SCS is for Scary Creature Set!

I could have used that last year . . . oh; I almost did! Having explained - last year - how I bought the Fantasy Creatures Set II from SCS Direct because it was less numerous in the Amazon listings, and that I was hoping to get Set I in the Autumn, when I went back for it, it had totally disappeared (along with all other SCS listings on both Amazon and evilBay), and it wasn't until July/August of this year that it reappeared, but it did and I nabbed one!

Packaging art-work and contents, the contents - like the two sets we looked at last year - are not equally divided between the two colours/'armies' with dark grey suffering severely from outnumbering, nor do they come to the advertised total of 100 pieces.

As seen here, there are four each of the light grey and only three each of the dark grey, except with the Minotaur, but that small victory for darkness is lost to the missing Knight, who's gone AWOL, with his head, so not even biting people to death!

The sculpts; the upper shot shows two which wouldn't look out of place in a ray Harryhausen movie, the Serpent-lady is a vast improvement on the old DFC/Toyco ones, while the lower shots are more heraldic, with a Griffon and a lovely 'Welsh' dragon.

The figures are manufactured in a quite soft, modern, substitute-PVC, and tend to distortion in the packaging/shipping, so I've posed a few Unicorns, they are all the same pose which should - I suspect - look like the dark grey one.

The lower shots have two roman skeletons as they should look (left) and a couple of quite different ones which I'll hang-on to as they are - these sets get split and shared with two other collectors once I've done the images - on the right.

Wizard, Knight, Minotaur and an rather nice Elvin Huntress, the Minotaur would make a lovely foil for a few 20/25mm Greeks in a little vignette, the Wizard is a bit LotR's Gandalf or Asterix druid in execution and the Knight is the weakest pose; he looks like one of Monty Python's round-table questors - hence the reference above!

Ogre/Ork types with one or two heads, a Dwarf and a vastly oversized Fairy/Pixy! The Dwarf suffers from short-shot'ing on his helmet horns, and the Fairy is rather out of place against the others, but they are all nice sculpts.

Brain has started painting his, they are still on the work-table and he pointed out that the camera-flash is a harsh critic, something I've noticed/suffered from in the past, but it gives an idea of how they'll take paint, and if you’re pondering on who/what that dragon is, he's an Alien . . . coming in the next ['newer'] post, in a short-while!

P is for Putrid Pirates Pal-up with Perennial Packs of Plastic Playthings

Brain again! Sent me these a couple of weeks ago, as it happened I had sourced a set on feebleBay, but didn't know if they'd get here in time (they did - just), so we'll run with Brian's for this year, and then next year maybe look at them all again, as we've had four or five iterations of these now, in four or five years.

Previously branded to Dolgen Corp. (Dollar General), this year they are credited to an Old East Main Co., but still found in Dollar General, and while for the last few years it's been two sets (mummies and skeletons), this year we have a new set, Zombie Pirate Army!

Like the other two sets a bit cartoony, but they can be used to fill the ranks of the Blue Box mob from a few years ago, being the same size and a very similar plastic colour! Eight figures in eight poses, again as the other sets, although I seem to recall one of them was ten-figures for the first couple of years . . . skeletons?

Skeleton army; seen before, so just confirmation of the new packaging variant!

Mine, like I say there have been three or four card variations now, figure-count anomalies, and this third set, so in a year or two, when there's less to post on the day, I'll try to return to them for a more comprehensive pulling-together/overview, yet we may see them again next year, as we've seen them for five-years on-the-trot now!

Many thanks to Brian for the images, I'll try to remember to open my Pirate set for next year whatever else happens!

M is for Monsters vs. Military

Another box-ticker, and another intermediate set of 40-mil odd's, these being Monsters vs. Military from Blip Toys LLC, and while my Halloween posts can veer toward the fantasy or medieval, they can also veer toward the sci-fi, and that's rather the case with these!

How they arrived; they had been undercoated with an aerosol spray-paint which was the devil to get off, I don't know what it was, but suspect something like Crylon or even Rustoleum, it was a three-dip job in the end, over two days, and some finishing with a toothpick to get two sets clean!

We get a right old mix here, which from the left are: an Eagle-man, an Alien knock-off Xenomorph, a Shark-man, something equating to Dr. Frankenstein's [cartoon] Monster, a real alien-alien (sort of eye-head cyclopean) and a bog standard Zombie with the prerequisite own severed-limb being waved about! And it's only the three (Eagle, C19th Monster and Zombie) out of twelve sculpts which got them in/on the list today!

The 'Space-Marines' lean equally heavily on both the Alien and Halo franchises, I think, although the prone MG-gunner could pass for a current GI! As would both the kneeling and - otherwise unarmed - grenade throwing chaps; with a bit of paint, the other three have pretty obvious 'space' weapons.

My favorite is actually the shark-man, who would go really well with the similar 40mm shark-man figure from Papo's homage to the Pirates of the Caribbean. He's even in simple shorts and riggers boots, so would look quite at home on a pirate-ship's deck!

The Frankenstein's Monster pose is very cartoony, and with his arms raised in a threatening 'lurch', has covered the 'Hollywood' bolts in his neck, so they put one in his elbow, so we'd not fail to work out who he's supposed to be!

I is for Imperial Zombies

Just a box-ticking quickie, these came in several playsets including a very good knock-off from Walmart which you can see on Sean's Blog here.

But as mine only came in the six Imperial poses and seem to have better sculpting, I'm guessing for now (in the absence of others), that they are the Imperial's.

They - as Imperial - were issued in a larger set as Zombie Apocalypse with Tim-Mee knock-off AFV's, a 'toob' and a smaller twin set which was called Zombie Responders vs Zombies; we saw them here courtesy of Mr Berke back in 2018, and they do still turn-up on evilBay from time to time! The responders in blue plastic . . . the Zombies having a tank in the larger set!

 

I have one in a slightly different colour with a stock control mark printed down his body!

W is for a Wicked Witch of the Woods and her Whacky Wonky Waffle-hovel!

But she got hers!

I try not to ask for stuff for the Blog, I get plenty sent voluntarily and this year of all years haven't had the time to keep up with anything, but I did drop a line to Brian Berke in New York the other day just to see if Scully & Scully were going to 'deliver the goods' this year, and he kindly popped down the next day to check - and has been back subsequently.

Sadly all they had was this quite large-scale table centre-piece, and Brian wondered if maybe they had been caught-up in the global logistics foul-up and failed to get a new stock from Germany, which is likely, but anyway, no blurb needed as we're familiar with them now . . . Hansel and Gretel;

And many thanks to Brain for going the extra-mile; cheers Brian!

D is for Dang! It's the Dastardly Day of the Dead Again!

Rather like with this year's ITLAPD, Halloween hasn't gone smoothly, and might seem a bit bitty to some, but I managed to pull back a few boo-boo's at the end of the week and am starting the blurbification on Friday night to get the posts done in time . . . I hope!

And . . . although I've never intended Halloween to grow to the size of 'Pirate Day, A) I never intended West Country Accent Day to grow quite as big as it has the last few years either, and B) these things will wax and wane under their own steam! But we might as well start with the same 'round-up' post/format I've adopted for ITLAPD!

I've had this for years (I think?), anyway it was in the mixed, unbranded monster box, and while sorting earlier in the year, fired off a few shots for today before it went off to storage. It's a sort of dragon/bat/vampire finger-puppet, and in polyethylene so not as comfortable as the more usual PVC ones on a finger, especially a fat, grown-up's one!

But it also makes a passable stand-alone, 'toy soldier' figure, and is here posed on 1898's Transylvania, then the eastern part of Austria-Hungary, now in central Rumania. Worth a read . . . Wikipedia

This came in recently (charity shop mixed lot) and is - I suspect - quite modern, being a sort of flexible polyethylene which means the sucker doesn't really work, but it's a bat, on All Hallows Eve, so that's a box ticked!

I seem to have ended-up getting eMail updates from Poundland, due to some past, self-inflicted, button-clicking misdemeanor I'm sure! But I've recieved several on Halloween stuff recently (very little of which seems to have made its way to the store in Farnborough as I checked once or twice), but of use - if you could have found them, or to ID when they turn up in job-lots a few-years hence - are these skeletons in larger pairs (44cm/17"!) and smaller quads (160mm/6").

These came in with a mixed lot I'd bought for something else we'll see today, but turned out to be the hard-plastic versions of one of the STS or Greenbrier sets we've seen in the last few years, but missing from those posts. I think it's the latter Greenbrier, but I'm too busy to sort it out now, however we'll have a full round-up/comparison of all these grey sets in a year or two.

Because Halloween is firstly a North American thing, and secondly a kids thing, there is a tendency for me to look upon the day as a more general fantasy/medieval day, as far as subject matter goes, and these are obviously from a board game I haven't tracked down the title of yet, but appears to be about four empires/nations, and aimed at younger players?

The dragon giving it an Arthurian bent, it's otherwise a medieval setting with a (THE?) sword in a  stone, wishing well, sub-scale tent and pack-animal, and two figures per 'side' or 'team', there's definitely a dragon missing, and possibly other stuff?

On one of the Faceplant groups I'm on, there has been a lot of edible Halloween stuff in the last few weeks, not least a recurring line of seasonal breakfast cereals, and the coffin-candy we looked at a couple of years ago, so I was happy to find these in Sainsbury's and post them over there the other day, as it's mostly an action-figure site, so I don't post as much as some of the others! Purple Jaffa Cakes! They're Purple and they're JAFFA CAKES!!!! Well . . . lilac . . . with an orangey-bit! I've still got a pack . . . I'm going to go and have one in a minute!

I've also been filling gaps in the Technolog collection and here's four suitable for Halloween, from the top; chocolate-brown Heroic Barbarians, lilac Amazons, large green Orks and a set of what I suspect are bad Knights, very bad knights, and god knows what that colour is; metallic mauve? It's not quite purple, it's not quite maroon . . . Kriminal Krimson?

P is for Pattern - 1907 Lee Enfield Sword Bayonet

To paraphrase Blue Peter, and further to the second-previous post - "here's one I shot earlier", the longer bayonet of the infantry, this has a non-standard, green canvas 1950's-dated take on the WWII frog which should take the short spike bayonet used in the European theater and which carried-on in service with the Lee-Enfield's until it's replacement with the FN-licensed SLR, and I think the metal of the scabbard has been polished up from gun-blacked, possibly for ceremonial duties?

To Paraphrase Sunday's Post - This IS the long 17-inch 'sword' bayonet of WWI infantry charges across no-man's-land AND that of the 'Desert Rats' of the 8th army in those iconic press-shots (and Airfix artwork) of World War II!

S is for Still 'Q is for Question Time' but C is for Closer to an Answer!

Sometimes these things come fast, sometimes they drip-drip-drip toward the truth, I'm not sure which this will prove to be, but we can add a bit to the three figures originally tacked-on to another post here, in the hope it may trigger someone's memories?

I actually found this in Greece, but with an English title 'Plastic Toys' that's no guarantee of anything, I also sourced an Alamo set in generic packaging from Greece, which was actually BMC! Four cowboys on foot protect a wagon from two mounted Native American Indians. Stapled (rather than heat-sealed) blister hints at age, but it's not empirical.

Colours aren't as interesting as the metallic's we looked at last time, but new poses include a couple more Marx 54mm clones and a mounted Indian, he has both a familiar look and the look of French 1950's hard plastic, which could be another clue?

The wagon is a common design, Crescent, Blue Box, various US makers and Giant et al in the smaller scales, this is the version with a box-seat forward of the tilt and differs from others with an additional towing hitch at the rear. And . . . yet another iteration of 'THAT' horse, which - while Bergan/Beton to us - is actually the old Britains hollow-cast standard!

Foot figures are marked as last time, the mounted figures have a more evenly scalloped edge to the base side/rim, and what looks to be a removed brand-mark, all are numbered, seemingly in sequence with the previously seen ones (by which I mean the duplicates are marked the same!), starting somewhere above ten or fifteen, suggesting earlier numbers may be for another line - WWII or US Cavalry, knights . . . or something else?

How it looks now; the reason I only shot the one mounted Indian from the set as 'new' is that factory-painted versions had since turned-up - in the pile! So we have Marx clones and [possibly] French clones, in a least three issues (one painted, two colour-way runs) which may be French and/or have had a Greek branding/importer.

The card also has a spurious '2' hinting at other card-arts, or suggesting the artwork may have been nicked from something else? And the numbers now found hint at a set of at least 15, in fives, plus the wagon (or any other accessories?), thus:

[11-15 - Foot Indians? (yet to be found by this author)]

0 - 15 - Unknown

16-20 - Foot cowboys
21-25 - Mounted cowboys
26-30 - Mounted Indians

31-35/40 - Foot Indians?

35/40 - 55+ Foot Cowboys ?

 

Unmarked - Covered-wagon and team with driver.

But that is all pure conjecture, the Marx foot figures were a larger set and more/all poses may have been copied, taking the numbering back to 1, 5 or 10 . . . with no foot Indians being produced?

Anyone feel they can add anything, or ID the mounted figure's donors?

Now known to have been Kain premiums at some point, and one of the Indians on foot was here, elsewhere, and a higher number, as are two more, all under both Kain and Make; Greek tags now so you can find them, and more have come in. product issued by Kain is still unknown and cowboys on foot may be numbered from 10 or 11?

N is for Naval Landing Parties

Another piece of ephemera, nostalgia, family history . . . I think I've mentioned my Grandfather was drafted across from the Merchant Navy to the RN in 1915, in time for the Gallipoli Landings in the Dardanelles, serving aboard HMS London. I've found his copy of the land-fighting manual used by Naval Landing Parties.

'Rifle and Field Exercises for His Majesty's Fleet 1913', so, written/published the year before it all kicked off, lacking anything on trenching and entrenchment.

I wondered at them having marker-pens in 1915, until I realised it was pencil which has lost its shine after 106 years!

'JTS Hall Midshipman RNR HMS London', I don't know if this means they made them substantive RN personnel (RNR is the Royal Navy/Naval Reserve) later, or not at all, neither do I know if he was already in the RNR, or was co-opted into it when leaving the MN? I suspect he had to serve in the Reserve as part of the payback for his merchant naval training, crossed as RNR and became substantive later?

This appears to be an 'emily' or what the Army called the MLE (Magazine Lee-Enfield), the first version of the weapon, dating from 1895, reworked in 1899 and obviously considered good enough for the Navy! The Army had by 1915 switched to the SMLE, lacking the protruding barrel obvious above. The SMLE (Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield) was known as the Mk.1, hence the Mk1* above, to differentiate it from an actual Mk.1! The Mk.1* would still be in use with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in WWII!

This is very similar to the SLR bayonet I trained with/carried in the 1980-90's, even down to the mounting-catch design, but the blade is longer; the SLR was 8-inches, not 12. This is not the long 17-inch 'sword' bayonet of infantry charges across no-man's-land, nor the 'Desert Rats' of the 8th army in those iconic press-shots (and Airfix artwork) of World War II either, but rather the P1888 Bayonet carried over from the Lee-Metford rifle.

The Webley Scott .45" automatic pistol, far more useful than the revolvers a lot of Infantry Officers were still going 'over the top' with at this time, and would still be doing in another war? But that's the Brit's, always slow to rearm, re-equip or modernise, always fighting the previous war . . . presumably, needing fewer numbers, the Navy were allowed to be daring with the 'new-fangled' weapon! Issues with barrel residue had been solved by the time Granddad got his!

What the figure painters were waiting for, even though they're black and white! I would say the standing firing pose is not pushed forward enough, but he's a big looking chap and can probably take the recoil! The prone figure, not shown clearly, is angled so that the recoil is taken in a line down the right leg.

How the instructions for firing sitting can take precedence over kneeling (the best firing pose of all) is anyone's guess, but they obviously did things differently a century ago! He is shown firing downhill (or from a crow's nest?), which makes sense, sitting to fire level is the worst of all poses!

The final images in this section; there's not many other images in what is a very wordy tome of many pages, but there is some interesting stuff on battalion advances in column, line, echelon etc . . . which I'll get up here another time.

A is for ARMY Men; the People's Liberation ARMY Men!

This lot present the same moral quandary as some of that overpriced stuff coming out of a co-operative 'somewhere' in the Ukraine (several 'interviews' now, several brands; no location?), but as I didn't pay for them I'll desperately try to pretend there's no hypocritical conflict of interest here and/or a public service element to the posting!

Sent to the Blog by Peter Evan's - roving reporter for Plastic Warrior magazine and moderator of the Friends of PW Faceplant group - They are variously branded to Jeu, Jeunow and Vi!Kondo, these are clearly and best described (there's no clues on the packaging or online - it may be hidden in the Chinese characters) as Middle Eastern irregulars, but have the look more of 1970's PLO/PFLP, 1980's Lebanese combatants, Hezbollah or similar Levantine fores, rather than the looser-garbed modern terrorists of Al Qaeda, IS or the legitimate power of the [never listed as 'Terrorists' so OK for The Donald to do a deal with them-] Taliban!

These are the 'army-builder' poses, the bare-headed pair can be used anywhere that's had problems in the last 40/50 years from Ireland and Central America to Namibia or Burma! Their clothing is more Viet Cong, revealing their Chinese-centric sculpting. Top left has a Turban which could place him with Maoist Nepalese, or in the contested Indian-administered Kashmir? The others have cloth balaclavas of the Keffiyeh / Shemagh / Hatta type made iconic by generations of Palestinian fighters.

Slightly dodgy sculpting on the Molotov Cocktail here, but what a useful pose, cut-away the gun and we could be in Paris '69 now! The bases are separate and both plastics are quite hard polyethylene or 'propylene types and a single lug on the base locates in a hole on the figures, leaving some a bit off-center.

25-10-21 - For more on the poses see Craig's comments - below 

These two particularly; are both stuffed-up one-end of their bases by the parameters of the fixing system! The 2"/51mm generic infantry or foot-mortar is more of a VC thing than for modern insurgents, but some may have IRA style home-made mortars, however the limitations of the AN/FO explosive they tend to use makes them larger on the whole! Note Accessories.

Googling them to find-out more, I discovered my sample was missing a tenth pose, and he looks quite Mujahidin/Talib-like! The machine-gun's an oddity - looking a lot like the brand-new RPL-20, I suspect it's modeled on a Chinese copy of the old RP-46 LMG, or an FN Minimi LSW which is becoming quite ubiquitous now?

All-together a really useful set for irregular force-building.

On-line, they are Jeunow, and here are seen with 'Fritz'-helmeted opponents and various other items from the same source. Of interest is the variation of stock-quality, from the excellent (and probably HO-compatible) Opel Blitz, to various lumps of anonymous imagi-AFV, some of which are copies of copies, or have been copied, as I think we've already seen some in other sets!

Chinese WWII-era figures and Japanese invaders also exist, and integrally-based variants of both are seen on the right here. I was unable to find built-in base versions of the insurgents and US-helmeted troops, but imagine they all-four come in both types?

The Japanese have been given an accurate flag, the Chinese have been given one which can't be mistaken for any of the flags (CSR, Maoist, Nationalist or Imperial) they fought/resisted under! Quite deliberate I'm sure; Xi Jinping's regime is trying to re-write the history of the period to include the better details of Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang party, in part to weaken Taiwan's claims to that history/legacy!

A few hours later - never try being clever when you're tired! Both forces on the right have perfectly good flags, it's the Japanese on the left who have a generic printer's registration-mark! But the Wikipedia page (link below) is still an interesting read!

The paper header was a home-printed affair, although a subsequent one was in a glossy-magazine style, professionally printed on card-stock, so it may be someone ran-out on a Friday afternoon and printed a few copies off in the warehouse, to finish an order?

But this is where it all goes a bit sour, morally . . . that third logotype, is CCTV7, that is China Central Television [channel] Seven . . . the channel exclusively for the use of (and probably funded by or for-) The People's Liberation Army.

What I'm suggesting is that by purchasing these, you may well be financially supporting the army of the Enemy! Because, and make no mistake about it; A) That's how these things work in China (as they did in Soviet Russia), and B) despite the rapprochement of Nixon (another lying, narcissistic Republican with the gift of the gab, more interested in power at any cost, and profit over the best interests of most of the people most of the time), China were always the 'other enemy' and are flexing like never before . . . indeed through these toys! What do you think the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Malaya were all about?

Now, OK, if you're a simple-thinking, garden-gaming, kidult, you're not going to give such things a second thought as you squat in the yard going "piow-piow", but I served, and I served for a reason, with a sense of purpose, and I find it all a bit disturbing . . . this watching the American far-right getting into bed with Eastern-European disrupters and mercenary gangs in Donbass or Libya, on the Dark Web, watching Trump selling-out the Middle-East to Russian influence, hanging the Afghans out to dry next to the Kurds, watching Biden going along with it all while Boris kills 200,000 of us while banging-on about Vegemite!

We're fucking rudderless in the West right now, the only rock among all the self-serving wankers, populist liars and religious-Right nutters was Merkel and she's now just keeping the chairs warm for a few more weeks, in a caretaker capacity, while they sort out a new coalition.

Deep breath . . . these came (also from Peter) with the glossy card, and can be seen in the previous shot, I saw them on-line in other, wackier, colours - pink, purple etc . . . probably down to any end-user/customer's requirements.

As sculpts, these (or some of them, the two kneeling poses may be new) have been around for a while now (Ja-Ru, Soma?), and these might be 2nd or 3rd generation, but cut/re-cut to a good standard, and basic modern American troop types, usable for m-any forces who use Western/NATO equipment.

Many thanks to Peter for sending them, and I'm not meaning to be ungrateful or cast aspersions, but now I've uncovered the somewhat sinister link, please think twice before buying them. One man's freedom fighter, is another man's terrorist, another man's resistance fighter, another man's revolutionary, but one's enemy, is one's enemy, is one's enemy, and we forget that at our peril.

Here's a lovely 'Rabbit Hole' - go; lose an hour of you life!

A is for Ahhhhhh! The Children's Crusade!

Well, you've seen me frustrate myself wreaking a big red Dinky London omnibus, while my brother sleeps oblivious next to me, you've seen the the pair of us as biscuit-chomping cowpoke gunslingers, now I seem to be a crusader!

I have absolutely no recollection of this whatsoever, however I think it might be 1969 (I look about six - far left) when I stayed with my Godmother while our parents were in the 'States. The guy in the middle is her son Charles, who was a couple of years older than me (so eigh'tish in this shot?), and while I thought the other guy might be an old friend Tobin, I suspect he's actually some one from the School I attended while staying there (Bishops Stortford), as my brother is absent and he must be my age/from my class, as Charles was a year or two above . . . or even attending a different school?

Could be a school-play? But 'Blondie' hasn't gone to the same lenths with his costume? Although his bow looks a little more professional than mine! Am I Robin Hood to Charles's Friar Tuck, or a man-at-arms to his crusader?

Fun thing to find!

The Children's Crusade

News, Views Etc . . . Airfix Blog Update - Astronauts

As the title says - I've added some stuff to the Airfix blog's Astronaut post, in fact I think I've nearly doubled the size of it, with lots of new comparisons, the 50th anniversary issue, a Polish set, more links, a repaired link and a new link in the older section . . . 16 images with blurb in total, so there might be something over there to interest Loyal Readers!

More of a security guard than an assistant!

What I have done over there is remove all the spurious brand-tags, and I will do it on all the posts there in the fullness of time, there were going to be many-more comparison brands than the tag-limits allow-for, and that will be the case on all posts in the end, so they'll have to be served by the meta-tags. And some of the things which are there 'only', will eventually get a box-tick here and their own A-Z listings or thematic pages?

Next day - forgot to add the link; now added above - Doh!

News, Views Etc . . . Design Eye

As I mentioned last night, I've put the Design Eye A-Z entry up here;

http://smallscaleworld-d-e-f.blogspot.com/2021/10/design-eye-design-eye-publishing.html

I haven't done as much on those blogs as I'd hoped this year, but the day when I really get stuck into them is not far off, or nearer, whichever gives you more hope!