G is for Guards - Side Drums

Four treatments of Crescent / Crescent for Kellogg's, some home-paint, some factory.

Three from Charbens with a white polystyrene early figure on the left.

Two Lone*Star and one Sacul

C is for Corgi Creatures (Wild Animals, Jungle and Safari stuff)

The Corgi animals were in the main quite good sculpts with a bit of character, there were also a few dogs but they've been and gone as have some of the circus animals, so these are most of the rest...

Daktari, a popular TV series with - I think - one or two movie length spin-offs, produced several animals draped over Land Rover bonnets and the like, along with a cross-eyed lion who I think was called Clarence? The giraffe is one of many, they are all in the unknown HK animals box, as they are very hard to tell apart, and they mostly came in Chipperfield's sets, but some were in the larger Daktari set.

The legless yellow chap is a propylene copy of the safari guide, probably from a cheap plastic copy vehicle of some kind? The piece to find is the stethoscope.

Common animals from stand-alone vehicles were the Bull which came with a Lamborghini 'Fighting Bull', the Rhino came with a VW Beatle 1200CC East African Rally car with steering while the Jumping rabbit was the accessory for the Hillman Hunter also a rally car - London to Sydney.

Close-ups of the 'Kanga', a quick spray in the factory lead to quite a variation from pale ones to dark, and they have a little Joey hiding under there.

Tarzan, recently staring in a small scale 'deffinative' list is actually 54mm, with the sliding one - from the play set - closer to 60mm, colour variations in the PVC are quite marked.

Poor research (or cutting and pasting from that there interweb thing) leads to myth and legend, while a lack of question marks in poorly researched text leads to myth and legend being taken as fact. Never mind, he will take it from here now, he's taken enough already!

 

2025 - Now some internet images here;

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-tarzan-corgi-gift-set.html

 

A hunter from another Safari/Jungle set got copied in Hong Kong for a cheapo cuckoo-clock as one of the two barometric figures who swing in and out with changes in the weather, his hands now testing for rain. The inset was previously published in Plastic Warrior and looks at other cuckoo-clock figures, with early composition on the left with a wooden one, hard styrene plastics in the middle and the copy on the right.

The figure is missing his rifle and I think he came with the Lions of Longleat set?

No Comment!

The Lions of Longleat set also contained this nice lion-house, very useful as a temporary HQ or for hiding a Flak or Pak AT-gun in a war game!

The lions are circling the hunter in the previous picture and are both different poses from the Clarence character piece, but come in the same colour material so go well together.

They were also much pirated in those Noah's Arks sets of the 1970's available as mail-order from Tabloid magazines or TV listers and from Bible book-shops.

G is for Guards - At Ease...Stand Easy!

These are all Britains from the Herald range, with two older UK polyethylene production on the left and two of the later Hong Kong production in PVC to the right, the first with a plug-on base the second with a integrally moulded base.

Left to right; Britains Detail in a dense PVC, unknown swoppet (Speedwell?), unknown swoppet (Charbens?), early Timpo and late Timpo - all ethylene, then a Timpo-Toyway in vinyl an interim/late Timpo or Timpo-Toyway, probably in polypropylene.

Crescent for Kellogg's in scarlet polyethylene, a painted Crescent in the darker plastic, Timpo Kentoys (thanks Dave - see comments), Charbens and the unknown - possibly European premium - we looked at the other day.

C is for Corgi Characters

This is the least complete of all these Corgi posts and yet it was the largest area covered by Corgi who really bought into the licensing 'thing', producing a lot of adult and children's TV, comic and movie characters, or vehicles based on them.

My problem being that while often know what's what, it can take years to correct the 'unknown' boxes, especially as in recent years my stuff has been in storage twice, in three venues with 6  moves! So...most of the Sci-fi,  Marvel and DC stuff is elsewhere and a lot of the anthropomorphic cartoon stuff likewise, while the Superheroes are deliberately in another box...but here are a few to give a flavour of the oeuvre...

The yellow submarine, who (of a certain age) didn't have one of these, not because we knew what it or they were/was, but because our still slightly uptight late-Edwardian parents could attach themselves to the younger 'Hippies' vicariously, by buying us a psychedelic cartoon submarine barley large-enough for the four-man popular beat-combo occupying it!

Hey maaaan...anybody got a carrot...I know I've done that one before...I'll do it again...he was a stoner! And that F***ing snail...I hated the bloody whining whingeing moaning mollusk!

Tom and Jerry - unbeatable, when Tom gets sliced into a dozen pieces by a toaster or something falls to the ground in a heap of pieces, shake himself together and continues the pursuit! Why didn't he go and live somewhere else, dumb-ass! There was a Tom, and this toy came out 30-odd years before Small Soldiers and their roller-skate.

Pink Panther...two cool for school - period. There was another PP vehicle (the pictured one is off some kind of motorbike thing), a car with a huge fly-wheel and with a pull-strip motor, not sure it was Corgi thought, or whether it had a separate figure?

All the above are favourites with a whole new generation of infants, though the Magic Roundabout has had scene and dialogue changes/makeovers.

Buck Rogers and dribble or whatever the pet-robot was called - Yes; I could look it up but then someone might think I give an ess-aich-one-tea!

The Hardy Boys, there are a couple of three figures missing from the bands line-up here, not a big seller so the figures aren't as numerous.

The figure with a cloth-cap is from Postman Pat or Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder or....it's from the Corgi flood years...

Wonder Woman (looking like a native-American dwarve), Spider-man and the Green Lantern? Hornet (thanks M7 - see comments) There are loads missing here, other Spidy's, three sculpts of seated Batman & Robin's in two sizes, a Hulk or two, a large Batman, Superman...

G is for Guards - Lone*Star Parade and Ranges (with Hong Kong copies)

Title says it...

Lone*Star parade and 'ranges', and again - with the Royal Salute pose - we see smooth and textured with the same base, while the standing firing provides different bases.

With Hong Kong copies, there are two types of these; HONG KONG and EMPIRE MADE, both come in either scarlet or maroon.

C is for Corgi Civil-Response

When you ring 999 in the UK the nice lady or gent on the other end of the line always says "Do you want the Police, Fire or Ambulance service caller?", so we will look at them in that order...

We've looked at the police several times in recent months - well; going back a year or more (where the hell does it go?!), and the mounted one was in the first Corgi post the other day, The other two - badly sculpted - propylene pairs came with a late Corgi Juniors play set toward the end of Corgi 'proper', there was a third pair in day-glo orange (fire personnel?).

The day-glo traffic cop at the rear came with several vehicles as my brother kept getting him and his set of traffic-cones and folding road signs in a plastic crate - Range Rover, Ford Transit van...and others? He is also designed to match the ambulance crew from the same era (late 1970's-early '80's) shown below.

The firemen came with the superb Corgi No.1143 American La France Aerial Rescue Truck, one of their best sellers despite also being one of the pricier "...wait 'till Christmas..." items in the catalogue!

The US cop is perhaps a Noo Yoiker with that hat, or LAPD? and in the flanking shots both he and a medic type are on the mystery card we will look at again...

A round-up of the stretcher cases and bearers from Corgi over the years. I could spend a while trying to make sense of them but won't for several reasons. Firstly the websites I visited in researching the figures don't always seem to get it right themselves being more interested in the vehicles as stand-alone playthings or mint-boxed investments. Secondly some of these seem to be interchangeable with late Dinky (who were bought by Mettoy) toys, thirdly; I will post a vague list at the end of these Corgi posts; some of the contents were subject to change and finally; some of the items came with more than one vehicle or in more than one set.

The carded example is giving a clue if you know UK domestic brand trade-marks! Note also the scale-down top-right.

The late sets all went with this day-glow set-up, all part of the craze for motorway emergency vehicles as the M3 and M4 started to open up the nation to visiting other bits of itself with a little more ease!

Some being moulded in orange-red vinyl, sometimes painted, the green one is a softer synthetic rubber and is probably another Hong Kong copy. Again there was a smaller-scaled version.

G is for Guards - Standard Bearers

From the left; a Hong Kong, PVC (with ethylene base and head) copy of Britains Herald, a Timpo 'solid' with moving arm, a Reisler polystyrene Danish Guard and a massif lump of lead which I assume is a home-casting...or very minor make!

C is for Corgi Circus

We briefly dipped into the circus figures the other day looking at those BTS resin things from Hastings or wherever it was! The Corgi Circus has been one of their longest running successes, from the Chipperfield's branded sets of the early 1960's through to the Jean Richard circus set of 1978. Quite a few were also re-issued in the recent Corgi flood years, although I think figures were either thin on the ground or poured-metal 'Corgi Classics'?

The later figures top left are a styrene human cannon-ball'ess flanked by two 54mm vinyl characters, the clown replacing the earlier model, then; a diver from a set we'll be looking at again in a day or so.

The smaller unpainted polypropylene girl with the ring is from a 'Dolphinarium' (on a lorry!), the horses are common as they came six (or 8?) to a set with a circus horse-box, while the elephant (a lump of PVC) was also issued as a hollow-finished styrene kit, along with a packing case in the accessory range.

The clown and chimpanzee from the advertising Land Rover, I have one missing the mic, the other missing the hat, so lined them up to get a 'composite' shot! Again; faces get very different treatments, one being 'whited-up' with the shirt's pale blue.

G is for Guards - Lone*Star Musicians

Er...that's it...Lone*Star musicians...9 of them, three similar pairs, some Toyway reissues, some originals some intermediate...musicians...from Lone*Star.

C is for Corgi Cowboys (No Indians!)

I think I promised this one to somebody over a year ago, can't remember if it was Sam or Gog, but it was one of them! Anyway, Sam has since published a better review of these but as I'm doing all (most...) of the Corgi over Christmas, they've got their five minutes...

There were only five or six items in total, these two (stagecoach and generic wagon), a simplified locomotive and carriage, and two larger play-sets, wagons and train, both with the three buildings. The only thing to note is that the red buck-board/prairie-wagon only seems to have come in the set, so you should always grab it if you see it - not for scalping a profit, but to fill the gap in your collection!

G is for Guards - Cymbalists

Lets put'em together and make some noise people!

Charbens x3; late, late mould-shrink and early with a Sacul on the end.

Another Sacul on the left and two Lone*Star, one website says smooth-bearskin'ed LS guards should have oval bases, but things are never that simple, the textured bearskins are later.

Various treatments of the Crescent/Kellogg's figure.

C is for Corgi 'Crocks' - Edwardian Style

A small number of the Corgi range are of what we would call 'old fashioned people' as children, now - of course - I know they are Edwardian - and still not that 'old fashioned' when I was a nipper! As far as I can tell, several of them were also supplied to Dinky...

...of whom the couple in the main picture to the left above are some along with the seated pair to the right in the upper inset. The first couple are very much typical Corgi in a hard'ish PVC, but the other - pinkish - trio, are a very soft, almost silicone-like synthetic rubber. This may be a clue as to which is Corgi and which Dinky?

The other chap is starting a car with a starting handle...who remembers doing that, when I was a kid I well remember starting cars with a starting handle when the starters failed on cold mornings, and as a teenager trying to start a tractor without breaking my arm!!

The other couple; bottom right, are the inimitable Jeeves and his daft charge Bertie Wooster.

The other figures from the range in Edwardian dress ore the characters from the film Chitty-chitty Bang-bang, which was produced in two sizes, the Husky/Corgi Juniors box-size, which in this case is a good OO gauge-compatible 20-odd mm's. The larger Corgi model is around 1:48 (I think Corgi stated 1:43 for their models?) and the children are separate mouldings, rather than a single piece.

The reason they are in the same pose in both sizes is probably down to the licence agreement tying Corgi into the use of a single  recognisable pre-movie press-release image?

And yes...that's a banana...I didn't have a piece of flower-arrangers oasis and couldn't find my pumice-block!!

G is for Guards - 60mm Figures

There were three 60mm sets of guards produced in the classic factory-painted, soft-ethylene, 1950's toy soldier style that I can think of, the two below and a set of non-musical Cherilea figures one of which appeared in the En Garde post the other day.

The other Cherilea set were musicians and I only have the three at the moment, they will re-appear over the next few days in more of these thematic posts.

The other set was by Crescent, these came courtesy of Mike Melnyk (who has helped with a lot of these guards/ceremonials) and arrived about a year after I took all the other photographs, so they are not in any of the other posts (I think I've queued-up 16), so the standing firer wasn't in that post the other day, and the officer was missing from 'his'. There were 3 other poses and when I've tracked them all down we'll have another look at them. They have more than a hint of the Charbens sculptor about them and are very different from the 54mm set by Crescent.

C is for Corgi Combat

There were not many figures of a military nature from Corgi, they weren't that keen on military stuff, remaining more of a civil vehicle producer with a growing range of licensed cartoon, film and TV character related products.

The previous sentence obviously divorcing the modern brand 'Corgi' (who churn-out military stuff like it's going out of fashion) from the old Corgi Mettoy.

In the Husky range there were a few vehicles given a military finish, a Citroen Ambulance, a petrol tanker and such-like, all without figures. Once the Corgi Junior brand had replaced Husky, there were a few more military vehicles issued, of which my favourite was the rather large-scaled Daimler Dingo, top left with an MG gunner who matched the figures from the play-sets (dark chocolate brown ethylene or polypropylene) and was pivoted in a manner that allowed him to spray bullets like a demented-demon!

A Jeep had a similar matching driver and two of the figures (on their distinctive shared base) came with a small gun which I think is aiming to be an air-portable US pack-howitzer, and  it achieved that aim to a far higher standard that the Matchbox offering we looked at the other day!

My other favourite (and who wouldn't like a vehicle made by someone called Cadillac-Gauge?) was the V-200 Commando, that icon of cold-was television news bulletins, being used, sold, licensed, supplied or copied to just about everyone not in NATO (or the Warsaw Pact), who had an army or police force! Indeed remembering a gloss-blue one at Stuttgart airport in 1977, some members of NATO took them as well.

So the few figures of a military nature from Corgi; The chocolate brown ones ran for a number of years (decades even) and apart from the odd change in shade of chocolate, there's no surprises. The pair front-centre are the more common as they came as crew with the pack-gun, the rest came in the play-sets which - due to their higher cost - shifted less units.

These near-25mm figures and the late Corgi Junior vehicles (V-200, Jeep towing the howitzer, Helicopter, Dingo, Land-Rover ambulance and Land-Rover pick-up truck (wrecker) were issued in the late 1990's or early 2000's by the then Woolworth's owned (and - then - recently resurrected) Chad Valley label.

The figures have the feel of Polypropylene, but the poor-detail suggests a high-density ethylene.

Below them are the roughly 1:48th scale figures that slightly pre-date them, on the left; the crew of the AMX Armoured Recovery Vehicle; you got two of the squatting pose with a pair of trestles and an AFV's spare barrel, all in a dense PVC. On the right and in the same ethylene/propylene as the brown 'Tommies' is the MG-gunner from the Sd.Kfz.251 Half-track. One wonders if it was intended to produce some German 'pairs' to combat the Brits?

It's interesting to ponder for a second why Corgi went with an AMX ARV while Dinky sat on the opposite self with a Leopard ARV despite the fact that at the time (mid-late 1970's) Britain had several indigenous ARV's, BARV's and AERV's and the like -  the old Centurion and newer Chieftain engineering and recovery variants? I can only suppose that both companies were pandering to wider markets than the domestic?

At the time of the marketing campaign I call 'the Corgi flood' (turn of the century and a good 6-8 years either side), there were several military ranges, in various packaging, some were given as a set 1:48th scale, the others (budget range!) were less forthcoming on scale but several of them came in at 'war-gaming' size, and two of them are shown above, a Churchill and a Scorpion (taken from my old Imageshack account so lower-res), the vehicle box is somewhere else at the moment! There were two Shermans from this range and that missing box in this post; S is for Sherman

We looked at the two recent sets in another post a while ago...Here while the old plastic-chassis forward-control (FC or F/C) Land-Rover from Husky can be seen Here. I will do Husky one day, but it will be a while.

G is for Guards - Band Majors (Drum Majors? Pipe...)

Wanting to be clear of the facts before posting I thought it would be a good idea to get my head round the difference between Band Majors, Drum Majors and Pipe Majors...

...almost the first result on Google was a handbook for pipe band drum majors! That is; a Drum-Major in a pipe-band, so I gave up...someone with more sense than me might explain it to us, in the meantime I'm guessing they're all Drum Majors? Oh and they're not majors they're Sergeant Majors!

Left to right; Lone*Star (re-issue); Sacul - from hollow cast; Charbens, soft plastic, Charbens, hard plastic.