J is for Jean Höffler - 2: Wild West Hong Kong

The second part of this trio of articles is the Hong Kong production and while I don't have many of these either, I have picked-up enough for a ramble through them!

The commonest form of these are the brown Indian and creamy-white Cowboy versions, which are usually unpainted and while there might be a commercial aspect to these Indians, I'm pretty sure the cowboys have been home-painted by a colour-blind hippy on 'speed'!

These are the same figures but the cowboys came in blue, and they are the bare, undecorated version you normally find the others in too. Horses are similarly marked and are found in B&W with the cream/brown batches as well.

We saw the full sample of these when I found them, or soon after, they were a Sandown Park show-find back in the autumn. Lots of new colours but the same base marking, the cowboys having a smaller pallet of tans to the Indians' explosion in Laura Ashley's studio!

Having got used to the cream/brown set in passing (before I collected large scale), it's been fun finding the other colours as I collect, and these have come in as ones, so can't be placed (well; I could put the second one from the left with the crazy-painted ones . . . after a clean!) but are still more colours. Note that some (two or three?) of the cowboys have small recessed holes in them which might be release-pin marks, but could have another purpose?

The marking is the same for all three 'batch' finds and the singles, being a full capital MADE IN HONG KONG and a larger numeral, which - so far - have been limited to single-numbers; nothing over 9?

The pose count on these HK issues is less than the Jean originals, and I suspect two tools with cavity-numbers 1-8 and a horse mould . . . 1-4 or 1-6? If you followed the link to TSHQ in part one, you'll have found the horses are hard to tell apart but there are six in the original set, I'm not sure how many there are in the Hong Kong output.

Going back to the painted Indians in the first shot, this chap also seems to have been commercially decorated . . . and modelled on a young Michael Palin?!!

Hong Kong-Jean / Jean-Hong Kong

You may have noticed that so far I carefully haven't used the words 'copy' or 'piracy' with regard to the figures in this post, preferring to use instead 'output', 'issue' or 'production', this is because I can't really say these are copies, they seem to be from the old German tools?

There are some slight differences (the grass on the spearman's base above is short-/miss-moulded for instance) which could be excused by the age of the tools, slack-production/QA, or just different cavities, but the main details, fine etched (feathers etc...) sculpting and over-all size seems to be the same and I wonder if the moulds found their way to the Colony at some point?

It's true that a skilled pantograph operator can do same size copies, it's true that a high-tech operation could make masters from high-quality moulds taken from original figures (the hollow-cast guys do/did it all the time with Plasticine in Lego or balsa dams), but it's equally true that people like Marx moved their moulds to HK all the time.

If it did happen, and I'm not 'calling it'; it's only as clear as mud, it would seem to have involved only part of the tool-set, the common (or earlier?) [based] figures and one (or more?) of the horse moulds, as far as I know the Hong Kong sets never come with HK-marked versions of the wagons, guns, limbers, Tipis or the rather juvenile canoe etc...?

Changing the base plate to read MADE IN HONG KONG from W. GERMANY is the easy bit! I don't know, but I do know it's too close to call.

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Epilogue - I was looking at a Nigrin premium horse and an unpainted Jean knight figure with a blanked-off base, a week or so later and it struck me that it might be the 'premium' tool which ended up in Hong Kong (if one did), to wit; Jean themselves may have arranged a duplicate mould for producing the variously, differently-marked premiums, having a set of single base-sections with each mark (De Gruyter, Eri, Reindorf etc... Peter Konrad's books list over a dozen and we've seen Korona here passim) which were easily changed, that kind of thing? And that that was what ended up in HK or even/ultimately Peru? The Premiums are only credited with three of the six horse poses - I believe?

J is for Jean Höffler - 1: Wild West Jean Originals

I don't have a very good sample of Jean originals, a few odds and sods which have come-in with mixed lots and a bunch of mounted which I think came as a single lot? As a result I shot all the copies and things, but then ended-up with too many images for a post, so broke it into three, leaving the rathey-crappy sample of Jean originals as an intro'!

The samples we will be looking at - with a few additions - there are smaller copies, lots of them, but they are of little merit and poor quality so can wait for another day! The trouble with the originals (as far as my acquiring them goes) is that there are loads of them and the best place for a check-list/images is Kent's page.

My cowboys; the two prone ones seem to be additional poses, less easy to find and mine look to have never been painted, I also think they were on another tool, while scale wise they are a little larger too, but probably the same sculptor? The white horse has no signs of paint either.

Foot Indians; hardly worth showing and no prone figure, but I have the female with papoose which is another less common sculpt so you win some, you lose some!

However I can chase down Mr. Custer and give him a good spanking, as I have  a decent load of mounted Natives, albeit rather tatty on the paint front, but rather like Crescent or late Cherilea (&etc!) the later, shiny polyethylene meant the paint stayed on long enough to get them to the shops, and little else! It's fair to say these are play worn, and some of the horses have silver manes!

I shot this on John Begg's stand at Plastic Warrior a couple of years ago, and the horses are of note as we'll see some similar ones soon with a question-mark over them. Similar to the Cofalux one, but with a really naff slot-base system for the horse-team.

Variations on a theme; A Hong Kong version in pink (next post) stands with the Manurba-Big swivel-waist and a 30mm figure (another 'left-hooker'), both also used (like the set we're looking at here) as various premiums and in the Wundertüten 'sweetie' bags.

So that's a bit of a box-ticker, but it gets them out there and we'll look at the Hong Kong marked ones next.

E is for Eye Candy!

Funnily enough the rhino's I posted in a hurry one evening a while back generated a mass of traffic which suggested if I want fame I should drop the soldiers, the spacemen and the everything else and concentrate on unknown animals! And there wasn't a bot-spike, it was small hit-numbers over several days?

Tigers! Not because I'm moving to animals, or want fame, but because I took it the other day and these shots are always fun for seeing what you can find!

The one at the top was flocked, but the flocked flocker has lost most of his flocking, while I can't decide whether the green one was once flocked or is a knock-off of the He-Man battle-cat? Or a Thundercat . . . one of them was green I think?

There's nothing exciting here . . . just tigers, mostly Britains copies!

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

From Euro-Quality to Hong Kong Shite!

Oh What Fearful Symmetry

Has Worn-off Your Poly-Physiognomies!

News, Views Etc . . . Houskeeping - Tags

The magic BTWifi-with-FON I found the other day dissipated yesterday, just vanished, only reappearing at 8-30'ish last night by which time I'd lost my mojo for posting stuff, so I started cleaning-up the tag list, which is like painting the Forth Bridge!

I've checked and tweaked the numerals, A and B, and broken the previously-86 'Ancient' tags into more manageable chunks, by nation-covered, the hard one being the Herald sculpts which are double tagged Ancient Greece and Troy as 54mm or copies, but tagged Ancient Rome as Giant or sub-piracies, due to their packaging making it clear they are meant to be Romans . . . or Auther'ians!

Enjoying the torture, I will stick at it for the rest of the day, you won't really notice anything at all, but over time it will get easier to find things, and I'll - hopefully - excise the odd typo or duplication which has crept in?

I might post a little-something later if I get bored, and will post tonight for tomorrow, if the signal doesn't drop out again?

L is for Lucky Lorry

I shot this at Sandown Park on Adrian Little tables, but little did I know at the time how apposite it might prove to be only a few weeks later, as the measures to control Corvid-19 bring the haulage industry to its knees and their own 'professional body'; the Road Haulage Association, mutters darkly about  a possible need for nationalisation.

Because - if I'm remembering it correctly - BRS (as they were called when I was little) were the national, tax-payer owned transport organisation? I think they were being privatised while I was still little, as I don't remember any great 'sell-off' under Thatcher, so it was probably sold piecemeal to regional independents and gradually scaled-down to nothing?

Presumably some leftover from WWII, I think their wagons were blue but a little (a lot?) darker than the shade chosen by The Lucky Toys for this model, although I equally remember tarp's of exactly this colour among all the greasy, charcoal, navy and turd-brown ones!

Under the corona virus pandemic we have seen how both private railways and bus operators cannot survive, giving full-light to the lies of 41 years of outsourced, downsized, privatisation and sell-off. Lies which were identified as such at the time, but sadly, the Tories have had the newspaper editors on their side!

Quite apart from the selling-off of all our war-store depots and all our laboratories and the obvious failure of rail and bus networks, all the other obvious failings of our nation in this crisis can be laid at the feet of the Tories, and while 'New Blair' is hardly an innocent party, it is the people in charge - right now - who are responsible for that fact that while we (a developed, '1st World' country) have no face-masks to speak of, Turkey (regarded as a 2nd World developing nation) has a compulsory face-mask policy and enough face-marks to adhere to such a dictate?

A national haulier or the mechanism to create one at short notice is something we should have had, or had ready. That we had no such organisation, no national lab's, no face-masks, is all you need to know about the Thatcherite-Reganomic desire to protect the citizens they want to vote for them and their Trumpundbrwreakshit.

We were offered a part in a pan-European respirator procurement program last  the other week, and turned down the opportunity, now we're taking 200 off the Yanks . . . who need them just as badly? Capitalism has been failing us since before the crash of 2008, now democracy itself is failing.

Enough politics for now, although there will be more . . . it's my Blog!

Look! The treasure-chest from the Dinky Spectrum Maximum Security Car, cleverly copied to make a lorry load! And many thanks to Adrian Little for letting me shoot this.

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Th above obviously written while I was off line, it's all here;

https://www.brs.co.uk/page/103/history

And I wouldn't recognize one of it went past the window as I type! They were ours and if they'd been retained, we'd have had them when we need them! Sweden (who own BRS!) haven't gone into lockdown, because they are a high-tax/high-welfare society with spare capacity in their health services, New Zealand have a low death rate because they moved sharpish and hard (instead of watching and waiting like Boris!), we aren't 'great' anymore, we're just breaking Britain, struggling with the dichotomy between true democracy and big business' interests.

News, Views Etc . . . Airfixfigsblog Update

I've added a couple more comparisons to that page;

http://airfixfigs.blogspot.com/2020/02/1977-cold-war-modern-british-infantry.html

Nothing exciting, but is indicates how big the 'Super Deetail' were, even when compared with the later spinner-arm swivelidiots!

M is for Military Force from 'Mini Wheels'

The moniker used by a variety of sets from the small generics we looked at here, through this intermediate sized 'play set' to the big-box huge-box sets Wilkinson's (Wilco) carried each Christmas for several seasons around the turn of the century. Twenty years . . . this shite's been in the collection for twenty years; where does the time go!

In its entirety; there are 29 items, small and large, 32 if you count the tractor/trailers and rocket separately, and at half-price I must have paid £2.49p or - more likely - £2.50p! Which is no more than 8p per item . . . bargain!

Shipped-in by Ackerman, this is SP Toys/Supreme's sojourn into small scale, with decently scaled 1:72 scale AFV's (for the most part), but with oversized figures and undersized aircraft.

The whole caboodle came in sand (as here) or green plastics/paint-finishes and the jerry-cans are a triple-moulding (only useful for vehicle-loads or enhancing SAS jeeps!), but the oil drums are separate, both are more suitable to 1:35th scale modelling, while the figures are the poorest thing Supreme have churned-out to date and were only ever going to be box-tickers' in collector's lists!

Because we've looked at the AFV's (a long time ago, but fully; Tracked AFV's, Wheeled 'Softskins', Articulated Trucks and Engineering/Plant) and the figures (link at the start), and because I junked all the aircraft from the sets I broke-up (leaving the one above!) the only things left to look at are the street furniture (another day, there's a tub-full somewhere) and the low-relief building fronts.

The small sets got one of the little US-style 1930's urban 'station houses' with attached garage-door, with red and blue versions for fire and police sets, the medium sets all got the equally American-looking 'small-town municipal' town hall/public library type, while the huge trays Wilkinson carried had two or all three, which sometimes included the European barrack-style vehicle/MT shed or Fire Station with three garage units.

The flag is more often absent than present, I suspect that due to its propensity to break-off, it was discontinued? And note you get both unit command buildings and places where Henry VIII could store the cerebral body-parts of his victims!

An alternative inclusion in the larger sets was a ruined central-European farmhouse which came (as here) in dun and cream, or a more traditional black timber on white, with red roof. There were other buildings for the civilian sets, some of which we've seen, but there was also a larger service-station/garage type thing.

News, Views Etc . . . Retailer Links

I've edited the list of US Makers/Retailers 'North & South American Dealers' which mostly consisted of - sadly - deleting listings, the Home Page for one had changed and Tedtoy seems very dead, but the email is still there with a nice image so I've left it up for a while, but having deleted seven or eight the list is a lot shorter. Micshaun's closet has replaced TSSD.

So if anyone knows of sellers not on the list who they think ought to be, maybe they could let me know - USA, Canada and Mexico, Central or South America only; with an on-line presence/ordering system.

I will try to work on the other link lists in a similar fashion over the next few weeks so if you can think of any changes, point out any dead-links or think something/someone's missing who should be listed, let me know.

maverickatlarge[at]hotmail[dot]com

And here at SSW we're loving this new range from Wm Hocker!

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I've also added the enhanced/fuller abbreviation pages to the G-H-I and J-K-L Blogs, and will add the rest in the next day or two, I also fixed the D-E-F abbreviations page's glitch, which I wasn't aware of . . . I think!

'Albator' is for Space Pirate Captain Harlock

I don't know why the French changed his name to Albator, but he's far better known by anime/manga fan's in both Japan and the US as the Uchu Kaizoku (Space Pirate) Captain Harlock, and also in Italy where Atlantic had to produce boxes with both monikers, the French named example seeming to be far the commoner version on feebleBay!

These were produced by Fabien Plastica (I have little idea what else they made . . . Moomins and Sesame Street stuff, that sort of thing?) in 1978, off the back of the French version of the Harlock animated TV series.

Harlock had previously appeared as a Gunslinger in the American West (Gun Frontier; 1970), in space as Phantamunt Harlock (1970's The Great Pirate Harlock) where he began his career as a freedom-loving freebooter and as a WWII pilot in his first outing - 1969's Pilot 262, all created by Leiji Matsumoto and revealed to me by Helen McCarthy's 500 Manga Hero's & Villains which you may remember I grabbed in a charity shop, against such moments as this, a while ago!

They aren't that rare, when I got Nausicaa (from Chris Smith - cheers!) a while ago I looked at completing the set I'd been building for years and managed to get Albator/Harlock himself, rather tatty for a few pence off-of a UK seller, but there were several complete sets (only the five are known) on eBay.fr at the time.

However, even after he'd arrived (before Christmas) I couldn't post them as they were all over the place! The witch Sylvidre (Silvydra on Atlantic's boxes) originally Lafressia?) was an ID-lacking sorceress in the 'Unknown Fantasy Characters' box (she's been kicking around since 2009 I think), the boy (PW-show a couple of years ago?) and the doctor (John Begg, about 15-years ago) were in the 'Minor Makes F-J' box, and the more recent girl and captain were down with me; waiting for the sort-out the other night week which brought them all together!

The witch is almost demi-rond or semi-flat in her sculpting, while Nausicaa is, er'hem . . . very 3D! The doctor has what is best described as a 'hitler-cat' in his pocket, yet has quite animal-like feet himself and along with another character - not in this set - really is much smaller than the other Human/Humanoid characters.

Albator/Harlock on the other hand has been modelled oversized in comparison with the others, denoting his importance as the main character, and while we're told his gun ('Cosmo Dragoon' - based on the old Colt Dragoon) is a major part of his character, I rather like his space-laser-sword-raygun-thing with its basket-handle and pointy-pointy, space-death anointy, harpoony-tip!

There wasn't anything on Tadashi worth highlighting so I used him as a foil to the Crescent 'Berserker' for the sizer! Equally is he representative of Tadashi Daiba, Tadashi Monono, or Tetsuro Hoshino?

The bottoms of the bass-less feet have the same neat little holes in them as many of the Olá/Tito and Tylers/Mundi/Americana gum and ice cream premium figures, which may be a clue as to the real source? Remember the Comansi Lucky Luke have them too, as Olá scale-ups? Maybe Fabien Plastica was manufacturing-for or involved-with some/all of them?

This site . . .

http://www.cornponeflicks.org/harlock/harlockmain.html

. . . will tell you all you neeed to know about Harlock, but to grab a few details of most of the five characters in this set - in the order of the first image;

Dr Zero - Alcoholic ship's doctor, the cat in his pocket is supposed to be a ginger-tabby (not Hitler!) called Mi.

Kei Yuki (French; Nausicaa) - Sixteen-year-old staff officer on the Arcadia (Harlock's vessel; a Space Battleship), specialising in science and navigation, best friend (but not lover) of Tadashi Daiba.

Space Pirate Captain Harlock (French; Albator) - Rebelling against the right-wing government of Earth he takes his chances in Space at the helm of something closer to a freebooter than a true pirate vessel, he has some ethics and morals!

Tadashi - [read the character guide ofter the link-jump, he could be any one of three or four characters including two Tadashi's]

Lafressia (French; Sylvidre, Italian; Silvydra) - an alien witch queen who sparrs with Harlock (sometimes) in order to save her species; the Mazone and is not to be trusted, there may be confusion with Sunora (another Mazone) in the sculpting/naming/name-changes?

8th May - Geoff, who knows far more than me about this stuff, has them only being painted in Portugal, but made in Italy by Fabienplastica (all one word), more here with cleaner figures!

News, Views Etc . . . Vectis - April Sales

With my usual uselessness and lackadaisical approach to news and views, I forgot the Vectis sales dates changes, there is actually one of their Specialist Die-cast sales onging right this minute, but of more import is the Toy Soldier & Model Figure sale tomorrow, mostly new metal and quality old hollow-cast, and for which you can grab the catalogue here . . .

https://www.vectis.co.uk/auction/military-civilian-figures-equipment-accessories-790-1

. . . with dolls and bears on Wednesday and a private collection (Mecanno) and vintage toy sale on Thusday. Note there is no bidding or viewing in person, due to Covid-19, they are strictly on-line only.

CHANGES TO APRIL SALE DATES

Due to the ongoing situation we have delayed some of our Auction Sale dates for April. 

The new dates are as follows-

Monday 27th April            Specialist Diecast & Toy Sale

Lot 7298 - Pixyland Kew & The "Teddy" Toy Company Ltd

Tuesday 28th April - Military, Civilian Figures, Equipment and Accessories Sale - RE-SCHEDULED FROM TUESDAY 21ST APRIL 

Wednesday 29th April - Doll & Teddy Bear Sale - RE-SCHEDULED FROM WEDNESDAY 22ND APRIL  

Thursday 30th April - The Chris Freeman Meccano & Vintage Toy Collection - RE-SCHEDULED FROM THURSDAY 23RD APRIL 

PLEASE NOTE - THERE WILL BE NO VIEWING OR ATTENDANCE IN PERSON AT THESE SALES.