Continuing to look toward Lucky toys 'proper' and back at Dinky, this is one of the more
complicated posts in the series as Blue
Box put in an appearance and while it's easy to say "Those are Blue Box and those aren't, those are Lucky and those aren't, those are Dinky and those aren't"; the problem is all the 'aren'ts'
add-up to at least a half-a-hill-of-generic-beans!
And some of those 'generic beans' may have
come from Tai Sang or Lucky Group manufacturing plants!
We looked briefly at these the other day,
and this is a quick reminder of the Stadden-sculpted mechanic poses from Dinky's accessory set 009 Service Station Personnel, and we
are going to get bored of looking at them in a minute . . .
. . . on the way though we'll just tick
these off as they play no further part in the story (except the wheelbarrow!
This is a late one with grey wheel, early issues had the tyre painted black),
taken from two other Dinky sets: 010 Road Maintenance Personnel and 778 Road Repair Warning Boards, these
are some of the pieces not copied by the Hong Kong pirates.
To go with the bits above were five
road-workers (all from set 010), my better sample is in storage, so I only have
these broken ones to work with at the moment (there are warning lanterns and
smaller signs missing too), but you get the idea!
Little rack-toy sets included the soft
plastic generics in the centre-row of the main image, while Blue Box copied them in hard polystyrene
plastic as 35mm figures and soft polyethylene plastic as 45mm figures, all in a
grey base material.
Blue
Box also copied the mechanics (as did Lucky), in blue styrene, we will look at
them next . . .
Getting bored of the mechanics? We're not
halfway through this yet! Blue Box
added a fifth pose (third-in top row) a variation of 'windscreen polisher'
which I haven't managed to tie-down yet, but I'm sure it will turn-out to be
based on a Western design?
A generic set was copied (bottom image)
from Blue Box, being slightly smaller
and of poorer quality, with larger sets also available, but probably taken from
Lucky's larger 'originals'! One of
these can be seen to the right of two Blue
Box figures in the middle image.
Labelled line-ups need little blurb, note
that the Lucky poses have the same
square bases as the firemen we looked at yesterday, but their markings are
in-line with other Lucky civilians
(circular indents), not the firemen's four, square, variants.
I used to wonder at the poor sculpt/register of
the windscreen polisher's cloth, but now realise it's almost as bad on the
original Dinky sculpt and is representing a round sponge!
With regard to the generics, people will
tell you that the act of pantographing reduces the size by x-amount, you'll
find variations of it throughout the hobbies literature, but in point of fact
pantographs are only as good as their operator, first and foremost they are
adjustable scaling tools, so if they 'always' made a 1:1 copy 1 or 2 or however
many-mm's smaller, you would set that into the machine to make sure it didn't.
A good copyist can therefore copy to any
other scale with accuracy, the fact that HäT's
ancient artillery ended-up two sizes was because the Chinese pantograph operator
wasn't paying attention when he transferred the masters to the block, not
because H or his sculptor did anything wrong at the US end.
The window polisher has been reduced by
less that the oil-can guy, suggesting that the pantograph was changed between
jobs, or two were used separately, the point being they ended-up different
sizes for any one of a number of reasons; that pantographs 'always' leave the
new item smaller isn't one of them, indeed; a pantograph can make the new
product bigger if the operator wants it to!
The three base marks used by figures in
this post don't conform to the firemen or the rest of the Lucky stuff (still to come) but two of them will be recognised from
past Blue Box posts with the third (far left) is from some of the generics.
Now - now you're hating the mechanics! The
Blue Box (middle) have the same HONG KONG as their 45mm ACW and Wild West, but
of more interest is that the generic (left) has the same mark as the soft
plastic, unpainted 30mm GI's, suggesting a link back to Blue Box with is more
than just copying?
Others - particularly the larger ones
(right) - have no mark and smooth undersides.
Other generics (top left) have a single Marx-like release-pin mark . . . and
some Marx poses appear in the mix!
But knowing Blue Box supplied the Sunshine (and other - can't remember the
name) series' to Marx, it's easy to
see these may have been supplied likewise, especially the pink ones in the main
image, which also have the HONG KONG mark and were issued with large
push-and-go toys in Marx graphics in
hard plastic (with a standard Marx
base mark) and these - soft plastic - ones may have been supplied to Marx toward the end?
The two Marx-like
poses are to the right with surveyor's pole and pick-axe; you can see that
while they are from the same set, they are a higher level of quality as far as
sculpting goes. The other two poses in that line-up are taken from Triang's motor-racing set, another link
with the forthcoming Lucky large
scale.
This sample is small as it only contains
the scrapings of the last five years, the rest are in a Marx box in storage. Also another look at the Blue Box copies of the Dinky road-menders.
Cropped from larger Internet images (all
un-watermarked auction/sales shots) to hide non-pertinent information, these
give an idea of the range of the mid-sized generics available out there, being
hard plastic makes finding them undamaged a lifelong search, but you can see
painted and unpainted versions of the Dinky/Marx
road-mender poses, while the larger orange figures are quite recent rack-toys
with naff polyethylene rally-cars, crude, oversized road-signs and a copy of
the Blue Box copy of a Western (Corgi or Spot-On?) car inspection-ramp . . . and the wheelbarrow!
Because - like the World Dolls/Dancers -
these ongoing posts have been in preparation for some time, a few more figures
have come in since I started - with a big photo-shoot several years ago; these
are they, shot the other day.
Top left is a paint variation (broken
again!), top right a better pump-nozzle but broken base, middle left is a
plastic colour variant showing the same darker reddish-pink you also find with
the cowboys and some (early - Singapore/Jean)
knights from Blue Box, while the
colour range from the soft plastic 'cheepie' generics has increased!
Also a cross-over or intermediate figure
has turned up, bigger than the larger generics, smaller than the lozenge-based Lucky Toy figure he's copied from at
around 45mm, I suspect he's another more recent figure from a rack-toy
'playset'. Although he copies the Lucky
base, it's unmarked, spray-painted and with less well-defined corners?
