F is for Flying Jeep, H is for Hafner, M is for Malcom, R is for Rotabuggy

Brian Berke, roving reporter in NY, sent me these a month or so ago, and they got put on hold because of Rack Toy Month (and everything else he'd sent the blog), and the fact that I needed to play a bit of catch-up with the queue, but it's a fascinating thing, which nearly 'happened', and was performing well in tests, when it was pulled, purely due to advancements in Allied glider capacity/abilities.

 

The R. Malcom & Co's., M. L. 10/42 'Hafner' Rotachute-Rotabuggy, Flying Jeep, it's a Jeep . . . wot flu!

 

Utilising the New Ray Jeep, itself a nice model I haven't tracked down yet (well, I'm miles behind with larger scale vehicles, and they aren't a priority!), Brian has built a model of the Hafner Jeep for his troops, and above is the work-in-progress shot, showing how he went about it.

 

Basically Brian seems to have used a stiff paper or card, over a plastic frame, and when I was a modeller, I often used tissue paper for vehicle tilts/canopies - after a couple of coats of Humbrol they became quite robust, if you use a stiffer paper - a bit of Basildon Bond or something - you're laughing, it's as good as plastic sheet. Also, some people now wash the paper with super-glue to get even more plastic-like rigidity.

 

Finished and posed with the Lone Star paratroopers, who seem perfectly suited to the task, it really looks the part, for more on this machine, there's always Wikipedia:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafner_Rotabuggy

 

Strangely I have a memory of seeing this in the Airborne Forces Museum, at Browning Barracks in Aldershot as a kid, but if the only one (at Middle Wallop) is a 1980's mock-up, I must be imagining it, because I'm thinking of '71/72? There was a long series of cabinets along the window side of the museum as you entered, which contained models made by the modelling club of Depot Para', and it's likely there was a model of this there maybe? But I have a - presumably false - memory of one, out on the parade ground with the air-portable Land Rover on Hercules pallet, and the similarly bound Humber Hornet with Malkara missiles, which were parked near the main-road past the barracks.

 

Fiddler's Green, a name we've seen here before, also offer an all card model:

 

http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/models/aircraft/Flying-Jeep.html

 

It looks more like a mini-moke, but it's a bit of fun. And, to be honest, their page (scroll down) is better than Wikipedia's for imagery and history! And it didn't fail, it wasn't unsuccessful, it was working, when it was pulled, because it was easier to land a jeep with its gun, from a glider, without a big hollow tail attached!

 

Funny how people get all excited about things like the German Maus, a monumental waste of time, money and material, while we were towing people down the runway in these! I hope all that window area was plexiglass, not real glass, you wouldn't want to fly hot into a war-zone with all that glass, 12-inches from your face?

Many thanks to Brian for the shots of this fascinating scratch-build.

O is for Once Upon a Time, in June! Introduction

So, slowly catching up, and because this year's show was later, the reports are not as late as last year . . . Bargain! The Plastic Warrior show plunder reports for 2025, a year I couldn't image getting to when I was a kid!

 

Everything got a bit muddled-up this year, and some things seemingly didn't get shot (none of Isaac's bits are in this shot), so as per the last couple of years I'll add a thanks list at the end of each post, but the pink box was a donation from Peter Evans, the box middle-right was a similar lot from Brian Carrick, I think, the single red figure was a freebie 'test shot' from Michael Mordant-Smith, while top right looks like a mix of purchases and Adrian Little loot, although I can't see the Replicants buys, or big pink bag anywhere?

 

Trevor Redkin will have been responsible for some of the small scale (bottom left, or centre?), Barney Brown brought something over during the show, and I think someone else (Steve Vickers or Graham Apperley?) brought over the bench and table (bottom centre), which still leaves several things to attribute, and several names missing, so apologies if I've not mentioned you here (eMail me!), and I'll add all the likely 'feeders' to the posts' thanks-list!

 

This is the plunder, broken down by subject-matter, which is how we will look at them again this year, I'd say it wasn't a vintage year for rarities, but there were still some very interesting things, and the posts all have something engaging in them!

 

You see, for instance, this was given to me by someone, and I've forgotten who, and while it could have gone in the Civilian-Sports post, it's so daft, with pre-walkers on a mobile see-saw, I thought it should go here as an example of the weirder-end of Hong Kong novelty tat! And having seen this year's HKTDC catalogue, you just don't get this genre of push-and-go polymer nonsense, any-more.

 

So whoever gave it to me (eMail!), it's much appreciated, for the sample of it's time, that it is, and as an enhancer of the babies-box 'master collection', mentioned in a Sandown Park post the other day! Literally priceless! And while the box needs work, the . . . err . . . Machine . . . Device . . . Siege-engine . . . is a minter!

 

Also outside the themes of the rest of the posts was this little goldmine of early Plastic Warriors, there were more, about 15 in total, but here's 9 out of the first 10 (missing No.2, which I think I already have), and overall I think I'm only missing about two or three issues now, all in the teens/early-twenties? It's also interesting to see how Peter's header graphic developed over the early issues.

 

I think there's ten posts to come, and it was technically the 40th birthday show, as the next issue will be the 40th anniversary mag', I think? But with a year lost to Covid ('22) and a couple of years of two-show experiments, I'm not 100% sure what show it actually was, and it didn't make a claim for itself, but maybe the 41st actual event?

 

All hats raised to Brian, Paul, Peter and others no longer here, for putting it on, every year, a shout-out to Steve Weston for helping find the new venue (so 'new' we've all been meeting there for about 14 years now?) along with a self-administered pat-on-the-back, to all those who've helped with tables and/or chairs over the years, our best show ever, every year!

H is for Highland Sentries!

In addition to the aircraft we looked at last week, I had another Zang purchase back in the Spring, the Highland infantry boxed set. We did look at one I think back in the early days of the blog, but to see how they came, and probably how the guardsmen we saw a couple of years ago were issued too, is nice.

 

Unbranded lid

 

Full set

 

Close up

 

No sign of a gummed Timpo label, so I guess these were Zang's own retail idea, but as a generic for small stores? Like my existing loose fella', two of these are snapped-off at the ankle, but composition figurines in approximately HO-gauge, of men with bare legs were always going to be a long-shot!

M is for Marx Space - Moon Men & "Aliens'

So, to the aliens, known in the later (1970/80's) sets as Moon Men, and six of a possible seven poses. I've only ever seen the crawling alien in the gray PVC, and we've seen him, so he got left out!

 

The set of six, in a softish 'Airfix' polyethylene, a bit bright, but not as bright as the orange-red of some of the space stuff, and it's the whole slime-monster lagoon-radioactive-neon lighting trope of a lot of sci-fi - this colour was common on comic art and pulp-paperback jackets, spilling, radiating, blasting or dripping! Even the 'lobby-cards' and posters for black & white movies would have plenty of florescent green, lime green or yellow-green!

 

Compared with the Rex Mars set's versions, and as we'll see in a second, they are 'versions', all six were found in the Rex Mars set, with one or two also found in Tom Corbett or Space Patrol sets.

 

'Big Ears', the only one found in all four sets, and the similarities between this sculpt and the Fireball XL5 character 'Zooney the Lazoon' is almost certainly not a coincidence, as the Anderson's raided the entire 1950/60's toy oeuvre for their various TV series', the fact that they ended up with a character in a 1962 production, which resembles a 1950's space toy from the other side of the pond, is beyond accidental!

 

Note also, all the bases (and feet) are quite different, these are variants, not the same tool . . . with each being re-cut/finished as it was included in whatever set, the six 'ethylene Moon Men having their own tool, leaving the crawling guy in the Tom Corbett set, as the outlier, not included here.

 

I've seen a Tom Corbett Space Academy set, with all three PVC sets, so you got three Big Ears, but helmets for the Rex Mars sculpts only, it had pale-blue 'office furniture' and was dated 1952, ten years before Fireball XL5!! 

 

Likewise, the 'Frogman Assassin'; 

completely different bases on each of my three samples.

 

I already had four of them in a different shade of green, whom I had shot for the archive, and actually found the bag first, whilst putting the others away, then remembered I had shot them, and you can see in the lower image a clear colour variation between them! No accessories in this post; I'd run out of things to pose the figures with by the time I got to these chaps/chapesses/whatever's!

F is for Follow-ups - Various, Old & New

A few follow-ups which have been accruing over the last few years, and an eclectic mix of bits enhancing older posts and a couple of more recent ones.

 

 

A couple more KUM pencil sharpeners, these being a small pistol, and a revolver with a drum magazine! We looked at KUM, with more relevance to the Blog's interests here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/search/label/KUM

 

While this is an advert for pre-printed bookplates, with an emphasis on Sci-Fi / Fantasy, there's also a more traditional, even 'monkish' design. Found on the Internet and credited to David O. Knuttunen, it's the back cover ad from IF (not Galaxy), October 1966, and enhances this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/04/b-is-for-bookplates-1-overview.html

 

BEM - Bug Eyed Monster, an acronym which has faded from favour!  

 

Meanwhile as a backup to the recent posts on Holly, Lik Be (LB) and the 'Gygax' monsters, on the left here is the copy of the Monster Manual, which I was using along with the later lever-arch file.

 

The other two, which came in at roughly the same time, are a fascinating book on the Tommy Gun rival to Action Man, made by Pedigree Toys, and it's surprising how much Tommy Gun stuff my brother and I had, thinking it was Palitoy-Hasbro, because most of our stuff tended to come from the Church fêtes and Jumble Sales of Heckfield and the surrounding environs, or the local tip (dump)!

 

While the other book is a useful history of Marx, an updated volume, I still don't have Vol.I in any version . . . it will turn-up, everything does! 

 

The Mechanoid bits in the smaller inset, came in a while back, and the two ladders are the real treasure, as none of mine had them, now two will be completed, and the radar disc will finish the green one, while a near complete one came-in recently, with nice turquoise legs - also needing a ladder!

 

Looking at them, I think I may have a couple more spares in the 'unknown ladder' drawer of my old multi-drawer cabinet! So when it all comes together I should have three complete, another one with two-each different coloured legs and the gold-accessories one still needing a ladder, along with a few bits - that's a fleet!

 

 

A couple of rather poor images of a set of the Marx copies, and a generic set of the same copies of Cherilea astronauts/spacemen, I actually managed to buy the foot-pump set, twice from the same seller, because I'd forgotten I'd bought the first one (generics from Italy), so we will look at them properly another day, but all three above adding to this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2024/03/e-is-for-expelling-few-myths.html

 

While this will add a bit to this post from two years ago

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/05/e-is-for-eggcellent-effigies.html

 

He's a Humpty I shot at Sandown Park this weekend just gone, is a lead-solid from Sacul, and has had the base repaired/replaced.

I is for Invicta

We've seen one or two here, as they came in from Charity Shops, and there may be one or two more in storage, but I happened to be up early one Sunday back in July, and went to the big car-boot over at Borden, off the A325 Farnham Road, where I found a chap selling a shit-ton (an official measurement somewhat larger than a shitload!) of the Invicta (for The British Natural History Museum) dinosaur models, and I sort of bought one-each of most of them!

 

I then went and got an egg & bacon bap and a coffee, the real reason for going to a car-boot sale, in my opinion, went back to the car to eat said burger, and sort the plunder, and decided I might as well go back and get the others, which proved problematical, as everyone was starting to pack-up and leave, and I couldn't find the stall for a while, then nearly tripped over it, and this, below, is the result!

 

All the big boys together, I think I have one in storage, but couldn't remember which one! That's a three-foot table, so 'Dippy' is nearly two-and-a-half feet! Despite having looked these up in the past, I either failed to learn or didn't notice anything about the painted version in a softer PVC, so they came as a surprise to me, and means that despite this haul, I am no nearer to even half of the possible versions (there are a couple of complete colour variants among the old PE ones too), but I do now have more than half the sculpts, at least once. Technically, there's a modern Blue Whale to find too!

 

Cetiosaurus

(painted PVC)

 

Diplodocus

 

Mammenchisaurus

 

Apatosaurus

 

Brachiosaurus

 

Stegosaurus

(PE on the left, painted PVC on the right)

 

Ichthyosaurus

(surface-coated polymer)

 

Plesiosaurus

(surface-coated polymer)

 

Woolly Mammoth

(PE on the left, painted PVC on the right)

 

Left: Glyptodon

Right: Baryonyx

 

 

Left: Iguanodon

Right: Tyrannosaurus (Rex)

 

All undecorated polyethylene unless otherwise stated, the two later additions, both marine subjects, have a shiny coated-surface, almost like resin or fibreglass, with fine age cracks revealing a softer substrate as the bulk of the model, which is probably some form of polyethylene or polypropylene? Also, the tusks of the two version of the Mammoth are quite different, and were clearly redesigned between issues.

 

What was daft was that, despite two visits to the guy's table, I didn't take a Triceratops, even though he had several, as I thought I'd got one, but I'm pretty sure now I haven't, I had the Scelidosaurus which we saw here a while back, along with a couple of Megalosaurs over the years. And, or course, the one I most want, the Dimetrodon, remains elusive!

 

You can find pictures of all of them here:

http://www.dinosaurcollectorsitea.com/invicta.html

 

And details of all variations here:

https://dinotoyforum.proboards.com/thread/4110 

 

Less than a month later, and we have plagiarist eBay scrapings from you know who! His insecurity must be eating him up, and the commenters are only encouraging him! 

L is for Lord of the Jadas

I can't remember where I found this now, I have a feeling it was discounted, so probably TKMaxx, but I can't swear to it, it was in the last few weeks though (July shots), so may still be out there, if like me, you do regularly irregular sweeps of all the likely sources!

Having waxed lyrical about these Jada die-cast figures in the past, and specifically their decoration/paint-finish, I have to say I don't think these Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) figures, are quite as nice as some we've seen, but the green cloak guy has the lustre I liked so much on my first figure, while the silver chap could march straight into any 28mm biblical force, although at 40-odd-mm he'd have to be a specific Philistine!

M is for Marx Space - Rex Mars

I don't know if the Corbett license had expired, or if its sales were dropping to a market saturation-point, which Marx would have recognised from other sets histories, but for some reason they 'invented' a non-TV/Movie, royalty-free property of their own, Rex Mars, with figures similar to both the Tom Corbett and the Space Patrol these were issued with in bigger sets (I haven't even tried to work out the sets, there are dozens of them, stretching over three decades). And that's what this post is looking at, with more of the scenic detritus from my two partial sets.

 

The family portrait! I seem to be missing one sculpt, a chap holding a walkie-talkie near his face, and again, paint is going to have to be removed at some point! 

  

The landing party helping a 'red shirt' back to the shuttle! This time I have the female sculpt, but it's unclear who's who, as it's a made-up set with no TV serial or Movie to help guide the eye, it's all down to the kid's imagination who's boss! I put the lady in charge, she's the tallest!

 

The slightly more active component, they have the same rubber-ducting on knees and elbows as the Space Patrol, but other details are closer to the Tom Corbett sculpts, but with circular helmet-collars, they take the bobbled helmets with a couple of protrusions in the clear-plastic, which turn-up in mixed lots from time to time; I have a few somewhere in the spares pile, so some will get protection!

 

The Aliens, six in total, and rather like Lik Be's robots, all completely different! Which is fine if you want them from six different planets, but not so logical when they are the 'Moon Men' of the Moonbase set? They have their own post, probably next in the sequence.

 

There were, again, two unpainted ones in my sample.

 

The quadruple sonic-death-ray-beam traginator weapon, or boring radar thingy, depending upon your propensity for war toys - there were lots of them in the box, in three colours, but most in the mustard yellow! And something which equated to the morse-signaller boards we saw in an earlier post, apparently it's a solar battery!

 

Three of the landing pads for the Mercury capsule, it has a little hole in the heat-shield! And a ribbed, domed building/laboratory/accommodation unit, which is so remarkably similar to a gold-chromed lid off a touristy bottle of plum-brandy (with the plums in it), from Spain or Portugal, which I've been carrying around for about 50-years, after the Christmas we polished it off, waiting for a chance to scratch build (Terry Wise and the rest told us to keep everything!), I can't wait to dig it out and compare it with this, as I suspect one is based upon the other? But I'll have to wait, won't I!

 

The space-station, which I think can be similarly stuck on the rocket-engine building in the previous post? It's hopelessly out of scale, but so are most of the vehicles, in both my/all the sets!

 

Welp . . . I don't know . . . on the left we have the closest thing to an infantry heavy weapon/death ray, but it's too tall for any of the figures in the three sets we've looked at so far! In the middle, we have an 18thC telescope drilled through a 1950's parking meter! ! While I can't work out if the thing on the right is a sightseeing glass, or a 'What The Butler Saw' peep-show! Cum'on, design department - you can do better than that!

 

Help needed here, what I do know - the two tripods and two bent legs are from the MPC space station, the triple-disc thing is a broken instrument we'll see in a later post, the basket (front, left) also returns (and is part of the thing I mentioned in an earlier post, with the TV desk thing), but that's it.

 

I think the blue loudspeaker, may be from a vehicle, possibly a Hong Kong plastic toy, but it could clip into a tinplate 'wall' of a building? While I have no clue on the bowl (front, centre) which is hollow, the red bit might be a 'sprulette' (my own word), but there's a better shot of a silver one in a later post, so it seems to be a feature of these sets? And the two 'mine detectors' would seem to be from a 3 or 4" action figure? Anyone got any ideas on any of these five?