guard, a probably Airfix cadet, a Tudor Rose knight in a bit of a state, and I think the big knight was ELC, or unmarked (now defunct Wilco?). The guardsman is Hong Kong, and the little chap is some fantasy thing, from a mini-play set in the Blue Box 'Hidden Adventure' style of semi-deform.

 

Two pirates from the K&M/Wild Republic tube, modern PVC.

 

A board game man-at-arms taking on a bunch of spray-painted China clones of Italeri, Zvezda or similar, other Bloggers have covered these, which you find on evilBay or Ali Baba and Amazon in - often - large quantities, but of limited poses, here only two.

 

Four Phidal's, I think we've seen three before, the tall, slim babe possibly being from one of the Barbie sets, which I know I haven't looked at yet, I should keep an eye-out for one, while TKMaxx are pushing them through for Christmas!

 

Hasbro's Star Wars 'Command' Stormtrooper on the left, then a fascinating chap, who could earn 'best of parcel', as I already have a white one, I think, and possibly another, but clearly a Hong Kong parachute toy, taken from the Major Matt Mason bendies from Mattel!

 

We then have a common-enough MPC-alike, and a limited-articulation action figure, who's only a couple of millimetres over 54-mil, and who looks like I should recognise him, but I don't, so if anybody can help ID him . . . ?

A mixed bunch here, if ever you saw one (and you're about to see a couple more!), I think the grey chap is from Galoob's small line of Micromachine 'Alien/s' sets, which only went to a handful of cards with one or two - larger than other MM - figures per card, but I'm not sure?

 

Loose Thomas-Poplar PVC Santa's are probably more useful than Western wagoneers as I have several of the sleighs now, in two designs, so for the 'definitive' line-up one day, the correct number of clean, tidy Santa's will be required in the stash!

 

The rest are a mix of modern Kinder, a damaged Games Workshop skeletal horse (useful as it's glueable 'styrene), a Michelin Bibendum, a cake-decoration Santa, &etc.

 

An older Kinder 'steckfiguren', two novelty monkeys which seem to form a larger assembly if you find all of them and a capsule dragon-thing, which folds up into almost a ball, and may be Kinder, Pokémon, Ben Ten or something else entirely - there's so much of this small, blind-bag, limited edition and capsule-toy catoony stuff around now, it's impossible to follow it all, unless that's what you specialise in!

 

More Kinder, racing cars, of one type or another.

 

Again, mostly Kinder I think, the Gnome has a bit of age, but comes from a sub-set of Kinder 'solids', of which there were about eight or ten sets issued, maybe more, and with between six and twelve figurines per set, I'm nowhere near having all of them, but I do have a fair few, so we will look at them, one day.

 

Many thanks as always to Peter Evans for saving this lot, or spotting it at car boot sales, and saving it for me to share with you, here at Small Scale World.

M is for May's Visit - Historical Bits

We reach the penultimate post in this series, but there's still July and September's lots to go through, so there will be plenty more of these mixed posts, which do seem to get the traffic, even if it fell off a cliff on the 1st October, and probably ain't coming back, something called the 'The &num=100 Parameter Change', which, as I've never chased traffic, doesn't concern me, I post stuff even AI isn't interested in!

 

Two 70mm's from Papo, both women who lived and died [young] in a man's world run by men who didn't like 'uppity' (that's 'successful') women! Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc), and Cleopatra, and I can imagine her, wandering about her palaces, with a cat in her arms, a mini-God for a God-Queen!

 

Nice pose sample of Spencer Smith Miniatures 30mm Wellingtonians, with a colour/mould-purge gun-carriage. It's funny, but when you encounter a sample like this, you know he saved-up his pocket-money, and bought a few of each, just to see what they were like! We all did it!

 

Lido on the left, Hong Kong on the right. The Hong Kong goes with those copies of European wagons and coaches, while the Lido are usually found bi-coloured, but with a clean and dirty yellow, I suspect these halves were unioned years after they left the factory!

 

At last! Loyal Readers who've been with the Blog for a while may remember several posts on these a few years ago, as both Chris Smith and me, kept finding another, then another, then another pose, and it ended-up with Chris having one more pose, the tied explorer above!

 

Which raises the question of the nature of the - as yet - unfound set, one of the Great White Hunter's is free to wander about with a gun, the other is tied up? Shades of H. Rider Haggard or Burroughs about the whole thing! And he looks like a 'Bad Guy'!

 

Papo 40mm pirate and the painted version of the lady we saw, bagged, as a generic, in Rack Toy Month, and whom we had seen before, unpainted in the Webbs' sets, it took me a while to work out she hadn't got her hands tied behind her back too, but is hiding a pistol, to either defend her honour from a pirate, or slot a Revenue Man, if she is a pirate!

 

Three 15mm war games figures, may be one for Gisby? They look to be a command group, with officer, standard barer and bugler, all mounted, for the English Civil War? Thanks again to Peter Evans for all these.

A is for At Bloody Last!

In all meanings of the word, because I've only got an hour to post this, I'm knackered, and may well hit 'publish' sometime before midnight, with half the text missing! Because this is the post which has been held over for at least the last two years, and because this is it for ITLAPD 2025!

 

And, before we start, many thanks to Adrian Little, Brian Berke, John Begg and Paul Stads for help, contributions or stuff for this year's International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

 

So, I got me the Tim Mee Pirate Fortress! More of a Wild West frontier/cavalry stockade fort, but as a bolt-hole in Hispaniola, up some coastal creek, sheltered from the open sea, both weather-wise and line-of-sight wise, it'll do, and timber's easier to replace as the jungle damp rots things!

 

Big Bags!

 

Lots of 'stuff'! 

 

Assembly - shades of Marx's earlier sets are hard to ignore!

 

Believe it or not, the Tee-Pee 'sticks' are actually supposed to be a stack of muskets! And the moulding on the water-pump leaves nowhere for the water to flow up the stand!

 

The pile of logs, and the well, have more Marx DNA than Tim-Mee's!

Dark-brown accessory pack has a secret island, treasure chest and little jolly boat!

 

 

 The secret island stash!

 

Once it's all been 'de-sprued' (removed from the runners) it fits into half the box!
 

In the full figure count, I seemed lucky to get the yellow captain, or maybe you only get one per set, which would mean either a lot of captains going back as re-grind, or a much higher captain-count in the figure bags?

 

Only seven poses?

Yeah? I took 'em, . . . but I can't remember what point I was trying to illustrate? Maybe that you can fit a figure on the lid of the island! And I don't know why I collaged two shots of the same figure's back?

 

 Playing with the other accessories!

Rack-toy figure bags were available without accessories.

 

My original shot, posted elsewhere as a "Who are these?", Paul Stads put me right, although I had them on downloads of Sprecher's site, but I had been looking in the wrong place, namely Shaun's Fantasy Toy Soldier Blog, hoping they were there, as they look very Toy Major/Hing Fat/Red Box!

 

In fact, that's the earlier Hing Fat, there, to the right in green, and the Tim Mee's are more compatible with the later smaller set of limited pose numbers, so around 50mm, but I'll Tag 54mm too!

 

Sticker sheet

 

Instruction sheet

 

Well me'arties! That be it furr anotherr year! Oi managed ter get the lot out on time, but nut'un in the booty-bag furr next toim - avaarrst me blue blistering barnicles, oi'm away to hunt for morr Poirate Plunder!