T is for Tyo Typical Types

Well? A sort of theme was the space-sets I managed to pick-up over the weekend, and the matching loose figures, from two genres we've covered here recently, so a quick post on them, and the bonus was getting two-more brands associated with them both.

 

Haglon taking the Lik Be clones, and Trafalgar the MPC copies, Trafalgar Toys (better known for their tie-ins with LJN, Mego and the Hong Kong subsidiary Lion Rock) would have been a rival to WHC, Grossman and the like, and, indeed, this card may be in the archive as LJN?

 

But Haglon (Hagemayer) were more of a shipping operation, as far as I understand it, like with container ships, port space and warehouses in Holland, shipping all over Europe, and apparently adding their moniker to some of the stuff they shipped-in, that would have extended far beyond toys, which were probably a minor concern among all the household and garden goods, haberdashery, pet supplies and the like? And I'm sure I've seen this card as a generic. We also saw them as Woolbro a while back;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/07/lb-is-for-lanky-bods.html 

 

As supplied by Haglon! The 50mm knock-offs of LB's finaest, apparently limited to four poses (did they pantograph one of the Clifford sets?!) are not hard to find, although it took me a while to garner a decent sample, I'm now going for one of each colour! These came from four sources over the weekend.

 

MPC originals, in two slightly different shades of red, we looked at their oeuvre here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2024/04/mpc-is-for-many-plastic-cosmonauts.html

 

and these are grist to the mill, but again, there comes a point when you are just looking for individual 'better' figures, or a specific pose-colour combination, and these are clean!

 

Seen in the link in an unreadable, but probably generic set (next to the Payton bag), the Trafalgar ones are the better versions, very close to the MPC, solidly formed and with thicker bases than the other three or so variants.

 

While these are the Henbrandt/Hing Fat third-generation (like Payton's, but worse) sub-piracies, and again, of limited use, but they'll all be sorted into the master collection, before any are passed on, probably to charity, but that's all a few years away, still.

 

Tim-Mee, so keen to cash-in on Star Wars (AND Battlestar Galactica, everyone forgets that was a year later), grabbed one of the MPC sculpts, with the barest of modification, and there was one in the plunder, last weekend, which was lucky for the completeness of this post!

 

Which gives us, from the left:

• Haglon-Hagemayer/Woolbro (and others?)
• Tim-Mee
• MPC
• Trafalgar Toys (et al)
• Hing Fat/Henbrandt (et al)

Making more and more sense, every time we visit them, and thanking Adrian Little, Brian Carrick, Colin Penn, Isaac, Matt Murphy, Martin Fahie, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin, for their input on the day or over the weekend.

O is for Once Upon a Time, in June! AFV's

So, the other half of the 'Army Men' post (which was going to be one post, but I couldn't face all that typing in one hit!), their transport, and it's an eclectic mix with a few interesting bits in it!

 

I know, but it was a Jeep! It was a Hugonnet card! It's otherwise the same rack-toy shite churned-out by Hong Kong, but a worthy addition to the collection, and confirms loose figures I've got somewhere! Starlux piracies!

 

These were from Isaac, who's surname I've never caught, but he'd saved them for me (along with the Wild West swoppet bags and some other stuff), and they were a real revelation, as when I got them home I found they were confirming one of the possible combinations suggested by me in this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2015/09/p-is-for-pick.html

  

With the 'Long Tom' on the odd coastal-artillery type platform, as well as getting the 'Speedwell' tank, with/in the same card/bag, so a very useful addition to the collection Something I would have been even more excited about, back when I was a small-scale only collector, and new things were getting thin on the ground! Now I've seen the all-scale polymer mountain to climb, I'm a little more jaded, but these are much appreciated.

 

The CTS (now BMC) Sherman Tank, apparently a bit smaller than the rarer Airfix one, and in a hard'ish ethylene or propylene, I didn't get this from Matt, who I now know WAS Matt!, But either from Steve Weston or somebody near him? On one level it's a gap-filler/box-ticker, but on another level, also a nice model, and it looks the part, which is important with Shermans, get one major dimension, angle or curve wrong and they can instantly look very odd, or daft!

 

They need a clean, but for reasons you don't need to be bored with, cleaning's out at the moment. Also, we've seen them before, they are pretty common, but belong to a family of rack-toy stuff, including the Jeep-trailer/gun combo's we’ve also seen here,with and without plug-in crew, and with two or even three new colours, they are adding to the story, if we ever tease the full story out!

 

And the comments on Sherman's were specific, because this gets a lot wrong! Can't remember of this was a purchase or a contribution, but it's the sort of thing you see on eBay, and think "Even if I get it for 99p, it's not worth the postage!", but it was a box that needed ticking, and it has its own rack-toy charm!

 

Also, a generic, over-branded to Woolbro, and it has a telescopic barrel, to keep the box as small as possible, while the turret on the box art is even whackier than the turret in the box!
 

Thanks especially to Issack, but also Graham Apperley, John Begg, Barney Brown, Brian Carrick, Peter Evans, Adrian Little, Michael Mordant-Smith, Trevor Rudkin, Steve Vickers, and with no emails since the intro-post, anyone else who gave me stuff, who I have forgotten to add.

B is for Blue Boxes . . . Blisters & Bags!

While I was emptying the house I grabbed the opportunity, last year, to put a large board (an old home-pool table without legs, Mum used for her puzzles) on the sofa, and throw a bedspread over it, to make a largish 'studio' to shoot the Blue Box packaging, and this; not so much a comprehensive post; more of an 'overview', is the result!

Going back to the early days of Blue Box, or even pre-Blue Box - the pink box with the Crescent gun copy is an unmarked generic and can therefore be considered a Tai Sang toy rather than a Blue Box toy, contracted-out to a western buyer - are these mostly simple closed boxes.

 

Fold-&-tuck lids, lift-off upper sleeve lids and some with perforated lines to allow for fold back display examples on counter-tops or in shop-windows or display cabinets. The farm set is probably a little later (1970's) than the others, which are mostly 1960's, the gun may well be a 1950's item.

The window era brings us the 'decker' concept, where pricing within a larger display is denoted by the number of levels (or the width of the tray/plinth) of each set, this is all 1960-70's stuff and the basic unit is a single-decker!

Here you can see on the left two versions of the smallest set, card base-insert is identical with the same figures glued-in to the same spots. One with a two-sided window on an otherwise normal box with fold and tuck ends, the other an 'ultra modern' (at the time) variation (it's still how posh gift chocky-things, soaps, small electrical gadgets and the like are packed at Christmastime today) with an all-over folded plastic case, stapled to the plinth-base.

Similar packaging on the larg construction set, while the smaller one has a stand-up card extension for more graphical information, and the larger US army set (bottom right) is about as deep as any of these sets got, so you can see there's no room for the gun, which you-know-who was falsely passing-off as Blue Box a few years ago . . . well I think he still is; they never corrected or deleted any of their nonsense!

So then we add a deck, and get double-deckers, not the buses, not the chocolate-bars! The extended display area of the cards is off the front face on the two small scale sets, while the larger scale US troops - with the same small scale vehicles and equipment - get multiple windows, one highlighting each element.

 

The smaller set on the far right will be returned to but note how ultraviolet (sunlight) has completely discoloured the back body of the truck, both medics and the stretcher-patient, but has left the cab/chassis snow-white. It's all in the batch of polymer, I've said it before, and I'll say it again!

Triple-deckers! The trays seem to be the same trays that were in the single-decked sets above, and while you get green (friendly?) OR grey (enemy?), the contents are otherwise pretty random, with truck, tank and gun trays in the grey set and truck, truck and gun in the green, and with random loads/bodies on the trucks, there may have been some more, and some less disappointing sets in this line!

If you were a poor kid on a sink-estate, and you unwrapped one of these at Christmas, you would have been more genuinely joyful, than some rich-kid getting his cabinet of Meccano or whatever.

 

And I know that; we can't complain, we had a pretty privileged, middle-class childhood, but money was tight, and we had friends who got pillowcases, not stockings at the ends of their beds, on Christmas mornings, but their toys were all broken and unloved stuffed into all these drawers, we looked after ours . . . not the packaging mind!

But yeah, the mighty four-decker! The one on the right (like a fair few of these) is near-mint from James Opie's collection, the one on the left is a mess, but it's mostly there, I have seen a few over the years, where everything is still tied-n with its elastic bands (smaller items were glued), and it's just in need of sorting/ordering properly (even the teeny helicopter), and the figures returning - they are with all the loose ones. Scale in both sets, like most above, is all over the place!

Modernity arrives in the guise of vac-formed blister packaging, earlier sets stapled to their backing cards, later sets heat-welded to them, with hanger holes sometimes present for the true 'rack' toy! Julius Caesar still has his chad intactum, as the actress said to the bishop!

The 'Battleground' set (also hanging-on to its chad) is another Tai Sang generic (possibly for FW Woolworths, it has the look of a Woolworths cheapie?), and probably pre-dates the supply of the hard-plastic brown figures to Tri-Ang Battle Space, so people trying to call the figures 'Giant' when they were only a jobber are missing the point, they are Giant, in or with the packaging, otherwise they are Tai Sang/Blue Box.

We've seen these before I think, and they are oddities, with the one on the left for Woolbro, the one on the right more generic, again containing 'Blue Box' items, but as generics - Tai Sang.

 

Ledapak is also mentioned and may be another recipient (of the right-hand set), or the maker of the vac-forms, which include the crude Fort Apache frontage. The left-hand set also looks pricy for what it contains, and I wonder if they were experimental marketing? Both also came from James.

On the left here are some standard rack-toy bottle bags with header cards, in the case of three; the header having a long-tail to form the backing-card at the same time, in the case of the little set with 45mm US soldiers, the backing card is a seperate piece slipped behind the product.

 

On the right are some of the second-tier Hong Kong cloners, copying the already poor-quality Blue Box, with 2nd generation piracies! And they are there with one, two and tree decker's, blister cards, bottle bags and a closed box.

 

The only brand - on the right - is the Lucky Toys fire-set, they did a larger three-decker too, and (whispers) they are nicer sets than the Blue Box ones; much better build-quality! The camouflaged three-deck set should be the same colours as the pair of two-decks, but is sun-faded, contents/origin are the same. We looked at the Wild West set years ago - it's all on the Blue Box tag somewhere!

[image may be corrupted]

Finally, not Blue Box at all, but along with numerous ex-Marx tools, the Rado Industrial Co., trading as Ri-Toys seemed to inherit some Blue Box or Tai Sang mouldings, and certainly knocked-off others, so here are a few of their packaging types, taking us through the 1980's and into the 1990's with the central combat set.

And that's a pretty-good overview of forty-plus years of Hong Kong rack-toy output and the types of packaging at the lower level end of the market, if I say so myself!

 

Thanks to everyone who's ever saved me stuff, on this one, as I know James, Adrian and Trevor have given me Blue Box packaged sets over the years, John's helped me hunt them and bring them back from the far flung corners, Gareth let me photohraph his Marx/Sunshine version of the Wild West set for an earlier post . . . it's not that Blue Box are rare; they’re not, but there's a lot to track down as they were one of the biggest HK manufacturers for years and one of the first to own-brand, so there are tons of variations out there!

LB is for Lanky Bods

Back to spacemen and a whole bunch of Lik Be's lanky chaps have come it recently, along with a few other items of interest, indeed, all these posts were going to be one follow-up until I started editing them and realised it was going to be 30 or more images, even with maximum collaging!

 

Having inherited a lot of Woolbro stuff in the purchase from Jame Opie many years ago now (and many thanks to him), these were a must as soon as I saw them, and so that's what happened! They are the slightly smaller copies in bright colours, unpainted with flat/smooth bases,.

 

Price suggests 1976-78, as a box of Airfix HO=OO figures was going through 18, 19, 20, and I remember; 21p, around the same time? And dare I say seem to be aimed directly at competing with the Nasta Industries sets we saw the other day, both in the artwork and with the contents count/style?

Two of them are seen here in blue and yellow, between the older copy to the left and what I believe are my first two of the iteration carried by Solpa in Greece, they are smoother-etched than the other clones we've seen here (except the really small blobs), but I've only seen them online, so I'm not 100% on that.

More of the Woolbro type here, gunmetal, orange and green join the blue, an online image I didn't bid on as I didn't really need anything in the lot, although the robots were interesting, they look modern and will turn-up on their own for a lower price!

And another evilBay image here.

They look unloved.

While this set has the hollow-based copies, which from the painted forms (far left in the five figure line-up above) go right back to LB's own origins (late 1960's), but here seem to date from the late 1990's, with unpainted figures in a colour I haven't encountered these clones in before, and a CHINA mark?

Obviously more of a summer beach/lawn toy, with the figures not the central theme, but mere targets for the gun, which fires space-rockets . . . Fluorescent, Barbie-pink, space-rockets; what a bargain!

I've also picked up some originals over the last 9-months, and while the white ones will be checked against the master collection with the rejects offered as a complete set for swaps, the chrome ones will contribute to two sets, the very shiny-silver (most of the far rank) and the darker 'antiqued' (near command group), with any duplicates paint-stripped to add to the neutral granule sample we've looked at some before.

The idea being to end-up with four sub-lots; all eight marked as bright & antiqued, an unmarked set of eight cake decorations from the 1990's, and a larger lot of the plain, stripped plastic ones.

Again, no reason to bid on this lot, although I have gaps in the unpainted samples, there was too much other junk in the lot, and one or two of the green and red ones (which I still need some of (painted and unpainted)) looked a bit tatty?

Better known as a Naval artist for the USN, Fred Freeman was also a prolific magazine illustrator through the middle of the 20th Century, and his sci-fi stuff often used the X Craft-Mercury-Gemini suits worn by our LB breadrin'. Here he has them in something akin to a B29 cockpit, with 'vidscreens', in orbit over the moon! It won't surprise you he's well-known for his submarine art, either!

Then this big, bad, burgundy, blow-moulded, beautiful, blooming, bastard turned-up! Obviously a parachute toy (I may have one or two and not previously noticed the connection?), he's been shot separately for that page, about 120mm, but it seems there’s still no end in sight to additions to the LB for Lik Be output and clones!

Just replace LP with Lik Be, it's only three more letters and a gap, you don't NEED to use LB at all, if you really don't want to, fuckwits!

T is for Two - H is for Hong Kong Hovercraft

We haven't had as many hovercraft as we should have done, given their box was in the attic this last 11 years, so I'll have to redress that when I get to final [alive] resting place, but I can make a start here with two bog-standard rack-toy brands, one in Picasa for a while, the other sourced off feebleBay a week or so ago.

Woolbro's Hovercraft with Friction, is more of a whacky Intergalactic US Space Marines space-car, although with the body entirely filled with two large turbines, of limited use beyound getting two humans from A-to-B in a uncomfortably noisy fashion!

I actually have the Jane's Surface Skimmers and Hovercraft tome (and a tome it is, good for bodybuilding) and it is amazing to see how quickly Hovercraft went from British post-war excentricity in the 1950's to hundreds of designs all over the world by the 1970's (I think I have the '72 edition), and some of them do look a bit like this I think, but the forward perambulation isn't clear and the book's currently buried!

Carpet wheels aren't part of a real hovercraft which would have a hollow-belly to fill with pressurised air! Branded to an MMF and numbered 812, mine is obviously missing an ariel, but I will look out for another, better one as it also has that yellowish staining on the starboard side.

Learning something every day; although it sounds like the sort of thing Mum would have told us as kids, I learnt the other day that before 1844 it was Larboard and Starboard, but the Roayl Navy changed what was an obviously confusing (under fire/in a storm) convention, in that year.

The other reason to look out for another one is that the box on this one is shot to bits. The Woolbro stamp looks like the kind of overprint a few of their earlier sets carry, so there may be a generic version of this out there somewhere?

On safer ground with the SRN6 (Saunders-Roe, Naval, Type Six), this is another regular rack-toy star; Clifford Toys, and would seem to be a copy of the Matchbox die-cast, in military colours (which Matchbox also did). The Royal Marines used these for years, and the Griffon's they use now are quite similar in design.

I have the die-cast black & white civil one in the under-visited box, and this copy must be a slight scale-up; because, although small; it wouldn’t fit in the standard 1-75 range's box? It's also all plastic and like the Woolbro/MMF one, mostly polystyrene.

OB (?) is for Toy Leader, Pioneer, Woolbro and probably Zita et al?

Those loyal readers who have followed the Blog for some time will know there's usually one or two posts in RTM which get bogged-down in the minutia of branding, phantom-brands and brand-marks without proving much beyond the fact the Chinese/Hong Kong/Jobber branding can be a nightmare!

This is sort of one of those, but it also adds a bit to the Pioneer story (mostly uncovered here) and gives us a couple of what I suspect are quite late (i.e. quite recent) Woolbro items.

A couple of different sets, credited to a Toy Leader and imported into the UK by Woolbro, we'll do the brand stuff at the end. Contents are similar to the Realtoy military sets, or the Peace Enforce set we saw last year? If you then click 'older post' you'll get the contemporaneous Woolbro set we also saw then.

One in temperate combat scheme, the other desert, are they post '90/91 Gulf War, or earlier, there's no clue on the packaging? The contents however are really quite interesting, with references to various other Asian toy-lines/Marques.

The figures, are they the same ones Stonegalleon carry, softer versions from the Realtoy tool, or straight Pioneer production . . . well, they are the larger size, so it would seem they are from the tooling used for the Realtoy (and other) sets, and it may be that the sharper, squarer based figures (last year's and the Zita set) are from the same tooling, but weren't commissioned by Realtoy (or whoever was behind Realtoy - Dacron, Smart, Supreme?), so don't turn-up in the harder vinyl with consecutive numbering.

The trolley I have loose in my collection, it's a darker green, and better engineered (I think, I'll have to compare them when all this shite is properly sorted) and I assumed it was someone like either Corgi (all those 1:48th 'planes in recent years) or New Ray, and the recoilless-rifle here looks ex-New Ray too, so it would seem we have a pattern emerging?

I think the trolley is some kind of air-force ground-equipment, a charger, tester, starter or something, while the AT weapon is looking a bit TOW-like so second-generation ATGM? I would add that the stadium/marshalling-yard lamp-stands were seen in that other 'group' of sets branded Supreme/Ackerman/Titan etc?

Neither picture is perfect I'm afraid, but two new poses (in these softer ranges), both known from the harder Realtoy sets; kneeling pointing in jungle-hat (boonie-hat)a nd the prone gunner.

Again, I think some of these have been seen in New Ray's superior (for rack toys) 54mm sets of ten-or-more years ago, namely; a four-crate, WWII German werfer of nebels and a US/NATO M252 Mortar, while the sandbag emplacement looks prety-much the same as the Realtoy ones.

The temperate set has a GS-bodied truck, while the dessert set has a lookie-MLRS-likey rocket launcher get up, which seems to fire the same 150mm Werfgranate as the crated infantry-support Nebelwerfer, from two side mounts with hinged covers.

The slogans on the trucks is interesting, they both have Aoutca Dnphentkul written on the cab-doors, which Google-translate identified as Hmong, an ethnicity from Laos, Vietnam and South Western China, allied to the US in the second Indochinese war, many now live in Thailand or the USA. There is no direct translation.

While the Myo Niutop Buti on the rear of the rocket launcher was tentatively ID'd as Pilipino, with a translation of something-something-'good'? Both also have a hawk or falcon with the English message 'Fighting Action'! The two odd messages point to a Hmong-staffed factory in the Southern Chinese Yunnan province, making stuff-up 'on the hoof'?

But the Vcuneld on the back of the GS truck gets no suggested language, so it could just be a random-word generation robot/algorithm, but these are probably 1990's and such things weren't common back then, especially in an Asian toy factory!

So, to my thoughts on the branding . . . obviously imported by Woolbro, and marked-up to 'Toy Leader' the logo can't possibly be made to represent TL, looking distinctly like an OB? It's how they roll out there, and why Lik Be are LB, not LP or IDL!

And on the other card, the logo has been covered (before the blister was applied) with what looks like part of an Easter-egg artwork (or something equally bright and cartoony?) sticker, suggesting even they (the factory or shipper/jobber in the Far East) realised the logo-type was daft!

There is a prominent consumer message in Greek on the back of the cards (along with various other nationalities) so, given previous posts here at Small Scale World, it may be that these could be found in Greece with Zita stickers, and I'll add them to the tags for completion, even if they weren't, the connections are all there!

I suspect this is Pioneer production, a generic, given a phantom-brand wash which hasn't helped, copying from New Ray's more original stuff, and rehashing some of the stuff they supplied to Realtoy, but in new colours and with the softer rubber-figures?

I is for It Was the First of April!

OK, so yesterday's posts were both attempts at April Fools; the Airfix Space Tank is actually the Centurion card mucked about with in Picasa (I was pleased with the shadow of the firing lever! While the Revell kit is by an unknown artist and was kicking around on Faceplant the other day with no byline, so hat's of to the original artist - if anyone knows him, let us know!

 

I actually posted several edits on different groups or threads on Thursday as I worked on it, so with yesterday's shares it's got out there!

 

I'm still not comfortable posting, given everything that's going on, but i realise that life must go on, and if Putin's going to start WWIII I may only have  a few weeks to get 15-years worth of work done, so it behoves me to just get on with it, however there is still Real life stuff in the background too, but I'll get back to posting something!

In the meantime I did post some stuff over at the But Is It Giant Blog; the Giant 'Space Men' got their day in the sun with five posts covering the main points

Introduction
Giant Originals
Copy Type 1
Copy Type 2 (Woolbro etc)
Copy Type 3

 

While I also took a closer look at the three Roman cards, previously seen in the 'page' at the top of this screen.

 

980 - Roman Legion Chariot Attack

981 - Roman Legion Assault Group

982 - Chariot Race

 

If you go over there and scroll they will all be in the reverse order to above!

News, Views Etc . . . Not Giant!

Today's Rack-Toy Month post is over on the Giant . . . or What page, clue; they're not Giant!

An overview of the gold-plastic Trojan Greeks who are Roman!

http://butisitgiant.blogspot.com/2021/08/golden-trojans-non-giant-gold-plastic.html

P is for Plastic Peacekeepers

In that weird, twilight between the end of the cold-war and today's chaotic mess, which is seriously beginning to look like the end of humanity as a viable hope for the rest of the universe to root for, there was; that period where 'The End of History' had been declared, a feeling of hope for the future!

'Camp David' was - itself - almost history, Mandela was out, Kuwait was liberated (for its despotic rulers to continue treating their women, nomads, LGBTQ's and guest-workers like shit) and former Soviet troops stood near if not actually next to NATO forces in the former Yugoslavia, as [shaky] allies, so, with no global war on the horizon (China just made toys and stuff!), a lot of these rack-toy, war-toys, re-badged to the 'new world order' by shoving a 'Peacekeeper' into the set-title!

Joining the collection sometime in the 1990's, this was one of the last toys I have branded to Woolbro, who I believe are still going, but are now specialising in auto-paints and such-like, rather than the general/household goods - including toys -  they have done for several (many) decades.

An oversized and rather juvenile jet-aeroplane and some Schwimmwagen-limousine hybrid (both with pull-back motors) are no better than the Military Train stuff this post is meant to be helping bury, won't be looked at in detail . . . or again today!

The figures, in the 25/28mm bracket are interesting for being not only the usual mix of Airfix (3 poses) and Matchbox (2) clones, but having a lone copy of the Esci-ERTL Japanese charging figure, who was appearing - at around the same time - in 50-mil with Hing Fat sets.

A row of smaller scenics have a lot in common with sets from Kentoy, New Ray and Supreme which were around at the same time, although similar, they do have differences and maybe one day I'll do a detailed comparison of the subtle changes in base type or overall dimensions, but right now I can't be arsed!

Among the larger scenics are some Airfix 'Forward Command Post' cloned traffic-barriers, a copy of the Smart Toys micro-tent and a rather useful bridge for war gamers with slightly Asian design-lines about it; WWII Burma or Vietnam/Laos, although painted up would look equally at home with Napoleon's troops crossing the Berezina or even in an ACW war game . . . "Doc' - Can you help me live a little more? I expect good news".