Q is for Question Time - Fusilier in Fez

Can anyone ID this composition figure?

Possibly German made, but no base, so no base mark! And clearly an Ottoman infantryman from the period of the First World War, or from the blue, earlier . . . Russo-Turkish war of 1877? I'd love to put a maker's name to him. He's quite big as well; about 80mm?
 

M is for Many Ways to Make a Medieval

We're looking at the figures I lost (the images of) and which in the searching-for, managed to lose a near finished article due to my inherent fuckwittery . . . and the fact that Lenovo gives you half a split-second to cancel a shutdown, and even if you manage it, then overrides your [two] instructions and shuts-down anyway!

Cherilea's small scale (50-mil-odd) knights in armour, they come in at least two sizes (small and smaller!) and various versions, plastic colours and paint-ways. The figure top-left is a metal original, and the reduction in size between him and the larger plastics isn't down to a pantograph, but just that plastic shrinks more than metal as it cools - from the same mould.

The smaller ones however, may well be the result of copying by pantograph? Although a quick study of the plumes will reveal there are at least two cavities (or tools) in each size, possibly more.

My arranging of them has no real significance, but from this angle you can see further variations in base-shape and mould release-pin marks, while painted and unpainted on various colours of plastic are to be seen. The jade green pair are a more modern reissue, but still - now - fifteen to twenty years old?

The Crusaders; The two on either end of the upper row are the metal ones this time and the one on the right doesn't seem to have been carried-over to the plastic line. Again, two clear sizes (visibly three for the standing pose actually) and a variety of finishes including gold mail, but no coloured plastics - bar the re-issue. I think the fifth and sixth from the left on the top row have suffered at the hands of their owners' artistic callings!

The cross on the metal one's shield is much broader so it must have been re-cut when they prepared the mould for plastic-production, or they went straight to new tools . . . or I haven't found a plastic one with a broad cross yet?

The 'enemy', especially if you are a Kurd cut-loose by the Orange Loon! These are all brittle and I have a sample as large as the other two sets, but most are damaged. A third pose existed in metal (carrying standard), but I've not seen it in plastic, and it's usually broken when you find it in metal!

And, clearly a different sculptor, these and the other two metal poses are far more animated and anatomically different from the more relaxed or statuary knights and crusaders. The metal range was all together bigger with the four Saracens, four crusaders and three knights that I know of.

Y is for " ♫ ♪ You Gotta' Right t'Not-Fight, But Par-ar-ar-ar-taaayyh! ♪ ♬ " ! *

So this is the stuff I live to collect for - forget yer' Airfix, yer' Jean, Elastolin or Starlux, all mass-produced, common-as-muck stuff, and how many colour variations of Marx cavalry? Who cares, they were packed in quantity in huge play-sets and piled high in ten-thousand stores, every Christmas for a decade! Britains farm and zoo? There are over a 2000 lots on evilBay - today (Farm - 1,897 lots, Zoo - 780), there will be in ten days time, there were ten day ago!

But these . . .

 . . . never seen them before, may never see them again! Best thing from Sandown, best thing this year - so far, two cool for dance school! **

What'der-yer recon? Balkans? Removed from some larger piece of tourist tat like a cuckoo clock? Cake decorations? Presumably, back in the days before globalisation, there were things like 'local' cake decorations? Wedding-cake? They could be a wedding party?

They are free-standing, but with a tendency to fall backwards and note that there is damage to a foot at either end, so they may have been removed from something which might have been a simple base, a complicated plinth or some household object? They could be the handle of the lid of a cheap butter-dish, with the other figures from a matching cruet set or sugar bowl or something!

We know a lot about UK, US and Euro toys, have learnt a lot about Aussie and NZ makers form the ACOTS guys and are now getting quite a bit on the Soviet bloc's commoner stuff, but there's a whole world out there and we know little about most of it, we don't even know what happened to Tatra's moulds after they went to Africa, probably in the 21st century!

These could be from the 'Stans, from the Balkans proper, South to one of the former Yugoslav republics, North to Bulgaria, West to Greece, are they Maltese or Cypriot (which half?!), the hats are quite Cossack-looking, black rather than red and softer outlines than true fez's (so I've ruled out Turkey arbitrarily!) which could take us up to the steppes of the Urals?

Bagpipes! Now we're in Syria or the Levant! Yeh - Scotii, you got them from the Picts who got them from the Legions, the little baby Jesus [probably] invented them two-hundred years before the Picts stopped painting each other blue like monkey's arses for long-enough to kill some Romans and take their wheezing-cat bags, you just added some notes and a fancy tartan cover!

Joking apart, they have a lot in common with the Female Italian from Codec / Commonwealth / Sanitarium and the male Turk from Sanitarium in the various World Doll/World Dancer ranges, so maybe Turkey after all! The apron and simplified skirt-stripes could place the women nicely in Skutari, Albania?

Researching this costume stuff - as I've discovered before - is not made easier by the fact that fifteen or twenty of the modern states/countries the figures may be from were in three empires in 1900; Ottoman 'European Turkey', Austro-Hungary and Imperial Russia.

The bag-piper has a wire-nail trumpet, but a plastic finger-whistle-mouthpiece-thing and is a single moulding with the nail presumably set into a jig in the tool before each shot. The brown 'worms' on him and the figure below were perished rubber-bands, used to hold them all together at some point in the past - let's hear it for click-shut bags.

All the figures are a creamy-white or neutral plastic, definitely polystyrene (as I mended some damage to the line-up) and are all-over painted in at least 12 colours - all of which are on the seven-figure line-up; flesh, pink, red, blue, pea-green, dark-green, yellow, tan, brown, black, white and gold.

These two however only add to the mystery, they initially looked as if their arms had been broken off, but close-ups show that they are just formed flatter (and possibly - further glue-melted) and with the deliberate hollow formed in the centre of their chest they seem to have been removed from something large; a base-drum, a May-pole, a dancing partner, a circus act . . . who knows?

Someone does - somewhere! They had to be informally discussed, formally planned, designed, funded, ordered, master-sculptured, pantographed, cleaned-up, test-shot, manufactured, packed, wholesale-marketed, shipped, retail-advertised, sold, used, discarded, found, sold-again and moved to Surrey, over maybe a 30/50 year period? Somewhere; someone knows all about them!

You want to know more about Cherilea Wild West? Google them!

You want to know more about these? Tough!

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* With apologies to the Beastie Boys!

** Actually it's a toss-up between these and the whale, as Balkan dancers can't have a fair fight with a whale, it'll have to be a draw for now! Look out for best ever non-board game game . . . with pigs . . . ever; coming soon!

And many thanks to Adrian Little who as good as gave me the bag of bits which contained both these figures and the whale!

12 is for Days of Christmas - Day Ten

Yesterday's archers from the other side, the simple two-part knights who were nice but rather relaxed poses and the wacky 'clip-together' figures. Behind them, not so clear are the smaller Samurai, also simple mouldings.

F is for Fontanini - Part 4 - Fonplast

I'm calling these Fonplast rather than Fontanini because Fontanini had their own range of toy figures, the African natives, pirates and Cowboys & Indians sat next to the smaller versions of the nativity figures in peoples toy boxes - with a full range of Fontanini marks on them - indeed; they tend to have a full set with cavity/stock number, 'spider' mark, 'Depose' and 'Italy', while these only have a paltry 'Italy'.

However, there are various clues as to the fact that they came from Fonplast, not least is that no one else in Italy was producing Elio Simonetti designed figures, in dense, flesh-pink, PVC-vinyl, while Fonplast was producing all the PVC-vinyl, flesh-pink, dense, figures designed by Elio Simonetti . . . for Fontanini - who owned Fonplast!

A set of Turkic warriors of the early Ottoman Empire era, similar to but not the same as those carried by Cané, copied from Elastolin, as Simonetti was working for Cané at the time, and Fontanini were letting them copy their Vikings while they (Cané) were borrowing their number-one sculptor, it's possible that the figures were designed by Simonetti for Elastolin, they are very different to other Elastolin stuff, and follow Simonetti's styling; and that he gave permission for Cané to reproduce them, as 'rack toys' in another (Italian) market.

Whatever the truth, it seems Fontanini didn't have a set of Turks otherwise? Now; when the grand children of Emanuele Fontanini set-up Fonplast in 1963, they would have needed to practice on something and practising with the composition figures still being made by Fontanini a few miles up the valley would have been daft, impractical and technically impossible. I think these figures, which are quite uncommon, indeed - were hardly known until a number of undecorated castings appeared recently - are those 'practice' pieces.

Described by some as ACW and others as Garibaldini, the presence of a lasso/lariat suggests these are meant to be US cavalry, to fight the set of Indians below. I'd like to say Custer's 7th, but what looks like a 7 in the image above is actually a star on the guidon.

It would appear that before (or as) they were tooling-up to produce for Fontanini, the Fonplast factory experimented with a cash-earner; a small range of 'Toy Soldiers', which are the figures seen here. I don't know how successful they were, but the fact that they seem so hard to find (excepting the recent find) would suggest they didn't take of - or even happen; commercially - see below.

There's a pose missing if they were all in sixes? Also apart from the above three sets, I am aware of no others, but the Turks would have needed an 'enemy'?

They don't have the more domed bases of Fontanini either, even the little 40mm 'Zulus' had the grass-etched dome of the rustics/nativity figures. These have a very commercial looking 'toy' figure's flat base.

But the older-looking packaging of both the African warriors and the pirates contain soft-plastic polyethylene figures, with the painted, vinyl figures apparently coming later (from the same moulds). If we assume the early experiments with other plastics (styrene and ethylene) were carried out up the road by Fontanini, that makes sense, with Fonplast not handling them (the moulds) until they were up and running with the PVC production, they were actually set-up to engage in.

The smaller-scale, factory-painted figures - Africans, the pirates, Cowboys & Indians and rural/pastoral types - were still being sold in the UK as cake-decorations from point-of-sale stock-boxes in the late 1980's, while the 'antiqued' white or cream polyethylene ones were much earlier.

Another clue as to the origin and fate of these figures is seen here; there is in this recent find - which I'm lead to understand was part of a bigger find in Italy - of otherwise near-mint, finely manufactured figures, clear signs of short-shot and heat problems with the moulding.

These are three of the Indians, but problems are also evident on the cavalry and I wasn't checking as I chose the figures from a larger sample, so I don't know how many of the figures in total had problems, but it seems to be about a quarter of the total?

Having worked with an plastic-moulding machine (lower pressure extrusions not high-pressure injection-moulds) my first thought was that it was problems with foreign-bodies on the injector-head, the blackening is usually a sign that something has got stuck to the inside of the nozzle, over-cooked and is contaminating the new resin as it flows over the contaminant . . .

. . . however, all the gate marks are at the tops of the figures, so that explanation doesn't fit.

The holes (on the left above is a similar blemish on one of the Turks) are simply where the plastic has got too cool to finish filling the cavity, something which is easier to understand when you realise the figure concerned was to be filled from the sword blade at the other end - I'm not sure which is the gate mark and which is a jigget, or if they are both gate-marks but I have highlighted them both anyway.

Of course trying to fill a large (65/75mm figure) cavity from a small opening at the opposite end was going to be problematical and while the blackening remains a mystery, the evidence is that all did not go well in the manufacture of these figures and with most of the obvious problems on the bases - as far away from the injector head as it was possible to get - I think these were an over-ambitious, sprue-gate too small, first try?

Finally; while this recent find is in a condition anyone who's seen them will tell you is 'near mint', there are signs that prior to being released to the market in the last year or so, they have been cleaned, and cleaned of a thick layer of dust, the sort of dust which has aged to a layer of fine, greasy, soil on the figures.

These figures appear to have been in storage, as an unpainted, slightly damaged, stock of 'seconds', for a long time - probably since they were made. As - to my knowledge (and I don't know everything!) - the 'firsts' haven't been seen either, I propose as a theory that they never got a full commercial release at the time, although some may have dripped into the world from out-painters, or via the children of Fontanini/Fonplast factory workers?

And that these 'seconds' are it; the 'firsts', the survivors of a trail run, failed experiments with a new technology, pulled-line, whatever - there's a story there still to be discovered. One thing I'm sure about, they are Fonplast and/or Fontanini, not some spurious company called Italy!

How many companies in the UK marked their figures 'England' or 'Made in England'; how many French companies marked 'France'; German companies 'Germany' or 'W. Germany' and err . . . Italian companies 'Italy'.

The idea that 'he who makes things up as he goes along' should think to invent another company; 'Italy-Dus'(it's his second this year - DGN post coming soon!) on such flimsy evidence as a base mark is extraordinary, that people are swallowing his guff is more so, especially when he's taking what he's publishing from other people's books - and happily admitting it as he regurgitates it, with errors, yet without proper credit!

PS - Don't forget it's the London Toy Soldier show tomorrow.

S is for Sultan Saladin of Syria's Saracen Subjects

Repeat three times quickly whilst eating a water-biscuit!

Bit of a box-ticker today; not rare, not uncommon, but they have had a fair few decoration variations over the years so I thought we could look at some of them...the Deetail Turks/Saracens.

The one I always assumed was supposed to be Saladin / Salad-in / Sala'hadin....[Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Righteousness of the Faith, Joseph, Son of Job)] with his wicked curved scimitar lunging at the effete King Richard! "Drink my coffee with milk will you, you apostate Euro-swine!"

Chain-mace guy, some of the poses suit more than one of the weapons Britains provided, but this guy always looks best about to separate a crusaders head from his shoulders with a spiked boulder on a loo-chain!

Lance-throwing guy, his helmet has always suffered from the notorious 'easily detachable crescent-moon shaped crest syndrome'!

Other spear/lance guy...he's the guy with the other spear/lance.

Can have most weapons guy. I prefer the late painting on most of these figures, and his last version (a few years ago now 2007'ish) was particularly pleasing on the eye.

I'll take any weapon I'm given as well guy, but the axe works best! Illustrates the development of the base style well, in all the line-ups I've tried to go oldest to the left, newest to the right.

That's it; tags added, box ticked! Definite thanks to Mike Melnyk for some of the figures.