N is for 'Nother Noah's N'ark!

This is a bit of a rush job, but it adds to the earlier posts, however I'm not going to get the animals out of the bag as I seem to have a couple more of these and I think one of them is loose-complete, so I'll Blog it another day.

This is one of the more complicating sets, as the artwork comes on boxes with completely different contents! However, this is the one we've got, so this is the one we look at, with reason!

Far more packed into slightly more space than this morning's sealed set, including three bags of animals instead of two, 8 figures instead of two, large blow-moulds of rocks and props, palm-trees (6), play-mat and a couple of shrubs!

The bigger bits are all stuffed in the hull, which is upturned onto the deck (face-up on the bottom of the box), the four bags are then stuffed round the sides (on top of the two rock-piles) and the palm-trees rather sqiudged onto the top before the thing is taped closed - presumably while someone-else holds them firmly together!

Mix of medium sized animals, domestic and wild types and while you can see the legacy of Blue Box in some of them others are not the common BB types and painting veers more toward the colourful, the pelican looks more like a RedBox zoo animal. Scale is all over the place with the [2] lions around 1:60th and the [2] lionesses closer to Britains 54mm!

Clearly the four grey monkeys are two genetically-separate pairs!! The rest are common HK-fayre and can't be easily attributed to anyone. Again; mostly identical pairs; so this set has far more animals, but this morning's set had greater effort to produce interesting pairs.

As with the previous bags - multiple multiples, with quads and sextuplets, the sheep are definitely from different sources, the larger white ones being very 'blue box', while the little orange over-sprayed ones are also found in smaller generic carded sets.

Chickens are the later Britains type while the smaller animals are the sub-Blue Box copies we looked at last year. I haven't counted the pigs but there are about 10, in about four designs and the whole bag seems to have been diverted from a Home Farm packing-line!

The Home Farm having been just as much copied and mucked-about with as the Noah's Arks and as common in source-origin - Toy shops, early learning, mail order offers, catalogues &etc. Along with the same Blue Box, Pagget, and EJP boxings (among others - see below)

Larger wild animals and the set of eight Blue Box figures, we had two small tigers in the first bag, so that'll be Sumatra and Java covered? That Noah was thorough, I'll give him that!

Hippo's and Rhino's are identical pairs this time, but both the mouldings seen here made-up one half of the non-matched pairs we saw this morning.

As I said above, I have another complete/near-complete one of these sets and it too has three sets of props, two pale and one dark, so while I got them years apart and from different sources, they must have been from the same original batch! Usually you get two or four or in the case of this morning's sealed one, none!

I think you only got two sets in the Marx original from which these are copied - along with the boat, rock-piles and palm-trees. As I also mentioned earlier, the doors have been glued shut by some idiot running the glue-brush round the base of all four walls without thinking about the doors, which his colleagues carefully designed to slide - as they do on most examples you find, of all set types . . . a real Friday-afternoon job!

Instructions, not included in the smaller set we looked at earlier, and really only of use to the gluer, who ignored them!

And what's this . . . a logo? MRS? Well Mr. Walter; all that stuff about Tai Sang possibly being behind them all, which you pontificated-on earlier today, was bollocks; wasn't it?

Not really - this morning's was also carrying a brand; NMP, both are phantom brands, and to prove the point; share a ship's-wheel design-element!* Which - while it might give succour to TJF (40-years man-and-menace, you know!) and his self-abusing monkey-lizard, re- their 'revelations' about "Port Tain Sang" (still not worth looking-for on a map!) - only rather confirms that one entity is behind these two very different sets with relatively different contents, and/or those branded to more concrete makers or importers, with equally similar box-art or contents.

* Because it was all about the shippers and shipping-agents with these generics . . . geddit!

The set shown in this post can be found with the other, completely different figure set, a third common artwork has the Miniature Play Set Noah's Ark text on a bright pink plaque, with a vista of animals leaving the beached ark, after the flood, contents including some of the animals seen in the two posts today, but figures (a pair) having square bases like those common, poor copies of Blue Box farmers.

I've seen this morning's set with the common Home Farm triple-rabbit runner in orange plastic; I've seen this set with six single moulding trees (instead of the palms) like the two shrubs above but a different species, another with 8 identical brown monkeys, while a same-set box-opening recently revealed the same three-count for blow-moulded timber props and five of the grey 'swimming' apes.

These were very popular sellers, for many years, from probably the early sixties (or 'as soon as' after the Marx one hit the shops?) until about a decade and a half ago, hell; there's probably still a few hiding in the storerooms of older bible book-shops, or the prize-giving cupboards of Sunday-schools!

And they all follow [badly] the pattern of some or all of the Marx set's elements, e.g. ark, roof with twin gable-windows, larger gable over twin sliding-doors, long, thin ramp, large, triple log-props, piles of rocky-outcrop, a bunch of trees and/or shrubs, pairs of animals (domestic and wild), peeps - the smaller sets losing the larger elements excepting the ark, which in every case is a Marx copy.

Ergo; there was a constant stream of contracts for large numbers of dirt-cheap animals, figures and accessories, which would have overlapped as some items ran out sooner than others. More care was exercised over the contents of some; any-old shite was thrown into others.

Those contracts would have gone to any one of several hundred plastics makers with some downtime, and if they couldn't borrow the moulds they copied the mouldings, they used each-other's out-painters and bought their plastic granules and paints from the same service guys, hence dozens of sets of very similar animals,; while the boxes came from the same printers in different batches.

While customers/clients would have wanted a choice of artwork and a choice of pricing-points, result; lots of different-content sets in the same boxes and same-content sets in different boxes! Or . . . same contents / same box; different branding.

Blue Box, 'Hong Kong', 'Macau', EJP, MRS, NMP, Pagett Bros., RedBox . . . and . . . ?

But someone was pulling the strings for most of them and my guess is Tai Sang or one of their subsidiaries.

B is for Biblical Blokes and Babes

A quick look at one family of these Noah's ark figurines, there is another 'family' (single moulding or 'monoblock' figures, unpainted with round bases, but I can't find them, so we'll look at them another time), these are all - with the exception of Noah - taken from the original Marx sculpts.

A pictogram of this particular 'family' of Noah and his kin, with probably newest at the top and oldest toward the bottom . . . at the top we see the same Noah we saw earlier this morning, with the wife he is sometimes accompanied by, having no base and a pair of healthy feet, if rather chunky on her, having been added to a sculpt which didn't originally have them; they being covered by a flowing dress/toga!

Below them are a late set of the plug-based figures, six poses with simple paint, these are all copies of the old Marx poses, unlike the Noah. Further down are earlier versions with other paint schemes with an extra colour (belts, collars etc...) and - finally - a third version of Mrs. Noah, having her base-plug spigots closer-together.

The blue guy, extreme left is another pose from the next shot's full set . . .

. . . which seem to be from Blue Box, or at least Tai Sang, having the same base marking as their cowboys, knights and the equally pink-plastic road-menders we looked at a year and a half ago in the Lucky figures overview, where I seem to have awoken the Vichy (and others) to Scalextric!

Because I'd half done this article before things started coming out of storage the 1st image above was going to be tacked-on to the earlier post as a vague comparison, but then I found - and photographed separately - these two lots, being a whole set and the bag of 'bits & pieces'.

We now have four men and four women, all from the original Marx Miniature Masterpiece sets but in soft polyethylene. These are probably the older sculpts with the changes to bases, Noah's wife[s] and the invention of the older Noah being later developments.

Above; Classic Blue-Box base mark, below; three versions of Noah's wife.

While Blue Box did mark-up some of the better Noah's Arks, with these figures, I wouldn't mind betting the parent (Tai Sang) is behind most of them. This is not to suggest they are all made by them, but that they had a hand in their constant production (and changes) for the many European/US importers shipping them. Most of the animal sculpts used - whether good or poor - have their origins in Red Box/Blue Box stuff and all the figure generations have a lineage from these.

I'm sure also they wouldn't want to be directly associated with a lot of the sets, some of which are complete shite, but when you go on the HK-Chinese social-media sites researching toys you find that while they often mention Marx and sometimes mention firms like Harbour Lights, Herald Holdings or even Soma, it's Blue Box who get the most mentions (not Tai Sang, the buildings all had Blue Box on them!), and that's because they were one of the power-houses in the colony and would have many contacts (and contracts!) with the shippers, FOB'ers, importers, exporters and others who seem to have been copying their animals, figures and large cubit-by-cubit vessel, willy-nilly? I think there was a nod and a wink tipped from Tai Sang for most of these sets? There's another clue below.

These are copied from the missing (unpainted) figures and come from Pagget Brother's take; Cat No.5009465 - Noah’s Ark, which I obtained back when I was a small-scale collector, so I fear the contents went to the great polymer god in the sky, many moons ago! However, note the strange protrusions on the base of the Noah figure . . .

. . . which seem very similar to the protrusions on the bases of the two foot figures associated with the Einco bagged Indian Village set. That set came with the horses I call 'Pony', which also come in Ri-Toys branded sets (without the foot figures!), Rado carried a lot of the copies of Blue Box (including the French Resistance figures!) and ran the old Marx moulds for Marksmen until everyone piled-in and the market collapsed! It's another clue see; Marx-Blue Box-Ri Toys . . . wheels within wheels!

By the time you read this I will have posted two articles on the small-scale HK 'But Is It Giant' Blog pertaining to these Indian figures.

N is for Noah's Entirely Fictional Nonsense Boat!

After the Rain on Saturday I was starting to wonder if the drought might be followed by a flood, but I'm still here and no large wooden structures are going-up locally, cubit-by-cubit, but you never know . . . Link to [well meaning but deluded] loons and more sensible money-hungry Dutchman.

There are so many of these and the contents vary so much between same artwork presentations and different boxes there's no point doing more that paying lip-service to them until I'm able to compare them all (which will be in about 20-years time at current rates!), and these are in an odd order as I'm posting them in the order they were shot, which is this post (in the queue since December last), the next post (an overview of some of the figures) which was shot in bits over time and then another set, shot the other day from the storage archive, but probably slightly earlier than this one.

Sealed when bought, if they are not sealed they are not worth buying as the contents are so crap to begin with, if you can't assure yourself they are original, they won't say anything about anything, other than that there were loads of these sets issued by Bible book-shops, mail-order sellers, catalogue stores, corner-shops and 'all else'.

This is one of the latter sets, with a boat and two bags of pretty basic animals, Noah and his wife. No boat-props, no rock-lumps blow-moulded in finest ethylene, no trees or shrubs, no sons or their wives, no &etc.

Boat is in one colour, earlier sets (including the lovely Marx original) tend to two or three colours, but all the elements are here and at least the doors work on this sample - this afternoon's post has them lazily glued together, closed!

Contents of the 'wild animal' bag, the animals have probably been sourced from more than one source (in order to get the different poses as much as anything else) and this is marked with the tigers and zebras particularly. The monkey and turtle sculpts are identical pairs though.

I'm not going to try listing all the European donor-brands, but you can see they are poorer that the Blue Box originals or Arco copy-animals from which they were nicked, those fellow Hong Kong brands having taken then from Britains, Timpo, Elastolin et al.

Farm/domestic and oddments-bag! The figures are particularly interesting in this set as they are a crossover, we'll look at them in more detail later this morning, but suffice to say the Mrs Noah (with stand) is taken from another set of figures, to which the Noah seems to have been added, scaled to account for her base, but it's not as simple as that. I've seen similar horses with livestock wagons in Kamco train-sets.

The giraffes have definitely come from two sources, with different colours of plastic and different 'crazy-paving' stencils, the alligators/crocodiles (it's the bible so; crocodiles, I guess!) are subtly different and the elephants are both 'baby-elephants' in/from other HK play-sets.

The lioness is also commonly found as a black-panther, in which guise I've had one for a while now, while the tigers follow the giraffes in colour, as well as being different scales and both rather male-looking, with only one getting a white mane; or do tigers have beards? The rhino's have the same plastic colours as the elephants, and all four have had their eyes painted-in at the same time in the same orange-red (a Tai Sang / Blue-Box / RedBox trait?).

The other 'big' animals, all pretty common as 'unknowns' in loose lots, or carded to small sets of generics and again some may be from two sources (the kangaroos for instance), but the turtles are mere duplicates! The hippo's are slightly more interesting though . . .

. . . as they have the remains of a marking, which while not clear on either, both seem to include the date 1972, which would suggest this set is later; from '73 or '74'ish? It's certainly one of the commoner sets, and there's usually one or two on Feebay in any given 10-day period.

The larger domestic animals betray their origins as 2nd/3rd-generation Blue Box copies with Britains, Gem and somebody-else as original donors. And like the elephants - the horses and cows here are calves and foals elsewhere, in other sets!

The two figures again and the duplicated, smaller animals, we looked at a 4th (or higher) generation copy of the monkey with the circus set a couple of days ago; compared to that grey one, this is quite a good sculpt, but still not a patch on the original.

With the vast number of late version Britains chickens coming out of Hong Kong it's nice to see the old ex-hollow-cast 1st version getting pirated as well!

News, Views Etc . . . Charbens

I've found a better selection of the Charbens US GI / khaki infantry figures from the Timpo sculpts and put them in the correct slot on the Khaki Infantry Page.

N is for Ninjamites!

Giveaway premiums across Europe, blind-bagged in Italy I think (ours are in a soft PVC polymer), they were also available in the US in a rigid-plastic as boxed-tray and blister-card sets (see link at end) with glow-in-the-dark paint-highlights.

A small sample, but they are near-deforms, with scale a bit 'loose' (30/35mm) so it's as many as I need, given that the box is now ticked and a few-more will come in with mixed lots in the years to come!

Originating in 1985; I think most of mine were from Mr. Lucky bags in the mid-late 1990's?

Soupie nailed the pose-count and US-side of things here, he also has more links to various other relevant sites.

And no! I have no idea why one of them has six arms! I'll have a guess that it's a bed-bug 'mite' in-joke!

N is for Ninja Fighters

These came in the day after the start of Rack-toy month, courtesy of Peter Evans, made by Tai Sang's RedBox and brought to the UK via those consummate rack-toy importers Grossman - or HGL as they are now branded - and I photographed them the next day; since when they have been stuck in the queue!

A 12th figure is out there somewhere; eleven is an odd set-count! Diminutive at around the 40mm mark, they match a set of similar pirates we looked at last year on TLAPD in silver, which helps ID them in the question-mark department. As RedBox they came originally in a lovely little play-set with atmospheric scenery pieces you can see here about halfway down the post.

Simple, clear China mark; the detail is there under/behind the difficult to discern glossy-black or red plastic and they would paint-up well, if  a little child-like, which is more due to the loose, baggy clothing than any fault with the anatomy . . . arms a bit short; maybe?

Generic card suggests they should be available elsewhere - look for them near you if your 'thing' is ninja fighters!

News, Views Etc . . . Festival Products Inc.

Right - I'm running hideously late, but have lots 'in the bag' for later in the week, suffice to say I'm throwing up Monday's posts for today and Yesterday's for tomorrow, and them tomorrow I should have time to sort the pile! eMails tomorrow (New York - Got, Thanks - Artist, Got, Yes, Weekend, anyone else -  will read/reply tomorrow!), well . . . I forgot it was a Bank-holiday!

Timpo as American rack-toys, over on the A-Z pages; Festival Products Inc., more info would be appreciated, but it's a start! It's funny isn't it; I start loading stuff from the archive and he decides to photograph an instruction-sheet - badly! Too funny.

T is for Three-ring Circus

Except it's only got the one ring and a small one at that, but the magic of photography means we can have a three-ring circus if we want one!

Bought this at that last Birmingham show in 2011, and though I'd not sorted it, but I had slipped it into the mixed civilian and sports box, mainly because it had come apart so was easy to slip down the side of the tubs with the pack of figures on top of the mixed circus tub! Luckily it still holds together for a photo, and I scanned it flat at the same time.

Three rings; mostly the same-old-same-old copies of Crescent's set, seen before here in miniature and under Maysun and generic HK marks, these are generics, indeed, the performing seal has no marks at all.

But there are other items of less obvious piracy; I love the polar-bear playing the horn, while the animal trainer is looking a tad French or American in origin? I thought the clown might ride the elephant, but actually he only falls off the elephant, but he does stand-up independently, so 'just' a clowning clown!

I have lost track of these, I have a bunch with the unknown dancers, a bunch with the unknown cake-decorations, a bunch with the unknown novelties and a bunch of small-scale/mini's, she has been copied so often it's silly; with Britains, Fontanini and Gem (in addition to Crescent's dancer) to plagiarise, there's bloody hundreds of them!

The day anyone gets a Tiger to balance on four balls for even an instant is probably the day he or she dies a wild and savage death - from a thousand claw-strikes! I think someone misheard an antiques-dealer talking about 'lions-claw ball-feet', too funny? Bear's bloody brilliant!

The monkey can't ride the horse as it's got Crescent's great ostrich-plume 'palm-frond' growing out of its back! However, he does manage to ride the elephant quite well! You can see from these 'bag-opening' mint figures (lots of paint-chips in the bottom of the bag though) that the glossy-plastic monkey has probably been bought-in from a different source to the chalky elephant?

We've seen these two before, they came-in a year or so ago, but they do suggest that the contents list of the above set may be fluid and changeable from batch to batch or even box-to-box?

Crescent clown and 'berserker' conspire to deal with the piracy! And you thought Crescent's clown had a stupid nose!

Because the circus tub was underneath; Not a full set, but under the paint of the bear and the clown are four matching yellow polystyrene (hard plastic) figures who must belong to a larger set.

One's first thought is cake decorations, but they've been glued onto something . . . in fact . . . I vaguely remember removing them from some article or infant toy, I recall the lions paw disintegrated and I had to build it back-up from three crumbly pieces! So there may be something in the files? Music-box, clockwork toy, covered-lid, something like that?

The clown looks well-pleased with himself, but I think the tiger's too close for a clean-shot in the time left-available and a flag saying 'bang' never saved a breakfast from happening - the bear knows exactly what's coming . . . ulp!

Cum'mon lazy-bones', you've got a show to put-on!

M is for Men of Many Origins!

I lied - I managed to get this together late Thursday night, but there's nothing for Sunday and Monday will still be a late post!

When we looked at the Innovative Promotions Inc., / Shell premium 'Men of '76' AWI figures and sets last year (and the year before), slowly building the picture with much help from contributors, I think I mentioned once or twice that I had a few in storage, well; these are they!

They are not quite as I had remembered them, being both disappointing and surprising, some things I thought I had, I don't (must have seen them when they passed through the stock of the dealer I worked for a decade ago), but I'd forgotten a useful, small-sample of the Hong Kong copies, so very much 'swings and roundabouts'.

Small sample of the Shell premiums, looks like the contents of two bags (Shell 7 and 8) and a spare or so?

The carded Men of '76 versions, I'm not sure about the Frenchies with facings in Red and Purple, there may have been some mucking-about and checking with the catalogue and from last year's posts - set seven seems like a likely candidate . . . with a body-swap!

Plus a bunch of 'bits and pieces'; interesting to note that the kneeling Hessian can have high boots or shorter ankle- or George-boots*, all done with paint; over the same moulding.

* Presumably George III . . . like 'Wellington-boots' a few years later? Where Jack fits-in I don't know!

S for Star / Star Toys; shite, utter shite with all-polyethylene mouldings, no arm articulation, unpainted white boots, Japanese Katana-sword (even worse than Innovative's), real 'rack-toy' crap! Their hats fall off, the hair follows, their epaulettes are taking flying-lessons and they are more Timpo than Britains!

Needs work! Even between the Shell and MO76 the hats don't fit or are loose, the foot-spigots are different diameters, so these all have to be sorted very carefully when I have a bit of life to kill!

You may have noticed in one of the 'stash' posts recently tubs of the Timpo and Britains 'donor' versions from the big purchase and I think what I will do is have an AWI page, once these bits and the bits already here are sorted and the two lots of figures brought together.

I'll have a final look at all of them on a new page with the Britains and Timpo at the top, these three in the middle and MPC, & Marx Solids, a few French and Polish-made figures, cake decorations, Accurate &etc - at the bottom?

Plans! You know me and my plans - it'll be unfinished forever!

The sort of detail that page will look at, the Innovative-for-Shell on the left; fine detail, properly marked Innovative Promotions Inc., and nicely finished; In the middle the [also Innovative] Men of '76, the underside has been 'hammered', the holes are larger, the 'soil' pattern on the upper-side is cruder and it's clear that something happened to the tools between the two issues - I think I've raised the point before? It's as if they started again from scratch, copying their own earlier offering!

On the right we see Star's poor imitation of Timpo's base, with a third hole for the card's holding-peg and the odd 'chin-straps' at either end.