S is for Spacemen...by Various Makes via Lido; Captain Video...et al!

I'm not even going to try and attribute these, the sculpts were originally Lido, but they have been license-copied, supplied-to and pirated by dozens of firms as stand-alone carded toys, bagged rack-toys and give-aways or premiums in three (?) sizes over 30-odd years (1950's-1970's) in hard Polystyrene and soft polyethylene.

Also this is a couple of small samples - I seem to have photographed twice! But I have more in storage with some of the smaller-sized ones so we will return to them...for now; Lido Captain Video!

S is for Spacemen...German Gift Giveaways

I'm not sure a name has ever been attributed to these as maker, but Manurba would always be in the frame for this sort of stuff, so I'll put it in the tag-list. They were give-aways with the German equivalent of lucky-bags I believe (and other things?) and the metallic greeny-steel one (top right) may have been a paratrooper. He's also a copy, with helmet clips which have helped him keep his helmet on; Major Tom!

29th October 2018 - Much better explanation here

S is for Spacemen...by Gemodels for Culpitt

I thought he was female for a long time, we will return to him as I have lots (colour and paint variants) in storage, being barely 50mm (as a cake decoration) and quite slight, I picked-up loads as a small-scale collector over the years before I started collecting larger scaled stuff.

S is for Spacemen...by Crescent for Kellogg's

Poses above and colours below (previously on the blog somewhere), no helmets and the UN 'lollipop' is a miss-mould; a common enough fault with that figure.

S is for Spacemen...by Thomas/Poplar

So, yesterday turned into a bit of a small-scale fest', I think to redress the balance we'd better go big, and there's nowhere bigger than space! It'll be a bit of a box ticking exercise as all this stuff has been blogged elsewhere, website'ed the heck out of and covered in Plastic Warrior magazine years - if not decades - ago, so there's not much point in my pontificating, when it's all known stuff!

The shots are a ragged mix of bits I've been squirrelling away in a Picasa folder for about 6 years, gathered together by company.

Thomas Toys (UK); ethylene and Poplar; PVC,  are the chaps behind these fine fellows, except the polyethylene alien dwarf with the base, he's a cheeky copy by some unethical pirate types! We looked at two of their ships a couple of days ago.

A is for Archive...Sorting Plunder!

These are collages of scans of old photographs I took in pre-Internet times, so not the best quality, but this is how it used to come in...

I've looked at the large bi-planes on the Blog, but the medium ones and these (above) smallies are still to come. The Starlux set has starred here, as has Tallon and I think the Plasty farm has had it's Warholian five-minutes here once? The rest of it's not terribly clear, but I can see one of the D-Day sets...and a windmill!

This was a Plastic Warrior show, in richmond, from around 1998-2000-odd as I remember looking at it first at Paul's house over a coffee before I drove home, they are both too fuzzy for me to take you through them point-by-point, so what can you spot!

The same lot a couple of hours later, I've already put a lot of minor stuff in their little 4x5½ click-shut's, leaving mostly Hong Kong to be sorted, which morphs into Blue Box as your eye travels anti-clockwise round the right-hand corner, and then turns to Marx bits as you travel up the back edge of the table toward the mostly unmarked post-Giant fort bits...these used to be so easy to find, now - with evilBay - they are all silly BIN prices! Those Napoleonics are non-Giant, but I think we've looked at them here on the Blog...or some very similar ones!

From the size of this sample and the date I think it may be the contents of a mixed bag, possibly one of the Trevor Rudkin swap-bags...he had an Atlantic Greek warship off me, on the promise of bags of stuff going forward to the value of the Warship...he's still saving me bags 21 years later, but I've been paying for them since about the 5th bag?

Interesting here are the Marklin railway personnel I was bemoaning the lack of bloggin-on the other day, with - next to them - some more of the Lone Star clones we did see the other night, as you can see - more colours! Next to them are some of the even smaller Cracker toy Cowboys & Indians (which are in the queue, but a smaller sample than I have in storage), and Guardsmen from lucky-bags and Airfix clones, two of each.

Also in this shot is the higher-quality version of the Centurion tank we looked at in the post before this, a hour or so ago, some Corgi vinyl, an early version of the Merit trolley, Lone Star Treble-O telegraph pole, a bunch of foot Cowboys & Indians we haven't looked at yet, some non-Giant knights in an unusual colour-way (pink, red and chocolate brown), two cereal pirates, a Blue Box farmstead'er/hunter and the larger HK Cowboys & Indians from the Lucky Clover sets which - if we haven't looked at yet - we will look at soon.

Best bit in this lot is the cake-decoration (?) skier in polyethylene - true 20mm; I've never seen another and he had both skis and both ski-sticks.

This looks like the sort of stuff I'd bring back from an evening toy show in the local school, about 1991/2? I'd keep an eye on the local paper and wander up for an hour about 7pm every eight weeks or so, it would usually be trays of tatty-to-mint die-casts, with a couple of Lego or McFood premium dealers and the odd tub of well playworn action-figures, but I'd rummage my way round the couple of dozen stalls for a while and bring home something like this!

It's all grist to the mill, and even with door entry, was probably less than a tenner...a cheap evening's entertainment, and I may have had the odd bigger piece or a catalogue or two, not in the photograph? Highlight? Back then it was probably the Axis & Allies German from MB Games, but following the recent (or 'since', some of this happened years ago now!) re-issues and spare-figure set releases, they're pretty common figures now!

I'm still looking for more information on the horse which is marked S.A.E. (if memory serves) and has turned up several times now, looks to be jumping, but with no sign of fixing/s for base, fence or rider? And from Hong Kong; not the other - South African - SAE 'en gin ears.

HK is for 'Chinatanks'

A common enough 'content' of mixed bags of detritus under the dealers tables at shows, or from car-boot sales, these are a tad smaller than Roco Minitanks (about 1:100 or 1:110 maybe?) and an eclectic collection of vehicle types. The commonness of them being due to the fact that they were added to plenty of sets...

Here we have basically the same set, on the left an unmarked generic rack-toy, on the right one branded to and imported by World Distributors of Manchester (UK) who were a wholesale book importers and publishing house of some kind.

Clearly this is the sort of thing they would have bought-in to enhance their otherwise 'bookish'  Christmas range...a lot of stores not normally offering many toys tend to expand their toy department at that time of year, and it behoves suppliers to make sure they have a few toys in their lists for the autumn.

World Distributors handled the very popular Dr. Who and Dalek annuals, so would also have had a foot in the door of Britain's newsagents, just the places to find sets like this in the 1960's and '70's. The 'Playtime' branding seems to me to be trying to mimic Rhemus another rack-toy of that era, which carried Airfix series one kits at one point. Airfix also suffering from the main thrust of the piracy present in this set, along with Roco's Gemini-craft and rubber pontoon boat

This set - sold in Germany (1DM was equivalent to about 18p or 30¢ at the time) - is pretending to be Ri-Toys, and has had one of the little beasts chucked-in, but the otherwise unbranded [card] set had flat-based figures (as per the two sets above) rather than the distinctive hollowed-base ones of Ri-Toys, so the only clue here is that it's not Rado!

Meanwhile in the 'States, Unique Industries were shipping them over without the other accessories as carded 'party favours' in sixes, all enhanced with 'allied' stars! Unique - of course - are still around and still carding-up party favours in sixes, we looked at their current paratroopers on the Blog recently.

One of the real problems with these, apart form the poor quality and sub-scale, is that the people in the factory didn't care which turret they put on which hull...

...as a result it takes a while to get a full set. Also the quality control was so poor on the material (it was non-existent on the finishing!) they come in a hundred shades of 'army' green, and to get the right turrets on the right hull...in matching shades takes forever!

When you have collected a large-enough bag-full, and matched everything up, you should end up with a Centurion, AMX30, T55, Panzer IV, Leopard 1/A1 and M60 of some kind (A3?). As the Syrians still had Pz.Kpfw. IV's when they lost the Golan Heights in 1967, when all these tanks were in service; there's a sort of sense to the range, but I'm sure it's purely coincidence!

I have a much larger sample in storage which gives-up some marking variations, along with moulding variants and a much better Centurion which was probably the donor-model for this lump, along with more carded sets, so - if you can bare it (and even if you can't!) - we'll return to these one day!

A is for Abilene

Another box-ticker really, this time it's Atlantic and their little frontier ghost-town (no figures!) Abilene with its attendant Fort Riley.

The lovely box-art of the later Atlantic sets showed you what was possible with a bit of paint, some lichen and a bucket of dry sand, and must have helped sales...I remember the frustration of not knowing what was 'really' in the Trojan Warriors set...even though the artwork was colourful.

Scrolled assembly instructions on the back of the box hint at the simplicity of design and construction, and there was a reassuring solidity to the contents when you shook the box!

There was a certain disappointment when the box was finally home and opened, the smaller units are very small, and the larger units are all corner-stands. But once they were made and up they could be arranged in a variety of ways to make a little township and it's not as if the Wild West fan of the late 1970's was over-supplied with pioneer architecture in this scale.

The frames came in two colours with one large and two small building's parts per frame, so mixing and matching could help vary the unpainted castings while stickers added a bit of colour and helped set-up any story-lines. You also realised that one of the reasons the box-art was so enticing was careful arrangement and cropping of the 6 building!

The garrison that helped the town grow were housed (once you'd bought them separately) in Fort Riley, again - to people raised on Airfix and Hong Kong forts, disappointingly chunky...until you gave it some thought...these things were built from trees...they should be chunky!

Put-together it makes a fine edifice for the edge of town (several inches from the centre of town!), and despite the chunkiness, shares the same approximately 8x8-inch dimensions of the Airfix forts, the Giant and Giant-like forts, the MPC 50mm figures fort and the Italian pocket-money fort we looked at on the Blog an age ago and which will be near the bottom of the 'Forts' tag-results page.

It should be noted that from the start the real Fort Riley was a stone fort, so best make-up another name-plate, however there was an Abilene town - also in Kansas and that would have been timber, a later Abilene was built in Texas.

17th April Pandemic Year - Here's the link as discussed in the comments
https://alkony.enerla.net/english/the-nexus/miniatures-nexus/miniature/miniature-scenery/plank-fort-gerendavar-from-hungary-miniature-scenery-review

The Dulcop 'super charlie' connection is interesting too, as both Hong Kong and Kinder carried them, or mini-copies of them!

H is for Hong Kong Mongol Hoard...or Herd of Huns

This set is 100% Giant, yet 100% not Giant! We know it's Giant because every single foot figure is marked Made In Hong Kong Giant (P), yet we know it's not Giant, because Giant were never that generous with their figures! Obviously there is the secondary evidence of no 'Giant Plastics Corp. NY' anywhere on the packaging and/or the presence of the retail price in s/d (two-shillings and eleven'punce).

This was the UK (and elsewhere?...it's quite common as these sets go) version of Giant's Mongols, probably let out of the back of the same factory supplying Giant, and consists of about 15 each of red and yellow foot 'Huns' and the same of silver and black [final 'type'] knights, with 6-7 each of the same force's riders.

Loose examples, I don't have all the mounted knights here, but you get the picture and when I get the rest out of storage we can come back to them and look at the forts and stuff. The missing yellow one turned-up and is below!

The knights tended to reuse the bulk of the pose (lifted from old British 54mm figure poses - Crescent and Britains Swoppets) which I've tried to highlight in the silver row - although the pose second from the right is the same as the pose fifth from the right.

I should add that when I did these in One Inch Warrior magazine all those short years ago...I photographed them with siege equipment which was actually from the Marx medieval/Viking fort sets!

Not sure what I was playing at in the top image...trouble with photographing 'off the hoof' without taking notes, but I think the top row are standard, while the under-row show a colour variant (obviously!) and a couple of 'usable' miss-moulds?

Middle shots compares the Giant-marked figures to the real piracies...small HO-sized blobs with unmarked bases.

The final image (a bit washed-out by flash as these images often are - red and yellow...always!) shows darker versions of some of the figures. In the case of the - missing above - yellow one it seems to be down to batch, while the red ones have some black flecks in them and I suspect the plastic was cooked-off.

When I was (briefly) a plastic extrusion operator, I used to get the problem of a brown, darkening line appearing in my extrusions, I'd have to speed the conveyor up a bit (which normally thinned the extrusion to gash quality) and run it as waste until the head cooled down and the mark disappeared. If the mark didn't disappear, I'd have to strip the thing down and clean an - often quite small - burnt speck off the injector head. That's cooking-off...a nightmare!

L is for Little Lions

Lions...Preiser...Preiser lions...hard polystyrene, Railway accessories compatible with European HO gauge, for circuses - not platforms! Wildlife safari parks...they'd work for a safari park...they go well with the Airfix zoo and Tarzan sets too...bargain!

Did I say Preiser? Box ticked...

H is for Hierloom

Well....it's not a toy soldier! It's not a toy or model figure, not a military vehicle, space ship or farm or zoo animal, it's not a woodland creature, an alien or a Little Rubber Guy so what the fuck's it doing here...

...this is a family heirloom, it came over from Southern Germany with the immigrants I call great, great grandparents and is still with us. Recently given its bi-decade soaking with linseed oil, its smelling a bit fishy, but will be there for another generation. Hand-made (probably by Great Great Granddad!) it has a commercially procured cat's bell inside the 'cage' and we used to love rolling it about when we were toddlers!

Luckily, I don't live in the same country as Donald trump so I won't have to pay for a wall round myself, but I do have an inadequate, insular, intolerant, small-c conservative (and big-C!), rancid little-englander of a cockwomble for a Prime Minister, so have to regard this artefact as evidence of my probably not quite yet 'belonging' to the village...although Donald would have to say that of everyone - not on the reservations - in his country if he was honest!

M is for Metallic Metal Metallions

Just a quick scan, I was scanning a bunch of stuff the other day and did this while I was at it. A small range of metal figures called Metallions (metal battalions...geddit!) was issued by Lone Star in the 1970's. They were also issued by Hubley and Kresge (SS Kresge were the forerunner of K-Mart) in the US and included Cowboys, Indians and Pirates along with these Knights.

Six character figures from 'Knights of the Round Table' fame, unlike the Westerners (which were copied from Marx 6" figures) these seem to be relatively original sculpts although one or two look familiar to anyone who knows the Britains Deetail sets. 54mm die-cast Mazac / Zamak alloy, they are then antiqued with a dark varnish wash.

The full story of the figures and ideas on who's were first (not Kinder; that's for sure!) told by Alexander Kutsche is to be found here - in German, but a thorough look at the subject. Small ones can be found here and question marks, overview and sets, Alexander's collecting and origins.

R is for Rollin', Rollin', Rolling, Keep them Wagons Rolling!

I - as those of you who have been following from the start will know - have a soft spot for wagons, especially small scale ones, but most of them are in storage, and most of them were blogged a while ago, but it doesn't stop me setting them up and photographing them from time to time!

So for those who are new followers, or who like me just enjoy wagons, here's a round-up of the Montaplex and early BüM wagons, most of which have appeared once already, but brought together.

Some have separate horses with a distinctive look that sets them apart from all the Giant, Giant-clones and post/non-Giant horses, but most have an integral horse in the manner of Manurba's, but fatter! The wheels are also very easy to recognise with their four-spoke, circus-wagon look and ornate tooling.

So far I've found a covered-wagon, stage-coach and copy of the Matchbox fire-appliance, crewed by astronauts! There is another design, a sort of pick-up truck/trailer thing in one of the Wild West town sets, but it's in storage and looks a bit crap anyway!

A line-up doesn't work properly when you find a yellow (BüM ) one after you've put the others away! Hay Ho...doh! Thanks to Peter Evans for the fire wagon.

F is for Follow-up...Hasbro Star Wars Command

Go on then Hasbro...prove me misinformed - five minutes after I publish!

New Sets Announced

Two big figure sets for 2016...I'll wait 'till they're reduced!

See following 5 posts for significance! But they seem to be bulked re-hashes of existing figures?

2020 - needless to say they failed to prove me wrong (proving me right by default!) and the range sputtered and failed a few months later. :-(

C is for Command...'Star Wars' Command, I - Overveiw

I was quite pleased when these were announced by Hasbro a couple of years ago now, but thought them hideously overpriced (have you seen the price-v-contents of the new Micro-machine sets!) when they arrived and determined not to buy them and to wait until they populated car-boot sales in five to seven years time.

However it seems they have - like the Horrible Histories figures - been pulled before they've had a chance to build a proper fan-base, and just before the movies come out? Madness! Anyway, the local toy chains hereabouts (Entertainer and Smiths) along with Sainsbury's Supermarkets (and other outlets - I'm sure) heavily discounted them and for the last 8 months or so I have been grabbing them one at a time, here and there,  for a half or a third, or less...of their RRP, except the 'Falcon, which was still a bargain.

The five posts below (including this one) are an overview of the sets commonly available in the UK from those above named stores.

This poster-catalogue is included in most of the larger sets - I had to scan it in two and stitch it back together, so it's cropped a bit odd and you can spot the join!

There are two big sets, and three each medium large, medium small and small, they are presented in reverse order in the four posts following this one.

In other parts of the world there have been other sets issued, four 2nd wave figure sets (with one vehicle each) have been available, there's a clone-war figure set and a Jabba/Rancor's Revenge set was cleared in the autumn, so there is more to track down if you're minded.

One each, good guys/bad guys. I have 24 poses of goodies and 26 baddies, but all 'bots are interchangeable, and imagination should allow for spies, undercover agents and turncoats!

Overall however, the bad guys consistently outnumber the good guys, and while it may not matter so much with toy soldiers or war-games models (the 'Allied' commanders get asked to play more games against the plethora of 'German' commanders), here it may have been one of the problems with the range, I doubt it, but Western kids today are quite fair-minded, and with Star Wars, the goddies have identifiable Heroes, there isn't the same imbalence you get with Panzer Black against khaki sacks!

Some of the figures; each set has a painted character figure or two, and then a bunch of what are basically well sculpted, PVC vinyl, sci-fi, 'Army Men'...from a galaxy far away a long time ago! My favourites are the R2 and R5 units...blue is 'good, black is 'bad' and orange? Goes with anyone...the tart!

Vehicles come with Galoob-like stands, or simpler hex-bases. Some of the sets have the daft trolleys seen bottom-left in this collage...because I've edited these five articles in the wrong order to get them stacked-up right for publishing, I've dealt with them further down, but they are a bit daft! The clear plastic bases are hooked onto the trolley. The vehicles all suffer from soft vinyl 'syndrome' and a hot water session will be a must one day.

Small figure sets next...