N is for Non-Matching Matches!

Gotta' Light Guvnor?


This is real magpie'ism, but as they all fit in one old household matchbox, it's not one that is taking up much space!!

I'm afraid the colours haven't re-produced well, especially the whites which all look the same!

H is for Hollow-cast

Intermittent Internet has led to my abandoning my attempt to beat my monthly total record (which was my first full month! Enthusiasm for the new huh!), but I'm back in the saddle until the next chunk of real life intervenes! And here's a nice bit of vintage metal to re-start...

These were photographed on Andy Morant's table at the end of the Norman Joplin Toy Soldier show last Saturday, Andy stall's out in the Portobelo Road market, where these and a myriad other delights are ready to lighten your pocket!

The show gets busier every year, and was brisk for most of the morning, it's a definite date on the collectors calender.

Shrooms - Friday gone

I think top left is an edible Puff-ball. Love the way a little slice of the one top right just went on strike and refused to climb as high as the rest of the umbella!

Bottom left is obviously very tasty to some insect, while the ones on the right look just like False-stone/Pebble cacti!

A is for Accoutrements

The final (to date?) installment of the 'Giant' fort story begins in the early-to-mid 1990's when Archie McPhee, a US toy and novelty retailer and early 'web' eRetailer started offering the original Giant mouldings - in new colours, under their 'Accoutrements' label. They were made more widely available by dint of Paul Stadinger who secured a goodly number and distributed them to the Toy Soldier collecting community via his Stads List.

The two sets as issued, there was a third item - a large bag of Knight figures only, appeared first in approximately 1990. The Mongol fort was then issued in around 1993 with the Knight's fort following sometime '95/96.

However they were only copies of a late 1970's to mid-80's issue originally marked MADE IN HONG KONG (rear card/R.hand card above), the Hong Kong (but not the YF branding) was then obliterated - presumably in preparation for the return to China in '97) and finally overprinted with the Accoutrements disc on the reverse and the MADE IN CHINA block on the obverse.

The Archie McPhee/Accoutrements cards were a more modern all-colour printing, the older HK issues being a three-colour process, but the original artwork was used, rather than a copy as was the case with the Giant set we looked at the other day. Figures in the HK and early figure bag had the 'Giant' scratched-out on the figure's bases, later sets had 'China' over-engraved.


The latest outing for the mould was with BuM in 1999, when they issued the Mongol fort with both the Mongol infantry, and with their own ex-Montaplex copies of the Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham figures.

The real question is - If the moulds to both forts and the Knight & Mongol figures are still usable, where are the rest of the Giant moulds, and might they also one day reappear? Also the fact that they can keep popping up and filling western companies order-books suggests that the poor quality of HK mouldings in general, is down to the poor quality of the masters, not - as some have claimed over the years (myself included) - cheap moulds, and in fact the moulds can under the right circumstances last just as long, and produce as much product as any of Airfix's moulds?

Of note - Accoutrements are currently carrying the set of 5 metal knights by Westair of the UK, sometimes credited to Kinder Germany! What goes around comes around!!

W is for World of Warcraft

One of the more recent trends in toy collecting has been the emergence of the 'Art' or 'Designer' toys, which were born in the 1990's; Wikipedia.

Of all the branches of our hobby, this is the one I have the most trouble getting my head round, they are produced in the same factories, from the same materials as figures similar to the ones in this post, given the same finishes and yet start at £20/30+ per small figure and can retail for thousands. They are also often quite grotesque with lots of blood, guts, dripping flesh, genitals, empty eye sockets etc, etc...

How can a 10-inch bunny-robot with an open belly full of bloody skulls or fetuses be worth ten times the retail price of a Wizards of the Coast 16-inch At-At Walker? So with the latest version/edition of WoW (as they are known) reaching the clearance wholesalers at £1.99 from their original retail price of £9:99, I though it would be an idea to look at them while musing on their over-hyped bigger brothers.

Two of the techniques common to Art Toys are metallic decoration and the use of transparent vinyls. The Elfin figure top left had a two-tone sword in metallic maroon and lilac, would you pay $300 dollars for a zombie bear in the same colours when this chap is currently around 75p?

Below him is a winged daemon of some kind, he has clear yellow vinyl wings with an over-paint of graduated red-orange, so what's so special about a similar half-dead corrupted duck-skeleton that it could be 'worth' a hundred time as much or more? Also of note, the Wikipedia article states that the production of designer toys is moving to Japan - in part - because they use transparent vinyls, yet these are made in China, I would suggest the move toward producing in Japan has more to do with Japanese proclivities toward torture, tentacle-porn, machine-porn and schoolgirl sex!

The Mage in the group of elves - bottom right - has many of the elements of a 'limited edition' designer toy, spikes, skulls, frown!...yet is pocket-money, not annual bonus money!

In the large picture a figure has been produced totally in clear vinyl, then painted until only the Jewell in the end of the staff is showing transparent (I can't tell whether the whole figure is yellow, or the Jewell is over-tinted), while the little pink-haired dwarf girl-warrior is exactly the sort of thing the designer toy people will sell you, in a larger size, for half a weeks wages!

As someone said the other day re. the current price of gold vis-a-vis historical gold trends, and bearing in mind the Tulip craze of the C17th, if something looks like a bubble, and feels like a bubble it probably is a Bubble...how long before the buyers of Designer Art Toys realize they have filled their lovely, sleek, black-framed, illuminated, glass cabinets with modern, industrial-processed, culturally meaningless, deformed, soul-destroying crud?

The above figures are from the latest incarnation of WoW, being the 'Miniatures game', there's also the 'Collectable card game' the 'Board game' (with smaller unpainted figures) and other branches of the franchise, nothing like squeezing the maximum out of your fans, but at least this is the affordable way of shifting a ton of vinyl to those with disposable wealth!

T is for Thank You

I was going to do a post on World of Warcraft tonight, new production, not common here, and follow it with the next part of the Forts we've been looking at, but two things happened to push them back one....

Some covered - plenty more still to come!

First I realized it was the 300th post since 'A is for Aurora' back in December 2008, so I felt I aught to mark it in some way, and the best way is to thank all those who have followed and/or commented since I started, it's nice to know people are even remotely interested in my wittering!!

Marx, Marksmen, Blue Box, Rado/Ri-Toys and the 'Opie purchase'
(like the Louisiana purchase but FAR more important!)

Secondly, Dave Keen over at PSR posted a link to this blog at about 11 o'clock last night, and the 180 hits a day I've been getting for the last month or so shot up to 2000 in less than 24 hours! So welcome and thank you to all the new visitors, two of whom have eMailed with kind words.

Vehicles, newer figures and 'Odds'

As I'm thanking people I'd like to thank the boys at Moonbase Central for many beneficial exchanges and putting-up with my 'silly dictionary' entries, Clive over at Vintage Wargaming who sent me a couple of really interesting early catalogues soon after I started blogging, The Philosophic Toad who's proved invaluable with help on Cereal Premiums, Ron Marshall for inviting me onto a couple of his shared blogs and the Input of Arlin Tawzer, Arto Haarala and Ron Chaisson who often point me in the right direction or add a piece of the 'bigger picture' which is what this is all about.

Larger quantities by larger makes!

As this is starting to sound like an Oscar speech!...I'll thank Paul Morhead, Peter Evans and Brian Carrick from Plastic Warrior. James Opie who sold me his entire Hong Kong small scale collection for what we both knew was half the intrinsic value and a tenth of the US eBay value! German collectors Peter Bergner and Andreas Dittman, along with Dimitri from Russia and Thanassis from Greece.

While from the UK collectors fraternity the following have been good friends, good sources of figures and/or information OR; all three! John Begg (all three and more!), John Clarke, Timpo Dave (who's now Lego Dave!), Adrien Little, Matt Thair, Barry Blood, Tony Herrington, Jan Jarzembowski, Andy Harfield, Dave Keen, Gareth Morgan and anyone I've forgotten!

One of five!

As we have new viewers at the moment, I'd stress that while I like eMails as much as the next man (when they're not telling me to pharmaceutically enhance my manhood with a Christian bank loan from Bakina Fasso before Hotmail close my account for winning to many national and international lotteries), I'd far rather you comment here, even if you think you've nothing to add, like police work it's the little snippets that produce the whole.

You'll see I use a lot of question marks, a lot of 'might, could, probably, seem to, I'm guessing, I think, it's believed...', there are thousands of companies who have produced figures and accessories for themselves or others, copied or been copied, bough-in or been bought-out by, or just disappeared and anything you can add helps. Even if you just leave a pleasantry, it's nice to know you've been through!

Company-specifics, book manuscripts, thematic lists etc...

Also like 'Liz' over on the Other Collectables blog, or 'Anon.' here who provided a nice shot of Scandinavian Space-ship dime-stores, if you have something you think I'd like to post, or you don't fancy blogging but would like to show something, get in touch and it can be added to an existing post, become part of a new post or have a post all to itself, fully acknowledged or totally anonymous, as you like it!

If there is something you don't like let me know that too, unless it's my occasional snipes at the French, that stays!

The plastic flats

If there is something you'd like to see, give me a shout, if I've got it I'll make an effort to post it as soon as I can. But ask me here or at my eMail, not on someone else's forum/blog please.

I guess now is also the time to apologise for not delivering some of the things I have said I would. Ive still got three draft pages meant for the T34 roundup I was planning in April '09! The mini-trucks I said I'd do in a few days - some months ago - are preying on my mind (and I'd like to do the HO ones by N.I.F.C. or whoever they are at the same time), the scenic and elves stuff I started to serialise sort of petered out - they are still on the work top! While I'd like to get more Renovation/Collecting/Archiving posts done, but they just aren't as interesting as more figures or tanks!

What a few hundred-thousand Hong Kong pirates look like!

So there you go, thanks to all for visiting, commenting, following, linking or just getting to the end of this self-indulgent post! I'll keep putting it up here...lets do another 300!

M is for Magnificent Men! Processed, Tim-mee et al.

Influenced by Scott's blog, tonight's title is a straight lift from his the other night and it was following the link on his that got me digging these out. These are slightly larger than 1:72 at around 1:65? The Hong Kong copies below are a bit smaller and fit well with 1:72.

A quick search on Google reveals that both these and a Spad were available in red, yellow or green, and probably other colours and aircraft types as well. On the left in each view we have a Fokker D-VII while on the right a Camel in French roundels.

Made at about the time the Tim-mee brand was being changed to Processed Plastics, both cards are PP, Montgomery, Illinois, however the Camel is marked Tim-mee Toys, Mont.Ill., while the Fokker is marked Processed Plastics, Aurora Ill. where they still produce toys to this day under the J.Lloyd umbrella, including the 'Tim Mee' vehicle range.

A Hong Kong copy of the Fokker, also marked 'Fokker D-VII' and possibly marketed by Giant in the US, here in Europe they would have been on more generic packaging.

An accurate copy but seemingly hand-done rather than pantographed, as the loss of size is greater than one might expect from pantographing.

My 'Flying Circus', the red one is marked JN4 Jenny as are the green one with missing tail-planes & pink wheels, and the solid nosed yellow one, the green one with a red propeller is marked DeHaviland DH-4 and the blue-nose is a Nieuport 17C.

Very much a side-bar to the main figure collection and only sought out because they have little pilots and gunners, I have some smaller ones (about 1:87 - Giant (?), 1:90 generic copies) which I'll post another day.

Finally, one can't really write on Great War string-bags without mentioning THAT circus, and its leader, The Red Barron - Von Richthofen - with his Fokker Dr.I Dreideker (shhhh....a copy of the Sopwith Tri-plane!), here closer to 1:60 and packaged for Marks & Spencer about 4 Christmases ago, probably someone like Carama/Hongwell produced it?

Closing from 9 o'clock is another Nieuport 17, this one still on its card from Jean Hoefler, while it's about the same size as the HK ones, the body is wider and the pilot is creeping toward 1:65'ish.

G is for Giant and Relatives

Moving not in a specific direction, neither older nor younger, first or last, but rather rambling toward a conclusion, we have arrived at the father of the forts we've looked at in two of the previous three posts on the subject, the 'Giant' of New York commissioned/marketed design.

Being a UK/European release, this does not have the Giant branding on the card, however both the fort and the figures are Giant marked examples, the fort is in quite sensible colours and the knights are those we (Arlin Tawser and myself) sort of agreed to term type 2/3 (or) 'late/last' production in the pages of 1 Inch Warrior magazine a few years ago (NINE!!! Where does it go?...have I already said that tonight?!!!), and which have been re-issued by others in recent years (better make that the last decade or so...Where does...!), but more on them in the next part of the forts.

To the right is the other facade design, for the Mongol sets, again a sensible/realistic colour.

This one looks the same doesn't it? You're thinking he's uploaded two similar images, he doesn't usually do something like that? No, this is that old HK chestnut; When kissin'cousins go bad; The family down the street doing a strait copy, fort, figures and artwork/layout; All - bar the horses - poorer quality and unmarked. It's a fact though; Mix the horses up and you can't tell them apart.

The two cards, Giant supplier on top, copyist behind, it's good, it's very good, but a rather wasted effort, parents like mine wouldn't let me have either, "Not that rubbish, look here's some Airfix RAF Personnel, I remember when I was on Blackheath in 1940..." (I Love you Mum, but I REALLY wanted that big bag of Romans, and I still haven't found it, they had a whole rack in Webb's, Einco I think, I just KEEP finding the Indian Village!!!). While the corner shops didn't care where their cheap rack-toys came from?

Speaking of cheap rack toys this is the 3rd or 4th? (I'll work it out when I pull all the posts together in a few days) generation of Giant copy, with the poorer of the gold figures we looked at the other day, these are the ones with smooth bases.

Note the Woolbro overprint on the left hand one, this would normally have been found in Woolworth's, but some did end up with independents, as we saw when I did a Woolbro overview a year or so ago.

Mowed yesterday!

The lawn is the lawn, and the woods are the woods and never the twain shall meet! So after a quick PR shoot, they went!

P is for Paper and Pulp (card)

A post full of coincidences tonight, some contrived, some pure fluke. The first is that while I've been planning this for a few days, it comes just after Mannie Gentile covered the Walkerloo figures on his blog; Toy Soldiers Forever and Scott B Lesch posted a nice sheet of Pelerin style French Fire Brigade papers on his blog; Things You'll Like. So a little bit of synergy moving wisp-like through the blogger-sphere there!

The second, accidental coincidence is that one of the reasons I've been planning this for a few days is that I'd read - a few weeks ago - that Edward Ryan had died and posting on Terry Wise reminded me I meant to do a tribute to Mr. Ryan too. Now when I caught the news of his demise (on Treefrog - I think) I assumed it was recent, but it turns out the initial announcement was a year ago today Washington Post, well technically tomorrow, but that's less than twenty minutes away so it'll be today before this post goes 'live' (he actually passed away 29th August).

Which is further coincidence, as I only took the photo's this afternoon in order to put something between the fort posts and I'm only splitting the fort posts because I started to rather by accident (I could have gone Part 1, 2 etc...As I had with VEB and others), more of that when I tie them all together in a day or five.

It's sad that another of the 'Greats' has gone-before, if I had to save only five of the books from my Library, his would be one of them, the depth and breadth of his research, over a lifetime was extraordinary and the shear number of companies and individuals mentioned in the text and/or appendices is second - in number - only to Garrett's great work. Paper Soldiers is not just a fine reference work, but also a beautifully illustrated casual read, or coffee table browse!

When we first moved here, I had decided to start collecting larger scales, as the 'whole picture' requires it and there was a slowing-up of new information in the smaller scales. Now I'd always collected card and paper in the small scales, so it was another coincidence when we went into Wantage for the first time - nearly two years ago, where does the time go?! - with directions to the local second hand bookstall.

[Side note; there were very good booksellers in both Wantage and Newbury, the Newbury one was Invicta, whom I remembered advertising in the modeling press years ago, sadly they closed this spring, although with hardbacks for a pound and soft-backs for 50p toward the end, I did 'fill my boots'! They will continue to have a bookcase or two in a corner of the Wantage arcade though.]

Well when we found the Arcade, they had these (Edizioni Storiche Europa) sheets of card Napoleonics for a couple of quid each, not the 19th Century stuff Ryan specialized in, but - and I'm guessing here - 1970's? Now I couldn't justify buying them when we first moved in as money was tight and other thing's were more pressing, so each time we went in to browse (hide from the rain!) I'd check they were still there and re-hide them (in full view - I give others a fighting chance!) until I was able to get them, by which time two had gone...Hay Ho! So the first Soldiers I purchased in our new home, were among the first large scale I bought. If not a coincidence; more synergy!

This only got photographed (Parragon/Simon & Schuster, 1991) because it was waiting around to go in the tub, which is half-way down a stack, behind something else and quite heavy, and I've pulled my back out fighting with a lawnmower, a stubborn choke and some long grass, not coincidence but fortuitous happenstance?

The crate in question! The beauty of card and paper is you can store a lot in a small space - if it's not made up! The Medieval Tournament above will end up in the stack of modern/current production you can see at the bottom of this crate, being Dover, Steve Jackson, Fiddler's Green and Usborne. The bus you can see is an old Riko re-packaging of something I think has been mentioned before? But that might have been on one of the forums, anyway until I get the crate out it'll have to stay Riko...(Price and Etheridge?). ANOTHER coincidence; The single-page list of small scale card/paper manufacturers was in a file on the floor, where I left it last night, meaning to put something else away!!

And with down-loadable war games paper becoming really quite popular at the moment, lets hear it for coincidence, spare a thought for Mr. Ryan on the anniversary of his passing and remember that in the wider world of Toy and Model soldiers, card and paper have a larger place than I've so far given them.

(Added 1st September 2012; It was Price and Etheridge! Repacked by/supplied to RIKO)

O is for Other Forts

As we seem to be working through the forts at the moment, I thought I'd post a few loose ends, being those of the right age but wrong design to fit the Giant/post Giant design.

I think I've shown this card before, but here is a close up of the fort, making a square less than three inches on a side as apposed to the 8 inches of those we've been looking at. It's gone for the same plug-in corner design, but with the towers fixed to the side walls and only plugging front and rear.

Meanwhile the early British companies went for two-dimensional relief designs, the largest (top) is by Cherilea, the one in the middle I suspect of being Speedwell, purely from the plastic used, it being very similar to the Speedwell Germans or their Sentry Box, although that was 3D.

The last two aren't really forts at all, but always strike me as being ruined dungeons? Again these are Cherilea, and they did three other designs like these, but clearly in a larger scale, and brick house construction not stone fort, so they'll see light on the blog another day.

Pudding!

I know this is supposed to be a gardening blog, which sort of became a wildlife blog, but with August turning into an early autumn, giving us some quite chilly nights, a bit of stodgy British fare is just what the doctor would order if he wasn't busy picking blackberries, so I thought I'd share this with you, not least because I'm really pleased with it!

I picked up some bright yellow Mirabelles (wild plums) last time I visited my mother, and had stewed them for a couple of nights, once with cream, once with custard. As a result they were starting to loose their colour and get a bit 'jammy', I also had two rather stale current scones which looked like they'd be blue in the morning if I didn't do something with them.

Now Mim's away at the moment, looking after her Mum, and keeps asking me - on skype - if I'm eating well (cum'on guys, if you've been a bachelor for a while you'll know exactly why she's asking!!) so this is to show her I'm feeding myself up!

I sliced the scones and layered them in the bottom of the dish, added milk (Mim's already said I should have added a beaten egg...Doh!) and poured the Mirabelle 'jam' on top, however the dish was still only half full, so I mixed up some custard and poured that on, but the gaps in the scone meant most of the custard sunk through and joined the milk - I was still only half full!

A handful of raisins, two slices of buttered bread, cinnamon and brown-sugar brought it to the top of the bowl in short order though! And then half an hour in the oven at 200°, it rose like a good'en until it pushed the top off the bowl, and I took a quick photo after sprinkling with caster-sugar.

Many calories per square-inch, go, make, winters coming!!!

A is for "A New Battle Game"

Somewhere toward the back (page 127) of his little 'Introduction to Battle Gaming' Terry Wise had a very small picture of a 'board game' which would turn out to be very large! With the caption "A new Battle Game introduced by Tri-ang", it had me captivated, and oh how I wanted one, well, one day I got one, had to wait until I was in my mid-thirties mind! This is it...

It's VERY, very big, about two foot by two foot by a foot - 8 cubic feet of my universe taken up with plastic and card crap, but my - what quality crap!! Check out that 60's artwork, the guy bottom right is my all time favorite...."Maaahhh Maaaaaaaaaa'haammiieeee!!!". I think he's being shot in the back, a lesson for anyone thinking of running away; Real men die with frontal perforations!!

In fact, it's so big, this one's been given it's own Pickford's label at some point!

Bottom center, with the lid off, there's a shed-load of stuff. This game? Play-set? Interactive tour-de-force, had so much going on, the mines (bottom left), barbed wire and trees, machine-guns, all sorts!

It actually looks far more complicated than it really is, and once you've got it all set up it's just a turn-for-turn game with lots of counters, and all the 'chance' cards replaced with 'action' pieces.

The figures have 'value', which is displayed by pose (they are the Almark figures with long spigots on the base, probably manufactured in the Minimodels plant in Havent, Portsmouth for Tri-ang) and the helmet colour; White is the Officer, with 2 brown Sappers, 3 red NCO's and the Grunts have green helmets.

One player set up, the machine gun turns using a football rattle type mechanism to make a shooting sound and the long tongues of the trees limit traverse. The two trenches above ground have mini-mines. With printed-card, styrene, ethylene, rubber, metal and paint, this is really the high point of domestic toy production in that immediate post-war era.

Unless you're some professional, returning to childhood with a bank full of money - in which case some bloke on eBay has got one you can have for 85 quid-something, my advice is don't pay a fortune for one, they can go for as little as £12, and I've never paid more than £25, so much is subject to loss or damage, you'll need to get a couple - at least - to make one decent one, and they DO take up a lot of space.

Tatty ones are always on eBay, there's usually one under a table at the Plastic Warrior or Birmingham shows and your local car-boot sale will chuck-up one or two a year, if you get there early.

Best play-set/game/toy ever and more nostalgia curtsy of Mr. Wise who's sadly not here, thanks again Terry...I GOT ONE!

T is for Tail-End

Toward the end, Starlux, looking around for ways to make a bit of extra dosh, started putting undecorated whole sprues in boxes. The boxes were double sided - artwork wise - so the various different sets could all be put in the one box.

Here we see the Foreign Legion sprue, with the side of the box that pertains to them, easy to see how you will also find sailor, marine or helmeted infantry sprues in the same pack. Likewise the Cowboys can be replaced by American Indians, I haven't seen cavalry in this size, but that's not to say they weren't available in France, they were certainly made in 54mm.

L is for Lucky Clover Toys

Hard to tell if these came before or after the ones we looked at the other day, they have the same title, but the mouldings are not the same, and the figures would suggest a later production. However they were on sale at around the same time, so piracy of piracies would seem to be the answer, as it often is with these HK guys!

There was a third set, a western fort which will be covered another day, when I try to make sense of them. Lucky Clover's artillery was unique'ish, being a copy of the Marx gun-barrel (as per. Giant) but with a different carriage (also Marx in origin) and heavier wheels.

These British ceremonials are the fixed-head ones as opposed to the separate heads of the larger carded sets the other day, again based on Crescent originals. Also like the other day's, these put the 'Mongol' tower tops on the 'European' fort design.

Chariot is a two-horsed articulated version with a smooth floor, as the figures - again - have the chariot mounting-hole filled in, of the two non-Giant gold plastic types, these are the more well-detailed mouldings with the 'HONG KONG' in a semi-circle round the 'scab' of the chariot mounting-hole.