S is for Silver Knight

Except, they are blue, red and black knights, with a higher or equal likelihood of gold paint than silver paint! But Silver Knight they were dubbed and Silver Knight they remain! The largest of the many Supreme / SP-Toys medieval sets/lines, and my least favourite, for mostly unfair reasons, but we all have our prejudices!

Empirical evidence! Taken from the Silver Knight Deluxe Play Set we are going to be looking at in the bulk of this post, we have seen the odd figure in the past, indeed, in past Supreme posts, but they were overdue for their own post!

Smaller sets were available, under the parent branding, here from Amazon or Alibarba? The Greco-Roman archer being a obvious incongruity, and a common trope with Supreme's medieval lines. Possibly discontinued now, you can still find brand-new examples on both platforms and in the odd, smaller, independent toy shop . . . if you still have one!

As I recently did with this set, going for a song (£9.99 I think, 12-something maybe?), the Silver Knight Deluxe Play Set, a small fort with outlying tower, siege equipment and two handfuls of stuff; figures in the one hand and smaller accessories in the other.

I would imagine these came separately in different sized sets, or were so available from Supreme or Toy Major's catalogues for the likes of Boley, Halsall (HTI) or Simba, if they wanted something in a smaller price-bracket/packaging?

The fort is a standard toy fort with two gates and a footprint about the same 8/10-inches as the old Airfix, Atlantic or Giant forts, the other a rather neat 'folly' with crenellated-tower, steep stairs (easily defended) and lower walkway.

Full contents on the left, pre-bagging of different elements also helps the factory packers add them to other, different sized sets, whether branded-up Supreme, Toy Major or someone else.

To the right we have the weapon-rack and a rather odd cannon above, and some of the other accessories below which includes the shields (one of the reasons I don't like this set - ridiculously over-sized and clumsy shields, breaking several of the rules of heraldry to add to their crimes!), reasonable weapons, a ladder and a pair of flick-a-pults (my word) for the battlements.

The siege tower, a pretty good model for its type and not directly copying anyone else's, it has more luck with the battlements than the towers though, but one of the points of towers was to remain out of reach! Like all toy seige towers a scale compromise (also seen in most toy forts/castles) means it's perfect for HO/OO-guage 1:76/:72 or 20/25mm figures.

'Flick-a-pult' in situ, and the ladder positioned as both defenders and attackers might use it. As there is only one, the assumption is it for the defenders to man their own battlements, the attacks having their siege-tower!

Other accessories include a guillotine and archery butts, the cannon/flick-a-pult ammo is in a bright, international emergency-orange, but I guess it helps find them and prevents them disappearing up vacuum cleaners!

The weapons can all (not at once, but after the figures have been armed) be kept in the rack, a rather fanciful item, but plenty of play-value for kids, while the lances have safety-points, which leaves them better suited to jousting than war-fighting! The cannon works as weird as it looks!

The figures. They aren't as awful as I think of them, the mounted figures and one foot figure have moving arms which makes them action-figures, or semi-action figures (one or two points of articulation is no more than Galoob gave their Action Fleet 30-mils!), and they are biggish, solid lumps of PVC or its modern equivalent. And - as you can see - 'silver' is not the stand-out feature!

Got arty with the arches! If you place the small tower in front of the castle, as a gatehouse, you create a tunnel for the attackers to negotiate, with fire and sword! On the left open and closed gates, just because!

An unbranded generic on feebleBay a while ago, same knights, different fort (simple one-piece relief sculpt) and a new siege weapon, a catapult of the scorpion type, other sets have an arm-over ballista or double A-frame battering-ram. Missing a few bits including a horse, it only came with four figures and would have been quite cheap and probably well within rack-toy parameters; £5.99 or thereabouts? Although probably popping-up to 12-quid odd near Christmas!

B is for Blackrock Castle . . . Again, Again!

Except that this one is Black (wait for it) Rock! The Blackrock's all having four walls and the larger one's; a Keep, this one is open, and more of a relief-structure, or a backdrop to the mêlée. Simba did actually carry several sizes of the other Blackrocks too. I'll tag it without the gap, just to keep the tag-list tight.

The box is very poor, which has rather curtailed the shots that are usable with this one, but with everything being pulled together in the last post in the sequence, it is enough for a box-ticker.

You can see the parallels with the previous Blackrocks in the spray-decoration, and the six figures give enough play value, but there's no hind of extra 'stuff' as there is with the Army Base play-set (previous / 'older post').

The other two sides which could be brought-back to something like their original colours with a  bit of tweeking in Picasa - five foot and one mounted, three and tree silver/black, two ladders and the fort, it is what it is; a cheap play-set for corner shops and service stations at Christmas-time!

15 parts, plus stickers; in fact two of the flags are pre-stickered and part of the upper, figure display, as I've not opened the set I don't know if they've been taken off the sticker sheet, or if the sticker sheet is only laid-out for the others, a minor detail of little consequence, but I will do a box-opening on this one at some point in the future.

In checking the Supreme tag, for preparing these posts, I've found we looked at this set years ago, right back at the start of the blog, so I must have shot it before, ages ago!

Standard variations of the standard Supreme range with the 'standard' Greco-Roman archer! Enough for a little mêlée in front of the 'castle' back-drop, or to send a few guys up a ladder to take a wall, or die trying!

A is for Army Base

And so to the Toy Major Army Base play set, not their usual PVC or ethylene 50-60mm fodder with a few accessories, and - like all their inventory - bought-in from someone else, the vehicles may one day help ID the maker, if their ad' turns-up in an old trade publication?

Being a major middle-man in the trade, Toy Major will have had some input to the manufacture and contents, if only so it would fit into the line which includes a knight's set, and probably also had, at the very least; a Wild West and either dinosaur, farm or zoo iterations?

The illustrated packaging (which we will look at below) suggests there are more contents than those displayed on the card and visible through the window, but we get a vaguely Cold War set up.

The backing photograph is unusual, depicting Canadian paratroopers (mid-1980's?) debussing from a Hercules transport 'plane, I can't find the actual photograph, but others which could be from the same sequence can be found on the Internet.

The figures, they are somewhere between the solids from First we saw here back at the beginning of the Blog, and the Action Fleet style of Galoob's Battle Squads; heavier sculpts; more like the First figures, but articulated like the Galoob.

The jeep is mostly Willy's MB, but there is more than a hint of M38 about the front end, while the Hawk trailer is a surprisingly common toy/model, I can think of four or five now, more if you include SNAP's ridiculous flying machine!

An M60 medium tank, nice from the skirt, up, but the chassis and running-gear are a bit crude, I suspect a push-and-go motor is hidden in there. It's one reason I will unbox this one day, another being to get a better look at the figures.

While the box-art; full contents-photo', suggests there is a bag of extra scenics and figures hidden in the carry case . . . and a helicopter? More reasons for an unboxing! You may also notice a similarity between this case and the diminutive one - also carried by Toy Major - we looked at just over a year ago.

I is for Introduction - Rack Toy Knights

I used to prepare 'mini-seasons' and pile them up in reverse order so they'd read right down the page, but I don't do it anymore, it's a faff, and you should all have got used to the non-English way of publishing on most blogs . . . that Blog on the Belgian Congo (not updated much these days) did publish down the page, but the landing page was always the first-ever post and you then had to find page 21 or whatever and scroll down to find the new one! The vagaries of the limitations of digital publishing!

Also this is going to be five or six posts, and the last post will link back to both the immediately preceding posts of which this is the first, and previously published stuff here on Supreme (and everyone else)'s similar knights, and 'Black Rock' castles.

I bought these ages ago; like 15 or twenty years ago? They were sub-scale and quite small for full-on play sets, and they were cheap, can't remember if it was a toy show or a car-boot sale, but I suspect the later as one is hideously sun-faded and damp-effected and was clearly left in a shed-window or something similar for some time?

We will look at the Army Base one in the next post, it has its points of interest, then we will get stuck into the knights with a series of posts. Not obvious in this shot though, is the fact that . . .

. . . one is branded to Toy Major, the other to the German firm of Simba (now Simba-Dickie Group), but make no mistake these are the same line, just different treatments of the packaging. Back when Mr. E. Sell (he who makes it up as he goes along) was in full flood, and long before he started talking shite about my Blue Box Australians, he was wont to talk shite about Supreme, and indeed, Simba and others!

And while I think I've undone the worst of it over the years since, these next few posts (excepting the Army Base) will underline some of the rules around the stuff, while remaining a bit confusing and leaving a few question marks to be cleared-up at a later date!

As to the above shot; Toy Major are more commonly a middle-man, or shipper/jobber between the manufactures in Hong Kong (now China) and both Western retail chains and other end-chain wholesalers in the US, UK and Europe, so when you find stuff with their branding, it means the end-user took it without new packaging as a kind of generic, albeit in the TM branding, while Simba (also, back then, a jobbing wholesaler, now a manufacturer in their own right, but we'll get on to that in a later post), have gone with their own branding.

T is for This is Why August is Rack Toy Month

 

'Nuff said! You treacherous holiday-taking lightweights!

Still, I hope you avoided the sheeple-driven mess of ports and airports this previous fortnight by leaving your departure dates 'till now? We'll still be here when you get back, but there's a lot in the queue, so you'll have some catching-up to do! Except - of course - you've all buggered-off, so you're not even reading this; Doh!

W is for World of Dinosaurs

The first set from Phidal I bought the other day is a bit of a departure from them, but if it's a sign of things to come, more of it, farm and zoo to follow, knights and soldiers in the near future . . . I suspect not, but the hope is worth some thought!

No movie, no cartoon, no Disney license, no Marvel or DC tie-in, just some model dinosaurs. A Guaranteed seller; I don't know, nor have ever known kids who aren't fascinated (or at least a little interested) in the prehistoric behemoths, so I hope in does well and encourages them to look at original sculpts of other fauna, extinct or extant!

Again only ten, and simply marked © Phidal, from the top left to bottom right they are;

• Triceratops
• Stegosaurus
• Spinosaur? [not named in blurb]
• Velociraptor
• Pteranodon
• [not named in blurb]
• Apatosaurus
• Tyrannosaurus Rex
• Elasmosaurus
• Kronosaurus 

And they seem to be a whole new set of sculpts, not Battat's or Toy Major's, so, yeah, any farm, zoo or other figures of a non-licensed type Phidal want to produce or commission will find a market I think? Let's hope.

B is for Book-full of Bunnies!

It only seems like the other day I cleared the Phidal out of the queue, but actually it was January, with a quick touch in April, both a while ago, and while I was bemoaning the apparent dropping of them by TKMaxx (my main source), they had two sets in stock the other day and I grabbed both.

This was actually the second, I was only there to sort out a car battery nearby, and popped in to have a look, purchasing the one we'll look at next, and wondering if this was the one I already had. So I memorised the figures and went home to check the set already published here, they were different and as I'd known I'd be back on the battery, got this at the same time a couple of days later!

We have all the rabbits again, Peter (left), Benjamin Bunny (right) with Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail (I have no idea if they are in name order and there are no clues on the figures or in the text!

Benjamin is wearing his Tam-o'-shanter . . . when we were kids we had the wooden Victory puzzle of that original painting by Beatrix Potter, and because in one of the stories Mr. McGregor throws a marrow at one of the rabbits, I thought, for years; he was wearing a marrow on his head!

Only ten figures again; which seems to be the trend now (cost of living crisis etc . . . ), but if it keeps them at 5.99 (an eminently acceptable 'rack-toy' price), I'm not going to whinge too loudly!

Tom Kitten replaces the three missing figures of the odd cockerel, Brock and Pigling Bland seen in the first set, with the other four - Squirrel Nutkin, Jemima Puddleduck, Mr Tod (The Sandy Whiskered Gentleman) and Mrs. Tiggywinkle - getting a reprise. I would had that the Nutkin is quite a realistic sculpt, but he was one of the less anthropomorphised originally, and I thought the Mr. Tod character sculpt was a poor sculpt.

T is for Two - H is for Hong Kong Hovercraft

We haven't had as many hovercraft as we should have done, given their box was in the attic this last 11 years, so I'll have to redress that when I get to final [alive] resting place, but I can make a start here with two bog-standard rack-toy brands, one in Picasa for a while, the other sourced off feebleBay a week or so ago.

Woolbro's Hovercraft with Friction, is more of a whacky Intergalactic US Space Marines space-car, although with the body entirely filled with two large turbines, of limited use beyound getting two humans from A-to-B in a uncomfortably noisy fashion!

I actually have the Jane's Surface Skimmers and Hovercraft tome (and a tome it is, good for bodybuilding) and it is amazing to see how quickly Hovercraft went from British post-war excentricity in the 1950's to hundreds of designs all over the world by the 1970's (I think I have the '72 edition), and some of them do look a bit like this I think, but the forward perambulation isn't clear and the book's currently buried!

Carpet wheels aren't part of a real hovercraft which would have a hollow-belly to fill with pressurised air! Branded to an MMF and numbered 812, mine is obviously missing an ariel, but I will look out for another, better one as it also has that yellowish staining on the starboard side.

Learning something every day; although it sounds like the sort of thing Mum would have told us as kids, I learnt the other day that before 1844 it was Larboard and Starboard, but the Roayl Navy changed what was an obviously confusing (under fire/in a storm) convention, in that year.

The other reason to look out for another one is that the box on this one is shot to bits. The Woolbro stamp looks like the kind of overprint a few of their earlier sets carry, so there may be a generic version of this out there somewhere?

On safer ground with the SRN6 (Saunders-Roe, Naval, Type Six), this is another regular rack-toy star; Clifford Toys, and would seem to be a copy of the Matchbox die-cast, in military colours (which Matchbox also did). The Royal Marines used these for years, and the Griffon's they use now are quite similar in design.

I have the die-cast black & white civil one in the under-visited box, and this copy must be a slight scale-up; because, although small; it wouldn’t fit in the standard 1-75 range's box? It's also all plastic and like the Woolbro/MMF one, mostly polystyrene.

M is for Maisto's Military Mystery - Cubeville Cary Cases

Fun one this, but a bit mysterious, I picked it up from a dealer in the market area at the Hop Farm, Beltring's big week-long combat-wombat shindig 'Trucks & Tracks' back in 2008, he only had these, but he had a mountain of them, like half a van-load, still in the outer, manila cartons.

The box shows three sets, but two of them come with the same truck, either tilted or tiltless! And I wouldn't exactly describe any of them as particularly inspiring? The feeling being that 'Military Cubeville' was a live market-test which sank with little trace!

The one I bought; Cubeville Outpost, there are elements of the much older (1970's) Monogram Pocet Force & Battle Link sets about this, but where they had a PVC or latex scenic base which squidges-up and folds away into a smaller case, the Maisto sets are larger due to the rigidity of the scenic diorama/vignette contained within.

Which - the scenic item - is a reasonable ruined dwelling with watch-tower, sandbag piles and a rather formal stack of bright-silver 'jerry' cans! I think the access ramp also has a secondary role of joining multiple units together but I might be wrong on that one?

This was placed above the carry case with a top/side right-angled window in the other side of the box (I didn't shoot it; I'll scan it sometime) and you get two quite nice figures in the 25/28mm bracket and a M2/M3 (I still don't know which is which; I think the difference is mostly on the inside?) Bradley IFV, and it's the early, pre-Gulf Wars upgrades version.

Close-up's of the two figures (it's a figure Blog!), the box isn't clear, but there seem to be six to collect, possibly seven, but it may only be four or five? ATGM looks like it might be an M41A7 Saber (improved BGM-71 TOW system), while the squad-commander with radio is pretty stanndard, post-Cold War fodder.

The mystery is they are hard to find on the Internet and there are none currently on evilBay, although other Maisto military are easier to locate, all small ranges (G.I. Joe, Military Force (upper shot), All Stars and Kid Connection), along with odd  military finished vehicles in the normal 'Matchbox' style range, most of the bottom row above.

Some, like the 'Electronic Warfare' truck above (or was it a fire appliance first!?) reappear in the other brand-marked ranges, in the truck's case as a fully camouflaged version in the G.I.Joe series . . .

. . . or even as Jurrasic Park knock-offs in the Dino Adventure line! Maisto also do military vehicles in other scales, including 1:35th and 1:16th, I think I saw a 1:48th one as well. But as to Cubeville, pulled quickly from the market I fear?

C25th is for Buck Rogers

Except I'd never actually seen a Buck eraser! To be fair, for a decade or two I've only had the 'trooper' and while I Knew Wilma and Twiki (the stupid kid/dog/little sister tea-time viewing-ruin character) existed, I did wonder as to the full extent of the set.

Still my favourite, and shot before the other's had been found, he's a generic space soldier, with little in the TV series I remember looking anything like him? But then I don't remember many of the space ships in the topper/eraser set being in the series either! He's really channeling the Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars and seems to have taken a space fire-hydrant up his jacksie!

I should state here that I watched the series . . . because - Sci-Fi . . . but it was shit, It was shit then and it's shittier now, it was worse than a bad Dr. Who story-line, it was cheap, it was a conveyor-belt for B-movie 'stars' heading down and wannabe stars heading-up, and there were no sweeping space-opera battles or anything, it was a naff, band-wagoning off-of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, without the budget or effects, it made the half-a-decade older Space 1999 look sophisticated.

It tried to be wordy and worthy, with Trekian morality lessons, or parables on life, but without the charm of Star Trek, and the lead (who's real name I can't even remember) was NO lead! But its run coincided with when we had our Bush colour TV and then moved here, so I watched it religiously hoping it would improve, or have at least one proper space battle!

The additions, for some reason I shot Wilma back-to front, more on that in a minute, but you can see she has the Imperial Toys markings on her back. Buck is to her left and that annoying little fucker 'Twiki' the ersatz K9-R2D2-Daggit thing is the blob of orange. the space craft are make-weights which seem to have been bought-in or - at least - added from another line.

Casting around for an image of Wilma the right way round (these are all in storage already) I found the original listing, of the lot I bought a while-ago . . . maybe a year-ago? Is still on Picclick! The whole box is on Pinterest, Worthpoint and at least one website, I used the Worthpoint one, but it's probably not the best.

The dumpy 'steampunk' dustbin ship (pink above, blue one in the post!) was previously part of a range of scented erasers (a trend which started in the 1970's but which had its heyday in the 1980's I think) in bubble-gum colours, and one of my two troopers (both the same green) is not marked Imperial, so there might have been a generic issue of some/all of the figures.

There's also a standing robot who looks more Diener and may be from another source, but whatever other issues they had, they were clearly interchangeable cavities and were run-together for the Imperial set - six figures (including two robots), six vessel. You can see one of the ships (yellow, bottom right) is vaguely a 'Thunderfighter' from the TV series.

Did I mention I can't stand Twiki . . . he grates on me like a Republican senator trying to talk on women's issues.

Now fully updated here.

C is for Carmine-Coloured Capsule-Cats

Love these! I only have four, I think there are about 12 from Kinder? Plus some solid, single-piece ones, but as a box ticker these four will do. I love them because I loved the cartoons, they were so chic, so stylish, it's like someone in the 1950's made some colour cartoons and hid them until the 1970's!

Although two of them have an almost uniquely British theme (bobby on the investigation and ceremonial guardsman) I believe they had a pan-European issue and aren't terribly rare, but are still among the more pricey Kinder items on evilBay, due to the very small stickers they need to be found with.

They are full-on 'Steckfiguren', but with the hands, feet, head, tail and legs all identical, there's no real 'swoppet' element, more 'push' or pop-together.

I like the little toe-beans on the underside of the feet, while the very-small looking red-component for the nose is actually a [hidden] larger component, so little fingers (perhaps with a parents help) can put them together. Note also; his rife is a pop-gun with a cork!

As well as the eyes, most models also have some other stick-ons, along with a  small sticker of the model for fridge, wardrobe door or bedstead/headboard . . . parents who don't allow a sticker agglomeration area aren't proper parents! That's it; Kinder, Pink Panthers - box ticked.

J is for Jumping Jazzberry Jaguar

I picked-up a nice mixed lot of jumpers a while ago, I think we've seen several now already, but there's a couple of 'jiggler' type monsters still to come, in the meantime and as a continuation of one of the side-collections, there was this Pink Panther.

Not a lot to add to the pictures, but you want to try and get three lines out of it to keep the Google-bots happy, so extra images for colour variation against different backgrounds and note he's wearing PE-kit of 'singlet & shorts' and looks happy anticipating his violent acceleration along a random trajectory with a 50/50 chance of landing on his head!

Marked-up to Hong Kong with a haloed globe and the letters HF (heliotrope feline!), I test fired him and he leapt about three feet . . . and landed on his head! Testing was in the interests of research of course, I'm a grown-up, I don't play!

This chap came in with a mixed lot at some point, I think. His natty jacket and hat also happen to match the sucker-pad on the one above, colour-wise, and I thought I might have him in the four we saw a while back, but he's new (there was one with a top-hat in that other set), and is probably from another set of four from the same source as last time.