J is for Juguetes Alni

A return visit to the Blog for this Argentinean toy producer, and frankly, they have managed to beat the level of poor quality shown in the first visit with this set of 'Soldiers and Armour'.

Even painted-up and given a diorama background, they manage to make the Atlantic AFV's look sensible! The wheels though look very useful, nice sculpts and I can think of several contemporary toys that would benefit from a tyre-change with these!

The picture doesn't improve when you get the bag open! The figures missing (seen in the artwork); seated and with carbine across body, are both seen in the previous set we looked at here, and seem to make the pose total seven figures as six mouldings.

Shades of Monogram/Revell and both Marx and MPC, can be seen in the sculpts but they appear to be 'based-on' rather than straight pantograph-copies. The ammo boxes are very crude and differ from the round-topped 'pirate' chest seen last time.

A universal 'cradle' takes various items either as direct plug-ins, or attached to a variety of plug-in spindle mountings, swivels or clamps. The rocket has the same tail as last time, but a sharper point and longer middle-bit!

If Alni was teaching young Argentines this is what armies were made of in the 1970's, it's no wonder the Falkland Islands are still called the Falkland Islands! That'll upset some, but really it takes a special kind of stupid to out under-perform the very worst of mid-70's Hong Kong rack-toys, which this set manages!

F is for Follow-up - Supreme / SP Toys as Halsall

I said I'd probably get one, and I went back for it the other day. I only bought the one, as Brian hasn't replied to my reply to his comment - There are three left and I'm over there next Friday if you want me to get them, I can bring them to PW, Brian?

Better shot of the carded set and a close-up of the two more anachronistic poses in the set, both actually taken from the Greek set, not the over-sized medievals. In the Greek sets they get slide-on hoplon shields missing from this issue.

The full set, painting is restricted to all-over silver and a moss-green on one side of the shield, which in the interior for three of the figures; exterior for the fourth.

The item which seems to have attracted Brian, and which I also quite like, despite being almost as anachronistic as the Classical Greek 'officers'!

It's a larger, early, banded medieval cannon, shoe-horned into the cradle of a catapult or ballista! Not as fanciful as it appears perhaps, as when these 'new tech's' first hit the 'high street' you're actual Robber Baron is more likely to afford one than the local Robin Hood, William Tell or Theiry la Frond! Consequently if the 'good guys' capture one, they may well need to house it in one of their old siege-engine frames! Hey - it's about imagination - they're toys!

You can see that as a toy it has been issued as a catapult as well, with mounting brackets along the back frame, and some sort of trigger at the front. It also had a 'recoil' pad in the centre of the cross bar to take the shock of a catapult's arm, yet the moulding also has the cradle for the gun, so was obviously designed with both versions in mind.

The other nice touch for such a dual-use equipment (where's the UN inspectors when you need them, is this a Matrix Churchill piece?!!) is that it's modelled as being mostly wrought-iron in construction, not the heavy timbers of earlier medieval or 'Ancient' siege machines - a surprising effort of design for such a cheap rack-toy, no?

If anyone has a picture of it in its catapult variant, that would close the chapter on it?

A re-shoot of the previous post's comparison/line-up, but with both the new set's figures and the ones I mentioned last time but couldn't find on the Blog. I still can't - so they must be tagged under some minor importer (I Blogged them about 3 years ago I think?), but they are the same as the Halsall set, only more poses and a more liberal application of paint in red and blue as two groups of protagonists.

There are so many now they over-filled their tub, so have left the 'Mixed Medieval' box and been given their own smaller box!

F is for Food Fighters!

I regaled you with the great Christmas food-fight at Wavell Barracks ages ago (link here if I can find it), but over the years there have been others - the weekly Sunday marmalade-filled bread-roll 'grenade' exchange at Friend's School when on dinning-hall cleaning duties were memorable and then there was the Great Porridge Strike of '76, when even Mr. D. Horn (maths) no relation to Mr. I. Horn (Latin) refused to eat the golf-ball infested muck, causing Mrs. Hooper (headmaster's wife - and probably related to Satan) to turn the colour of a nuclear-beetroot in meltdown - if you've ever seen one; that is!

So you can imagine how delighted I was to spot these on John's (pts52 on feeBay) stall at Sandown Park the other day for less dough than a TV dinner, however, it wasn't about fighting with food, but rather fighting on it!

Loosely based on the old Matchbox US Infantry sculpts, three of them have the same legs and they all seem to have got their weapons from the A-Team's armory - chrome-plated Ruger Mini-14's (fired it!) and some cheap, stamped-tin, South American SMG- haha!

If anything they loosely resemble 1970's Israeli troops, but then they are 'designed' by one Rafael Morgan - could that be a clue or am I open to a charge of anti-Semitism for even thinking such a thing? Actually he's Brazilian!

Right - I've got the grey ones, I need a set of green ones or the fight's not going to happen; on food, with food or about food! Doh!

M is for "♫ Motor'bikin'! ♫ . . ♫ . . ♫ Motor'bikin'!! ♫ . . .

. . . ♫ Moving on the Queens High'way; Lookin' Like'a Streak-a'Lightning ♫"

It is a mystery to me how this stuff comes in, it only seems a few weeks since I did a round-up of motorcycles thinking "That's it for a while", and damn-me if I haven't got a whole lot more to share with you! And to show it isn't really a mystery, but rather synergy; these all piled-up in the last couple of weeks!

This was first, an email from Brian Berke with a few 'shelfies' and a note to the effect he knew I liked motorbikes on the Blog and thought this was worthy of my attention. It is! And it's also the 'other' FunTastic, so I'll have to be careful with the tags!

It says 'three styles' and what looks to be an identical one is seen below, with a different colour-way, whether that's it, or whether there are different models and colour-ways leading to the necessity to collect a whole fleet is something the Atlantic will prevent me investing in a search of the definitive answer to - no bad thing - but thanks for the shot Brian!

At the other end of the spectrum in every sense is this Holgar Eriksson designed generic 'combat troops' machine in 30mm lead. . . weird for having an obvious sticky-out, kick-stand (both sides) but no sticky-out handle-bars? Unmarked by dint of its design, I'm assuming Comet/Authenticast, but it is just a likely to be SAE?

We've seen the silver chap (recently I fear?) but the gold one with blue wheels turned-up at Sandown the other day, so a fleet of these seems to be in my future . . . oh lordy!

While below them two more [purported to be] Airfix bikes to add to the - currently in storage - bag, sans riders (but that made them cheap!), they normally have a chap in a sort of field-cap/service hat, but there may be other riders.

Because by Monday just-gone, I could see a bike post building; when I saw these I nearly bought them on the spot . . . but went back and got them first-thing Tuesday! From a larger set of Iwaco-type erasers (a pound for 6) we will look at separately; they're too cool for driving-school!

The gods of space-saving: Crammy and Pylitup, decided I couldn't add these to the stack, so I photographed them on Adrian's Mercator Trading stall at Sandown Park - French, look like Cofalux (?), it's very similar to the damaged black one we saw here a while ago (separate handlebars are even closer) and the pointy-hands of the riders suggest I have a spare military rider somewhere!

And as the Belgians were stalled-out behind us - with some nice modernist melamine shelving - I took the opportunity to shoot them on a contemporaneous, '50's-feeling, patterned-background! But I forgot the jiggit on the camera-lens, Doh!

The interest element here is that you have polystyrene bikes, polyethylene handlebars and vinyl-rubber figures! The comedy element here is that they are motorcycles? Presumably the ladder folds into the side-car and the hoses are micro-bore, everyone's using micro-bore now!

It was the best way of getting more desirable toy subjects (police, fire and even ambulances) into a budget for every pocket, like all those family-saloons and estate-cars/shooting-brakes sold as Fire Chief's. I think we had more fire chiefs in our toy box than all other fire vehicles put together . . .

"Hey Chief!"

"Hey yer'self Chief! Oh, look here's the Chief coming..."

"You Chiefs over there, can you grab the County Fire Chief when he gets here; and go and blow on that fire, see if you can put it out?"

"Who made you Chief?"

"Who made you Chief?"

"Who made you Chief?"

"Who made you Chief?"

F is for Fifes; Fifes & Drums . . . actually; Mostly Drums!

Did I suggest 'that was it' for AWI yesterday? I lied, just makin'itup as I go along! I mentioned the missing set of Spirit of '76-influenced, baseless cake-decorations the other day, and Mr. Nevins sent these as a set of bookends, or a full-stop to his own, other AWI submissions!

As I can't shoot comparisons due to their being the other side of the pond and finding me boat'less and as I have blurbed the genre to the nth-degree now, I can only thank Bill for sending them and post them here for everyone to enjoy.

Bill says they are about 40-mil, so the same size as the little, based-set we saw the other day, although they look bigger in the photographs - in part due to the slightly better painting of these I think? 20-11-18 - They are 50mm.

Also they look to be PVC/vinyl? In fact they look remarkably like the 40mm Roman's from Macau via Portugal, or Culpitt's cowboys and Indians - both also sold by Super Plastic in France, but those all have bases of one kind or another, so I guess it's only a similarity!

Well - I thought I was joking about drums the other day, but they do seem to have featured heavily in these posts! Cheers Bill (and Brian from last year!) I think that's all of them now?

NO! It isn't! These are a fourth set; the ones in Plastic Warrior 150, shown by Chris Goddard are quite different! I'm now looking for two sets without bases in the 40mm bracket! But at least we've managed to blog one here, today!