E is for Emergency . . . Empire or Emson?

A closer look at a couple of the sets in the packaging-post from the other day now, with a look at the Blue Box emergency set, and what I've suggested is the Lucky 'version', however in preparing the images, it became obvious that it's probably not Lucky, but E (for Empire? Or Emson, see past article on Thames Trader trucks!), the people who made some of those Tri-Ang Minic ship knock-off's.

The two sets side-by-side, ignoring the illustrative card coming off the front side of the Blue Box carton, you can see the two boxes are roughly the same height and depth, but the unbranded one (sold as Lucky but probably Emson) is wider for double the contents.

 

The Blue Box turntable ladder truck is a bit of fun with a fully traversing, elevating and extending, sectional ladder (a very delicate structure in polystyrene, I don't suppose many have survived outside the packaging!), but purely fictional on a Bedford RL chassis I think?

 

The ambulance, on the same chassis, has been (along with the figures) quite badly discoloured by sunlight (ultraviolet), and you can see that while the far side isn't so affected, the cab/chassis moulding is untouched.

This confirms my own theory much expanded-on in an interesting thread on plastic diseases, on the old HäT forum, long since deleted, when H adopted the 12-month cut-off! Basically, I believe all problems with old plastic are related to errors on the day they were formed, with incorrect temperatures, pressures or additive quantities resulting in hidden flaws with will come out later, I'm guessing the body and figures were probably overcooked in the tools, while the cab-chassis went through their birth without problems?

The other set is aping the 77xxx series from Blue Box, with a window in front of each element, and similar packaging dimensions, and confirms the link between the round-based mechanics and the oblong-based firefighters, previously made here at Small Scale World.

I thought the artwork was rather atmospheric!

 

I don't know my cars well enough to call either of these, are they US vehicles, with that soft spongy suspension which makes kids car-sick, or are we looking at a Ford Zephyr or Zodiac for one of them? Corgi did an Oldsmobile staff-car, could one of these be a clone of that?

 

We've seen the figures before, they are copies of the Blue Box copies of the Dinky figures, but the sticker on the blue Police-car's door is clearly the branding of the 'E for Empire' toys, probably, actually Emson, seen on other toys of this type, which is not to say Lucky aren't in there somewhere, there was a lot of cross pollination between all those cheapo-platic makers, and having discovered that Blue Box (and Redbox) are only brands of Tai Sang, there's no reason to discard previous theories without empirical evidence, so I'll tag all three (Lucky Toys, Empire Made, Emson) until we know more!

 

The Thames Trader water tank (? Or tool-lorry?) is similar in lines to the real-life T55, but that was more streamlined, while the Dennis looks like a bit of a hybrid between a 1971 D600 (Mk 2) and the earlier F101. As different brigades would have replaced different numbers/types of appliances at different times, there would have been a gradual evolution in outline and fittings, as well as different decorations (some have more chrome), so it's a fair representation of a generic Dennis!

It was machines like this which attended our house, and saved it, back in the 1970's, when the heath caught fire (thoughts for the people of Maui, Greece, Portugal, Canada et al.) and the tar on the flat roof started steaming! The firemen gave my brother and I regular top-ups for our watering cans, so we could help 'damp-down'! We found tons of cooked Adder's eggs - sadface, and ended-up looking like a couple of Victorian chimney sweeps!

 

Being a local manufacturer, my childhood memories are filled with Dennis fire engines (and County tractors) being test-driven or 'shaken-down' around the area, and they often went through Fleet, sometimes as plain chassis, with the drivers' using motorcycle helmets and four-point, racing seatbelts, perched - as they were - on a temporary seat over the bare engine! I seem to recall the seats were held-on with a literal network of bungy-cords, but it was probably coloured rope!

 

While it is also similar to the Bedford RL 'Green Goddess' wagons of the Auxiliary [Army] Fire Service (AFS), and of the fire-strikes fame! All gone now, along with everything else in the cupboards - Thanks Tory voters, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing, least of all 'society'.

In both sets, the figures are slightly over-scaled at 28/30mm, but all the vehicles could carry-off service in 1:76/72nd scale armies or on HO or OO-gauge layouts, or maybe not the two cars; just the lorries/trucks?

U is for Update - Airfix Indians

 

I've added some stuff to the Airfix HO-OO Indians page, a few box scans, some OBE's a rack-toy card and conversions, which can all be seen here!

I is for In Space No One Can Hear You Blow Out Your Candles!

Cake decorations, not rack-toys, but the price-points and ephemeral nature of the products are pretty similar, and as I say most years, a few days in, RTM isn't just for RT's! Wilton today, and their quite eclectic output of Space Toys over the years, and probably not all of them but the ones I've been made aware of.

 

These are all generics, in that the rocket also comes as a stand-alone cap-bomb, and while I think I have one now (might be on the Blog?), it wasn't here when this post started to take shape.

 

Likewise the MPC copies are pretty common, these seem to be not the best copies, but not the worst, and from the colours (which I like) may be the same ones issued in rack-toy bags by . . . errr . . . Payton? Someone like that!

While the Ajax-Archer copies seem to be the soft-plastic with paint, Hong Kong figures also issued as both rack toys and bagged parachute-toys, in which guise the later, unpainted mouldings, are quite common. But the helmets would seem to be unique to the Wilton issue copies?

I can't find these in the catalogues I have, so they must have been a short-lived item, if they were Wilton, I was told they were but can't find anything definitive, I believe there's a second pose, I only have the one at the moment, but note, on his back; the same KT in an oval cartouche, as the firm which issued all those statuettes and pencil sharpeners, stationary stands etc . . . we've been looking at here at Small Scale World in the last few years !

 

He (previous shots) may even (with his mate) have been the production versions of the two in this catalogue image, with the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) or lander, as I don't think I've seen these either? Revell scale-ups? Behind them is the Gemini craft with two larger scale astronauts.

 

Here's the three of them, what do you think, could he be contemporary with the other two, having replaced the 'mock-up' press figures, or am I still looking for three other astronauts? And the bigger guys served to ID others in the 'unknown seated pilots' zone! the KT is about 45mm (50 with the domed stand), the other two 60+mm

We have also looked at the loose candle-holder figures here, not that long ago, but there was a second set with a UFO and one each of the two figures, so Junior could have space-cakes until he was eight, on two purchases! Then, if he makes it, the nursing-home staff could get them out for his eightieth!

 

The collection, as it stands, minus my loose UFO figures. The catalogue image above seems to show a transparent red-nose, mine is a totally opaque, flat red. And I'm not sure if the figures are even in the bag? I think they're stuffed into the ship, but I can't check as it's gone to storage.

 

 

I think I nicked this off evilBay to remind us of the figures without opening (or having to find) my bagged set!

B is for Blue Boxes . . . Blisters & Bags!

While I was emptying the house I grabbed the opportunity, last year, to put a large board (an old home-pool table without legs, Mum used for her puzzles) on the sofa, and throw a bedspread over it, to make a largish 'studio' to shoot the Blue Box packaging, and this; not so much a comprehensive post; more of an 'overview', is the result!

Going back to the early days of Blue Box, or even pre-Blue Box - the pink box with the Crescent gun copy is an unmarked generic and can therefore be considered a Tai Sang toy rather than a Blue Box toy, contracted-out to a western buyer - are these mostly simple closed boxes.

 

Fold-&-tuck lids, lift-off upper sleeve lids and some with perforated lines to allow for fold back display examples on counter-tops or in shop-windows or display cabinets. The farm set is probably a little later (1970's) than the others, which are mostly 1960's, the gun may well be a 1950's item.

The window era brings us the 'decker' concept, where pricing within a larger display is denoted by the number of levels (or the width of the tray/plinth) of each set, this is all 1960-70's stuff and the basic unit is a single-decker!

Here you can see on the left two versions of the smallest set, card base-insert is identical with the same figures glued-in to the same spots. One with a two-sided window on an otherwise normal box with fold and tuck ends, the other an 'ultra modern' (at the time) variation (it's still how posh gift chocky-things, soaps, small electrical gadgets and the like are packed at Christmastime today) with an all-over folded plastic case, stapled to the plinth-base.

Similar packaging on the larg construction set, while the smaller one has a stand-up card extension for more graphical information, and the larger US army set (bottom right) is about as deep as any of these sets got, so you can see there's no room for the gun, which you-know-who was falsely passing-off as Blue Box a few years ago . . . well I think he still is; they never corrected or deleted any of their nonsense!

So then we add a deck, and get double-deckers, not the buses, not the chocolate-bars! The extended display area of the cards is off the front face on the two small scale sets, while the larger scale US troops - with the same small scale vehicles and equipment - get multiple windows, one highlighting each element.

 

The smaller set on the far right will be returned to but note how ultraviolet (sunlight) has completely discoloured the back body of the truck, both medics and the stretcher-patient, but has left the cab/chassis snow-white. It's all in the batch of polymer, I've said it before, and I'll say it again!

Triple-deckers! The trays seem to be the same trays that were in the single-decked sets above, and while you get green (friendly?) OR grey (enemy?), the contents are otherwise pretty random, with truck, tank and gun trays in the grey set and truck, truck and gun in the green, and with random loads/bodies on the trucks, there may have been some more, and some less disappointing sets in this line!

If you were a poor kid on a sink-estate, and you unwrapped one of these at Christmas, you would have been more genuinely joyful, than some rich-kid getting his cabinet of Meccano or whatever.

 

And I know that; we can't complain, we had a pretty privileged, middle-class childhood, but money was tight, and we had friends who got pillowcases, not stockings at the ends of their beds, on Christmas mornings, but their toys were all broken and unloved stuffed into all these drawers, we looked after ours . . . not the packaging mind!

But yeah, the mighty four-decker! The one on the right (like a fair few of these) is near-mint from James Opie's collection, the one on the left is a mess, but it's mostly there, I have seen a few over the years, where everything is still tied-n with its elastic bands (smaller items were glued), and it's just in need of sorting/ordering properly (even the teeny helicopter), and the figures returning - they are with all the loose ones. Scale in both sets, like most above, is all over the place!

Modernity arrives in the guise of vac-formed blister packaging, earlier sets stapled to their backing cards, later sets heat-welded to them, with hanger holes sometimes present for the true 'rack' toy! Julius Caesar still has his chad intactum, as the actress said to the bishop!

The 'Battleground' set (also hanging-on to its chad) is another Tai Sang generic (possibly for FW Woolworths, it has the look of a Woolworths cheapie?), and probably pre-dates the supply of the hard-plastic brown figures to Tri-Ang Battle Space, so people trying to call the figures 'Giant' when they were only a jobber are missing the point, they are Giant, in or with the packaging, otherwise they are Tai Sang/Blue Box.

We've seen these before I think, and they are oddities, with the one on the left for Woolbro, the one on the right more generic, again containing 'Blue Box' items, but as generics - Tai Sang.

 

Ledapak is also mentioned and may be another recipient (of the right-hand set), or the maker of the vac-forms, which include the crude Fort Apache frontage. The left-hand set also looks pricy for what it contains, and I wonder if they were experimental marketing? Both also came from James.

On the left here are some standard rack-toy bottle bags with header cards, in the case of three; the header having a long-tail to form the backing-card at the same time, in the case of the little set with 45mm US soldiers, the backing card is a seperate piece slipped behind the product.

 

On the right are some of the second-tier Hong Kong cloners, copying the already poor-quality Blue Box, with 2nd generation piracies! And they are there with one, two and tree decker's, blister cards, bottle bags and a closed box.

 

The only brand - on the right - is the Lucky Toys fire-set, they did a larger three-decker too, and (whispers) they are nicer sets than the Blue Box ones; much better build-quality! The camouflaged three-deck set should be the same colours as the pair of two-decks, but is sun-faded, contents/origin are the same. We looked at the Wild West set years ago - it's all on the Blue Box tag somewhere!

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Finally, not Blue Box at all, but along with numerous ex-Marx tools, the Rado Industrial Co., trading as Ri-Toys seemed to inherit some Blue Box or Tai Sang mouldings, and certainly knocked-off others, so here are a few of their packaging types, taking us through the 1980's and into the 1990's with the central combat set.

And that's a pretty-good overview of forty-plus years of Hong Kong rack-toy output and the types of packaging at the lower level end of the market, if I say so myself!

 

Thanks to everyone who's ever saved me stuff, on this one, as I know James, Adrian and Trevor have given me Blue Box packaged sets over the years, John's helped me hunt them and bring them back from the far flung corners, Gareth let me photohraph his Marx/Sunshine version of the Wild West set for an earlier post . . . it's not that Blue Box are rare; they’re not, but there's a lot to track down as they were one of the biggest HK manufacturers for years and one of the first to own-brand, so there are tons of variations out there!

F is for Farm Stock - Page Update

I've added a couple more Hong Kong copy/clone examples to the Airfix Farm Stock page, one from Hong Kong generic/phantom brand National; the 'heavy horse' sculpt only, and the other unknown in green polymer, with a few duplicate/improved images of other stuff already on the page!

http://airfixfigs.blogspot.com/2010/06/1960-farm-stock-s4-hooo.html

WHC is for Well Heaving Catalogue

I can't remember the date of this catalogue, but I think it was 2006 or 2007, and while it was a heavy ring-bound tome with about 50 pages, the items likely to appeal to followers of this blog were on only six double-spread pages, and not all of them, so I've isolated the ones which may interest some of you;

Common Airfix clones!

All Hallow's Eve!

I've probably got all of these separately, but need to ID them in the stash and bring them together, common stuff in Charity Shop lots!

Looking at the scorpion, I think this is the set currently being handled by Henbrandt or the US outfit D&D Distributors, so the tool's still out there!

I've got similar, and possibly an unpainted version of this chap, but not this actual one, so he's on the 'wants' list!

Interesting as it looks like a comic-book cover-givaway, but I suspect some wires got crossed, and instead of five different animals (ONE per pack), these sets turned-up at Beano's distributors, which would have made a huge hole in their profits if they'd been given away, so they were cleared through Cornelius to claw back the investment?

I'd like to find one of these too!

Some of the many 'anonymous' civilians!

These are the soft rubberised, sub-scale (45/50mm) versions of the ones originally issued by Toy Major, and now in the Halloween sets from Dollar General, but back in a tan/fawn harder polyethylene. Suggesting that a year or two earlier or later WHC were behind the similar copies of Supreme's knights? An hour later - no, the TM ones are different sculpts!

I have some, but not all, these cowboys & Indians, in fact we may have seen them here in passing when I shot a few boxes in the garage a few years ago, but I don't have all these poses, and I have one or two, not illustrated here, so there may have been up to six of each, or five?

 

I also think I bought some around 1997 or '98, down in Sussex for the Editor of Plastic Warrior, in a fantastic, old-school, newsagent-sweet shop in Uckfield I think, or the next town down? I used to do a lot of milage! Yeah . . . might have been Hailsham, neither look-right on Google Earth, but Hailsham still has the circular road round the town centre, so I suspect . . . ?

I've got these too, one of the first large-scale samples to join the collection after the Blog started back in 2008/9, charity-shop lot, but they were so brittle I never blogged them, some kind of nylon or rayon where the fine detail snaps-off easily! They are large, around 80/90mm (?) and reminded me of the Auburn Rubber Vietnam era figures.

Chinasaurs! Quite nice, 'modern', weathered sculpts.

Another civilian you can now ID!

More Airfix clones and pretty common shite!

But distinctive bases on the Wild West.

Old cereal-premium clones!

This will be a larger model than the one in the Beano sets!

WHC is for Success!

We've probably had that one before! Hay-ho, a couple of items from WH Cornelius, now Playwrite, founded in 1911 and still going strong having seen their friendly rival H Grossman get swallowed-up in the last few years.

A very simple one, being a single copy of an MPC 'ring-hand' figure with a small runner of accessories, but just the thing to shut Junior up when out shopping . . . Until he starts losing the small pieces under the stroller (which was still called a pram in those days!), and probably from the era when it would have been sixpence, switching to Five New P in 1970!

 

This however, despite having quite dated graphics, can't be older than 1993, as that was when the CE mark was introduced? But, it may have been old stock getting a second outing with the addition of a sticker?

 

I intend - one day - to open this, just to construct and photograph the aircraft hangar! I've always dismissed the tank as shit, and back when I was a small-scale only collector, I sent several to recycling or charity! 

But here (with the turret reversed over the rear deck) it actually looks a bit like a British Scorpion, it isn't, it's still just a made-up thingy, but for Garden war-gamers (who don't seem fussy) it would make a usable CVRT! All the contents are common generics (except the card building), with Airfix clones and may well be from more than one source.

T is for Two - Current Rack Toys

Another quickie, one of the things I like about RTM is that I clear 20/30-odd folders from the ever-growing pile in Picasa and this one's one of them! I think these have both come from Peter Evans, although I seem to have two examples of the boat one, so probably found one myself, it seems the same stores which carry the Red Deer rack-toys, often also carry the BJ Toys stuff as well, and we have one here in Fleet, but it doesn't always have the same stock as whichever store Peter finds his in.

We've been looking at these, both vehicles and figures in various packaging (Poundland, 99p Stores, Funrise &etc) pretty-much since the blog started, and always 'current', so this is just another iteration of product bought-in from multiple sources and packaged by a middle-man shipper, printed-up/configured for each contract/order - the VAB-type is new I think, and quite useful?

This is the one I have two of; better on the figures, not so hot on the accessories, but under the naff paint is something which could be painted-up better, and would/could serve a purpose in someone's wargaming army, I'm sure!

Close-up of the figures, better quality versions of the common 'new sculpts' (first seen from Ja-Ru or Ackerman in the 1990's?) and old Matchbox US Infantry sculpts, that's it, and thanks as always to Peter for spotting and sending the stuff to the Blog.