H is for How They come In - Charity Shop Score

Back to mid-November with this one (Oh, I'm getting it all back into shape!), I had a swift shoot through the charity shops in town one Wednesday arvo' (best day for toys for some reason?), and managed to grab some useful/half-useful bits and bobs!

This was the bulk of it with a tank from British Heart Foundation, a bag of bits from Blue Cross (animal welfare charity/vets), and a couple of similar junk bags from Scope or Phillis Tuckwell?

This was shot separately, and came from the DEBRA shop (skin conditions?), obviously a faux-ivory ornament (Scandinavian museum gift-shop?), it's not far off 54mm (closer to 50, but with a thick slate base!) and the sculpture is all-plastic, so it will go with all the Britains, Marx, MPC and Timpo arctic stuff!

Contents of the three mixed bags. Nothing exciting, but I think the five in the upper shot must be from some current kid's thing, to the lower right are Kinder bits, and what might be board game figures from another juvenile franchise? Bottom left is a real junk lot, but it has another variant of those pop-up aliens we've seen from Henbrandt and Unique.

The tank; I suspect a late Maplin's Crimbo-gift type, it had an R/C unit at some point which has gone missing, so I will remove the aerial. It can move without the motor interfering anyway, and a generic soviet model with more 64/72 than T62 about it?

The next day I picked this up, only of interest as it is the same odd selection as one we looked at a few years ago, and the question marks are all duplicated, so clearly this was an odd set, with two polar bears, the oversized (and better sculpted) 'baby' bear, orangutang and panda, two hippo sculpts & etc? Doesn't prove much without a brand, but all helps join the dots, and I'm sure the info' will all be on STS when I get round to looking!

F is for Follow-up - G is for Great Wall

Brain Berke eMailed these to me just as the Corvid-19 crisis began to bite, so it's a bit of a late follow-up, but as a foil to the on/off, point-and-go battery-operated Walker Bulldog I'd found in Waterstone's, he sent this fully remote-control little beauty from across the pond.

Posed with the Airfix Cromwell, it's a Tiger I with rather whacky colouring and markings, but nothing a home paint-job wouldn't put right, and it comes with a 'new' small scale figure . . . looking a lot like the old Fujimi or Esci side-cap bedecked tank-commander, but there's not a lot a sculptor can do with a torso, in a turret! It's lost its lid as well?

Manufactured by Great Wall Toys, the rear of the carrier-box has a rather disconcerting mirror, which is obviously designed to display the details of both the front and the back of the tank at the same time, but it also distorts the whole thing like a stretched super-deform!

It's a long time since I followed AFV's in any depth but I think it's an early/mid variant? I don't get why so much effort goes into such an unrealistic camouflage, and a lot of effort has gone into it; it's a four-colour, approximately 55-15-15-15% scheme, well thought-out as well . . . maybe it's a current Chinese military patten?

But think of it on the drive, hunting-down the straight-line Walker Bulldog . . . one sided it would be, but great-fun!