So to the last batch of photographs from the last
Marx Miniature Masterpiece session (The WWII and other historical sets will not be for a year or two now, they are deep in the storage unit!), looking at the Indians/Native Americans and the gun-tote'un Westerners who turned-up and ruined their world.
As with the Farm and ACW we will look at the crystal boxes first, as that's the reason they are all in the same box together, clearly the farmers were added to the range as 'workaday' cowboys, or non gun-slinging 'cowboy' types.
Larger 6 figure units above and smaller 4 figure sets below: Reading from the top left we have sets 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 with 13, 14, 16 and 18 of the little sets underneath them. As with the farm and ACW sets I have a few spares in the small boxed range and am looking for 15 and 17 in the same series.
A look at the 'fighting' poses of Indians, a mix of
Marx's own down scales and some really quite sublime copies of the
Britains Herald 'Swoppets', relatively well painted for their size and the age in which they were painted.
The lower shot shows the
Rado/Ri-Toys recasts as supplied to
Marksmen in the UK, they seem to have lost the
Britains pose mould? These are in a quite tinny plastic that could be a modern hybrid ethylene or an older propylene?
A third element of the Indian range was the 'Camp Fire Group', again these are downscales of
Marx figures and are among some of my more favourite figures from the whole collection. There are more variations in colour with this grouping, but you do get some variation with the fighting braves and a few are also shown here.
Also some variation in material colour with the
Rado figures and an illustration of what happens when the release-pin get stuck at the wrong end of it's channel! They (
Rado) never re-issued the camp-fire figures either.
The 'Cowboy' accessories are far more generic than the Indian ones so are consequently elsewhere with the WWII and Napoleonic accessories! However the Indian's accessories are in the Wild West box and can be seen here, these are all hard polystyrene.
In the centre are those poses I have loose, they are not the full set, but the cowboys do seem to have got themselves played to death! Around them clockwise from the top left are some paint variations, a set of the
Ri/Marksmen poses, three of the later soft ethylene issue and finally some colour variations of the recent re-casts.
This is the soft plastic wagon sans tilt and is a recent purchase (the wagons seem to be 'missing' and must be in another box somewhere? A few horses, all hard plastic although soft plastic versions of the based ones were issued in the later sets - as seen below. I can't find the mounted cowboys either and apart from the one waggoner in a bag of otherwise broken bits and with all the ACW gun-teams absent (the one I shot was from the mint set) I'm guessing I split them at some point to make more room in the box?
A little set-up showing the view just prior to the Battle of Bent Tie River, when Corporal Custard 'got his' and a comparison between US and UK issued labels.
And - that's a 1 Gloster's other-ranks tie...j'a know what I mean guy? Wellington's 'Fire Brigade'...no messing, in'it doe!
As with a lot of the
Miniature Masterpiece range, toward the end they came out in soft ethylene versions in these window-fronted sets (interestingly about the same size as the
Triang set we looked at here:
Marketing), all the accessories were in the softer polymer as well.
And you got all that for ¢69!
