U is for Ugly Underside of Undulating UFO

Someone was asking about the underside of the flying NSDalek I CAD'ed a while back, this is for him, if you know CAD you'll understand, if you don't - please come back when I post something more interesting to you!

I filled the holes with blue 'glass' 5mil shorter than the cavity, and faced the cavities with an off-white light source, it looks better on a PC with a better graphics card, the Laptop simplifies the effect. H

P is for Profiteering in Plastic

This screen-shot from the latest eMail on Airfix's D-Day range is the most blatant piece of profiteering I've seen in a long time, I hope people will be as equally disgusted as me and share this around the communities of modelling, war-gaming and figure collecting...

Issued as part of the 'D-Day' tie-in, those who are new to those branches of the hobby that consist in the main of gaming horse-and-musket or earlier with white-metal figures may not know this item...for the rest of us (90-odd% of the various branches of the connected hobbies) it is as familiar as a bad penny in the saucer by the door!

It is an old, tired moulding, first issued by Airfix in the 1960's. and which through the 70's and yeay, even unto 1980/81 still had a pull back, spring-loaded, firing mechanism that allowed you to shoot little green shells about the place until the hoover and the carpet monster had eaten them all, after which it was matchsticks!

The mould paid for itself in about 1972, the contents of this box contain a non-working gun, which is based on the sort of deck-gun the British Navy employed on gunboats at the turn of the last century, not anything the Germans employed on the Atlantic Wall.

The plastic in this box is (by the law of pound-shops) worth about 65p. They - Hornby-call-us-Airfix - have also released a set with two landing craft, a jeep, the new howitzer and a set of 2nd type US Marines. If they are all market rated at £5.99, then that's £25+ for £16.99....a bargain...but this?

This is a rip-off of the highest order, a staggering amount of money for a boxful of shite! They should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for this, the people who died on those beaches died to make a better world and save us from totalitarianism...yet we seem to be losing our democratic voice and sliding back to the time of the robber-barons with complicit or powerless legislature and a business class determined to squeeze the last penny from our cold hands..I can't put my anger over this into sufficient words...Sixteen-fucking-ninty-nine?!!! Outrageous!

M is for Mysterious Moonmen

Can anyone put a name or other details to this? Adrian had it on his stall at Plastic warrior the other weekend, and it's hard to pin down. Seems to be French, but was trilingual on the other sides (English/German), figures are 1970's in appearance and don't have a 'style' or if they do it's more German or 'Kinder Egg' Italian than either French or Spanish?

They are about 54mm, with large square, rounded-cornered, flat bases. Each has four spigots on his chest, attached to each spigot is a small length of insulating wire, the other end of each is then attached to either his backpack or a piece of separate equipment.

The figures are also 'swoppet' like, with separate heads and helmets, swivel arms and the plug-ins. The scenery is card with separate pieces slotted into the base-card and with no obvious weapons in evidence are clearly meant to be astronauts not 'space men'!

Any ideas? the 'de luxe' brings to mind Starlux, did they experiment with ethylene swoppets toward the end?

07th Nov. 2015 - A little bird tells me (from an anonymous Blogger ID with one 'profile view' - mine!) that they are JEM/Norev, so they were French! Tag list adjusted accordingly. Thank-you anonymous!

LP is for Lots-more Plastic!

Another follow-up to previous posts tonight and an all-time favourite 'side-bar' or sub-collection within my wider collection has been these chaps from LB and their derivatives.

Before I was collecting all scales I scored some of the larger ones for Paul at Plastic Warrior magazine (when they could still be found in cake shops!), only to be asked to do an article for the small scale off-shoot (One Inch Warrior) and then after I Blogged them here I was asked to Blog them at the Moonbase Central Blog (the article's disappeared now, or not been tagged, but I have the images, and will redux it, here, sometime), so this is definitely a perennial we will return too!

Indeed, the boys at Moonbase have subsequently blogged some of these, pointing me in the right direction for collection expansion, as I believe I have helped them too . . . all the following have been picked-up in the last two years, most in the last two weeks!

So, first the additions to the large scale LB's and clones. The only marked original is the unpainted darker-green one, which I was looking for last time I blogged them, having unpainted red ones and believing they must have done the green ones unpainted as well. Couldn't you just take the paint off some spares? I hear you ask; well, you could, but that would defeat the object of confirming production runs!

Reviewing the old post, I notice the two smaller gunmetal clones with the deeper, unmarked, puddle-base are duplicates, but the cream and day-glow yellow ones are new to the collection. I suspect they were once day-glow all over, but time and sunlight have been unkind to them!

The little green one is the smooth-based sub-50mm version, while the larger chrome-plated one is actually larger than LB originals, and is also unmarked.

Previously Blogged over at Moonbase, theirs was an English language market one, this is . . . er .  .  . Spanish? Although emanating from Russ Berrie, the 1960's US-based toy company behind those bloody mad-haired trolls!

These two silver astronauts and their lander (along with a simple flag) seemed to replace the old armed spacemen in the smaller size and ran-on with the robots for a few years as cake decorations, in white. While there is no mark, the base is in every other respect the same as the robots.

In the snow-shaker (moon-dust shaker!) form, it's just another way of marketing the figures. Virca SPA will be the importer, and the little gold tag is reminiscent of tourist/gift shops the world over! Can a Spanish follower translate the motto on the side of the shaker (I'm assuming 'Gallarate' means gallery?), the English one was 'Galaxy Collection Water Ball'.

Moonbase's Wotan has been very good at tracking these down, especially the big grinning doozer far right (of the picture...although he looks like his politics might be "Hang'em-Flog'em" as well, like a metal magistrate!), as he (Wote') used it as his ID image for a while.

Seemingly made by two firms, the darker ones have come-in in dribs and drabs, the paler ones came in on Saturday at Sandown Park (at the same time as the shaker, but from different dealers).

The odd looking fellow (inset views) came with them, although; A) he's not got a sucker, nor any signs of having had one and B) the lot was accompanied by several other 60's/70's toys in the same material and pale brown colour (pencil tops, dinosaurs and a sea-monster), clearly from the same maker/source, not that he looked like he went with them either, so I've added him here for now as an 'Alien'!

His back has the same treatment as the backs of all those silicon-rubber spiders and bats we used to get in joke-shops, gum-machine capsules and Christmas Crackers...a sort of novelty-condom effect! They (spider and bat) were both in the same lot - along with a large silicon-rubber ant - so I think it was the remains of a salesman's samples?

An old scan from my original One Inch Warrior magazine article, that was 12/15 (?) years ago (late 1990's anyway), yet some people persist in calling them ID or IDL on-line and in auction listings...it's quite clear that it's LB with a line through it, held between the arms of a monster whose head is above the gap between the two letters, with a sun-ray effect carrying-out to make the full disc.

Indeed...the line-through may well be the monster's arms grasping/hugging the LB?

This is a CAD'ed rendition of the logo found on [some of] the darker green, olive and grey versions of the silicone-rubber robots, it could be ATS, AST, AIS....any ideas? The paler ones (and more transparent ones) only have a generic HONG KONG marking, sometimes two.

Another scan which originally appeared in black and white in 1" Warrior - this is the Russ Berrie contents in their LB / Culpitts cake decoration form, with low-lighting and no flash on a tray of door-mat beatings, after I've sieved out all the fibres and twiggy bits!

Also from the old article, a nice early/mid 1960's set, these are copies of the small-scale Triang / MPC supplied figures with unmarked flat bases, I say early/mid 1960's as the artwork is more late 1950's but the contents are later stuff. I love the two middle aircraft as they are reminiscent of the Trigan Empire's 'Atmosphere Craft' from Look & Learn magazine.

Although the MPC Golden Astronauts were the same chrome silver styrene ones as Triang, their space-base play-set contained these lesser ethylene clones...in red, white and blue.

Further Reading;

The Trigan Empire (Wikipedia)

Now known to be LB for Lik Be, tags adjusted to reflect the fact.

C is for Curate's Egg

It would be 'C is for Cautionary Tale, but we've already had one of them!

I don't know how many figures have been produced in plastic over the years, but the more you know of, the more - not less - likely you are to make a mistake occasionally (this allows those who take delight in spotting mistakes to make a point, hey CS? - still waiting for your erudite feedback!), and I made one at the Plastic Warrior show the other day...here it is!

I saw these and recognised the boxes, asked the dealer if they were really Merten (he's a well respected member of the hobby and made the same mistake so I won't name him!) as they seemed a little cramped...and he said yes, adding they seemed to be repaints, which I concurred with.

Because I use to be a small scale only collector I'm always on the lookout for new or interesting small scale (which in my mind always goes to 45/50mm 'ish!), we negotiated on the pair and I got a bargain (some will argue as they read on - a hell of a bargain...).

Because I'd already a bought a few bits these were perched a bit precariously on the top of the pile as I went on round the venue, and within minutes I was running into people I know who said the usual "Anything nice?" to which I pointed to these and said "Some nice Mertens in 40mm I haven't seen before"!

Well, those not blinded by the red mist of 'purchase frenzy' immediately identified them as WHW figures, repainted!

I should have seen it for myself as I have some undamaged originals, but in the 'heat of battle' failed to recognise them. They are actually KHW [Kreigshilfswerk] or War Relief rather than the earlier WHW [Winterhilfswerk] or Winter Relief and are from the set of Guard Corps figures issued by the Gau of Berlin in January 1942. Polystyrene flats, 45mm (50+ with headdress) originally painted in a simpler form. Because they were issued only in the Berlin area they tend to carry more value than the national issues, but do turn-up fairly regularly.

The figures are mostly paint or actual conversions of about 6 or 7 (mostly infantry) figures from a set of - I believe - ten original sculpts, missing is the lovely Imperial Kürassier sculpt with his eagle-helmet and the Hussar, along with the earlier Kürassier figure (all cavalry). There are head-swaps above, well done and some converting of full length muskets to Jaeger carbines, little metal strip bayonets have been added to a couple, pin-swords to others etc...

I am assuming they represent a specific group of uniforms from a specific time period sometime between the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and First World War (1914-18)?

So it really is a curate's egg...the actual value is questionable, the intrinsic value is questionable, the historical value is questionable, and without the correct paper inserts, I can't use the boxes for 40mm Mertens despite needing some, so they might as well stay in them for the time being...do I regret the purchase? No, they're a really nice group and will look good on a shelf somewhere!

F is for Freebe!

A follow-up to be read in conjunction with the original posts, which were right back at the start of this blog...B is for Betterwear

A quick perusal of those posts will reveal that I talked then of 'Incentives', having always been told and therefore believing that these were issued for total purchases, or total value of purchases or success as an 'agent' for neighbours or something, however; it would seem that in fact they were randomly shoved through the nation's letter-boxes as an advertising gimmick...

A quick read of the leaflet/flyer that accompanied the 'gift' would seem to suggest a rather physical version of cold-calling, in which the local agent introduced his or herself by going round the neighbourhood posting free cowboys, dancers or spoons (what else was there?) through peoples doors...oh that they were doing so today, they are still going as a direct/mail-order marketing concern with 'local agents', as are Avon and Kleeneze.

How the assembly seems to have been delivered; the flyer and figure together in a paper-backed cellophane window envelope of the type stamp-collectors used to use (well; they may still, I'm no expert!). The tear-off slip states that you exchange it for a free gift? Was this the cowboy so clearly accompanying the uncut slip or a further gift? Did some agents just place the gifts with the coupon as a further incentive, or was the policy changed after the flyers were printed?...or; has the cowboy been married to an uncut leaflet with a stamp-collectors envelope by a toy collector?!

A slightly fuller set than we looked-at last time, the photographs are courtesy of Gareth Morgan (Morgan Miniatures) who has also sent me some shots for the Charbens section of the Khaki Infantry page! I'm still missing the cannon from my collection.

Maybe you got one figure/spoon through the door and the rest of the set with your first contact? Can anyone remember?

It would also be nice to know if these are taken from another - probably US - origin (like the World Dolls which were previously margarine premiums), as they have something of the Alamo or Philippine expedition about them, rather than being just plain 'cowboys'?

 

Much latter - Yes, they are taken from a set of Euro-premiums credited to Mayer-Lippinghausen (German margarine), where they were issued in hard, brittle polystyrene, rather than the soft polyethylene of the Betterware examples.

News, Views Etc...Khaki Infantry Update and some show thing...

I've added some images kindly supplied by Barney Brown and David Scrivener to the Khaki Infantry page, specifically Benbros and Kentoy, with a caveat on the hollow-cast mould prone pose which I will get too soon hopefully; real life tends to get in the way of Blogging plans!

Thanks to both of them for the contibutions, they do add to the fuller picture.

UK Khaki Infantry

In other news...there's some show or something, somewhere tomorrow!

Details, details, details...still.

I will get some more Blogging done here on the homepage soon as well, hopefully!

S is for Search Engine

To Bing or not to Bing, that is the question! Thank f**k for Google!

And!....Yahoo doesn't even seem to have an image search feature, or not one I could find...don't use these fly-by-night half-arses...same goes for the Firefox/Chrome debate....internet explorer? What's that?!

On a far more serious note...Plastic Warrior show, this coming Saturday...if you're not there...you'll be somewhere else...and we won't miss you 'cos we'll get all the bargains!

Details, details, details...

O is for Optical Illusion

Clever!

Toy Soldiers Optical Illusion



Toy Soldiers and Plastic Flowers - Joe Black again!

Skulls

M is for Memorabilia, Militaria and Medals

I was lucky enough to be shown this the other day, and took the opportunity to take a photograph of it to share with a wider audience. Thanks to Peter for letting me shoot it. It originated in a factory in Germany at the end of the last war (counting down to the next one - thanks for that Putin...you're so gay!), and was 'liberated' or shall we say 'confiscated' as illegal Nazi regalia in - the then newly de-Nazified - Germany!

The card is original and I understand that each member of the unit in question took one as a memento, these cards were used in shop-windows as propaganda as much as anything else, and although it's been renumbered by a British hand, you can see the original German 1's with their long heads or serifs.

From the top left to the bottom right moving down then across they are;

1 - RAD [Reichsarbeitsdienst] Medal, awarded for four years service in the Labour Organisation, the reverse reads "Fur Treue Dienste in Reichs Arbeits Dienst"...for loyal service in the German labour service.

2 - NSKK [Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps] Motor Vehicle Drivers Badge, this would have been worn by servicemen as well as NSKK personnel as lots of military personnel had been taught to drive by the NSKK.

3 - Mother's Cross - Miniature, this was awarded each August 12th (the birthday of Hitler’s mother), with gold crosses (illustrated) being awarded for those women who had given birth to 8 [good Aryan] children, silver for 6 and bronze for 4. As a miniature it would have been worn as a broach.

4 - War Merit Cross, 1st class with swords, this was a military award for action deserving of award, but not for bravery (which would deserve an Iron Cross).

5 - Austrian Medal, awarded on entry into Austria (from Wikipedia; The medal, known as the "Anschluss medal", was awarded to all those Austrians who contributed to or participated in the annexation as well as the members of the Austrian NSDAP [Nazi Party]. It was also awarded to German State officials and members of the German Wehrmacht and SS who marched into Austria).

6 - War Merit Cross, 2nd Class with swords (see 4 for note).

7 - German Red Cross 'Social Welfare' Medal.

8 - Clasp or 'Bar' to the Iron Cross 2nd Class, this is the 'Prizen' size which is both smaller and rarer than the usual clasp and would have been worn with a WWI Iron Cross medal ribbon, below and coming from a tunic button.

9 - Iron Cross 2nd Class.

10 - Wound Badge 3rd class.

11 - War Merit Cross 1st class without swords, awarded sans-swords for civilian or rear-echelon acts.

12 - Narvik Shield [Narvikschild], awarded for service in the Norway campaign in 1940.

13 - West Wall Medal, the obverse reads "Für Arbeit zum Schutze Deutschlands" (For work for the protection (or defence) of Germany) and it was awarded for work on the Siegfried Line in 1939/40.

14 - Crimean Shield [Krimschild], awarded to troops under the command of Erich von Manstein who captured the Crimea region, very common medal, with over 250,000 issued.

15 - War Merit Medal, the lowest award in the series that includes 11, 6 and 4 above. The medal replaced the second class - without swords - awards as so many were being issued and would go to someone like a factory worker who exceeded production targets or something like that.

The cut down the middle of the card presumably has more to do with the dimensions of  a British large-pack circa 1945, than anything in the factory which made these, the location/identity of which is unknown. I told Peter the Mothers Cross was probably for losing a child in the war...how wrong could I have been!

News, Views etc...Khaki Infantry Page - Speedwell Added

I've added Speedwell to the Khaki Infantry page, the question-marks are starting to outnumber the known facts, and we still have UNA, VP and Trojan to look at!

UK Khaki Infantry

News, Views Etc...Khaki Infantry Page - Update

Tonight I've added sections on Reisler and Rocco (Royce) as we move toward the endgame of a mess that is UNA, VP, Trojan and...Speedwell still to come..

UK Khaki Infantry

News, Views Etc...Khaki Infantry Page - Update

I've added what little I've got by way of a Kentoy section and an overview of the various mortar versions to the Khaki Infantry page and will try to do more in the next few days...


UK Khaki Infantry

E is for Ethylene

Back to Marx...I had the box open to do the Mystery Space Ship the other day! The Miniature Masterpieces are relatively well known, we've looked at them before here and will come back to them in the future. As hard plastic they are relatively easy to track-down with mint examples of the larger play-sets often appearing on evilBay, and a few loose figures often in the 'mixed lots' of small scale at shows.

However, there was a lesser species, the polyethylene or soft plastic versions, which I assume to have been either a late thing, or another factory thing? And it's these we're going to look at briefly now...

Three different boxing's, all the same size with a cellophane window. The ' Operation "Attack" ' sets don't have the little disc overlapping the window, while the 'By Marx' rectangle becomes a national flag.

These are probably the hardest to locate as soft plastics, I used to think it was the space sets but they do appear on FeeBay quite often. Item count is the same in both sets, but the people stitching/gluing them in clearly had some leeway, as there are differences, The animals are from the old Noah's Ark sets, but in some wacky colours and - in some cases - even wackier paint!

Note also that the scenic pieces are mostly provided by items from the Wild West series (again all in soft ethylene), including the cooking pot, spear-stand and stretched-skin in both sets. And yes...the tree has been bent by 40 years of carton pressing down on it!

The British get a camouflaged box, there were German and Japanese and Vietnamese versions along with rarer Russian and Canadian sets (probably harder to get than the Africans actually?). So many US G.I.'s turn up in soft plastic they must have been included in other sets, probably late issues of the larger MM play-sets. The price label shows these were going head-to-head with boxes of 48-odd unpainted Airfix figures! 'Kress' was SS Kresge, the ancestor of Sears/Kmart today.

My favourite and one of the less common ones, all in soft plastic, silver versus gold, having a scrap in the courtyard! I didn't notice that the mounted gold knight had taken a tumble until I'd put them all back in the attic! Probably hit by one of those catapult stones...it's just not jousting!

We looked at a tatty version of the Wild West one Here Just over a year ago.

A is for Armoured Car

This is one of my favourite pieces, along with a composition tank I have in storage somewhere which will be blogged here one day! I'm not sure of the material of this, but it would seem to be some form of ceramic, rather than a true composition, but it's a low-temperature fired earthenware such as a clay or terracotta, and in the worlds of marbles and doll collecting (both more populated hobbies than toy soldier collecting) would be considered a composition anyway.

A study of the image (click once and it'll open, or right-click 'open in new tab') will reveal it's very crudely moulded with a poorly-mixed material (that alone pointing to low-temp firing, with all the air trapped in those un-squeezed-out folds it would likely explode at the temperatures necessary to create 'china' or porcelain), which has lead to some shrinkage and deformation.

It's been loosely 'shoved' into a mould, the pressing of the hollow cavity in the underside forcing the material into the corners of the mould and - after firing - airbrushed with gloss enamels, brown over a yellow base.

The crudeness points to a craft piece or penny-toy, even a home-made, and while date is hard, and subject matter (vis-a-vis actual vehicle depicted) impossible; I'm guessing it's early, pre-WWII, but not as early as WWI, the design - such as it is - is later. Anybody got an idea as to the make depicted...or maker?

It's roughly 'small scale'; big'ish for 1:72 but a bit small for 28mm role-play. Also I wonder if it might actually be French in origin. If war gaming I'd say a 2lbr, it's bigger than an MG!