B is for Best Show on Earth! 3. Ancient and Medieval

So; continuing with the plunder posts from the Plastic Warrior show in Twicker's a few weeks ago, and we're looking at the older eras depicted by toy soldiers, because it's all about the Toy Soldiers, or at least it used to be, these days it's as much about the spacemen or civilians, but you know what I mean!

 

Andy came over and asked me if these two Elastolin were worth a fiver, and while I'm no expert on the subject I said I thought they were given that they were two variants of the same figure, in good condition with the latter, rarer (or less common) moulding, only for him to frog-march me over to the seller? Before I knew what had happened, I was the proud owner of both? I'd thought I was just giving advice!

And they do make a nice pair, there are books published in Germany which go into intense detail on the left-hand figure, with endless colour variations, paint styles, base type hierarchy and so on, while the right-hand figure is unusual for being a harder plastic than the polyethylene of some other samples I have.

 

There are also French and Spanish copies of some of these, usually without the edge/rim to the base, and often silver or gold plastic, sometimes primary colours, usually unpainted.

 

A handful of 40mm Starlux medievals, who happen to split equally into blue/green and red/yellow armies for the purposes of photography, not planned as I picked them out of a larger sample. I have a few others somewhere, I think some have been on the Blog passim, so hopefully when we see them again, they'll be an even better shot!

Food premiums came in the guise of a Kinder Gaulish warrior and two Shredded Wheat 'Kings & Queens' series, I have lots of the latter, but don't know if I have all of them, and seem to grab them whenever I see them going cheap, and they are all over the place, so hopefully when I get them all togther there will be a full set - relief flats with the data on the flat back.

A nice handful of the early Cherilea knights, only bits and pieces, but there's a complete figure in the centre and enough bits for a second, sans helmet. I have managed to get several lots like this over the last few years (I know I have a whole archer somewhere), so when I look at them in full in the future we should get a better idea of them.
 

A small discussion was held about these, from which I gathered they exist, they turn up occasionally, they're interesting, but not interesting enough to buy, so I bought them! I wonder if they might belong with the previous swoppet types, from Cherilea, but currently 'unknown', the arms in non-matching plastic are heat-welded on.

Small scale from three sources and came in three donations I think with a bunch of Italeri/Zvezda Normans, a sub-piracy of Supreme's small-scale horse, a Giant knight and another Norman with a touch of paint.

 

This year's new set/s from Replicants were a selection of ancient/medieval levy/revolting peasants/belligerent civi's . . . they're not going to take it any more! Either side of which are two of the helmets from Airfix's 1:12th scale (six inch) character kits, being Richard III's on the left and the Black Princes on the right. As you can see they'll make nice enhancers for shelf displays or similar?

 

I've left them in the bag for now, but they are sculpted in Peter's usual, very animated, style and a nice mix of male and female types, with a lute player chivvying them all along with a Hay-nony-no, although the lady with a cleaver seems to have heard it before - once too often; you can have too much of a bard-thing!

 

Now . . . I have to get all these right, 'cos Brian Carrick put me right and then I must go and change the old post, which I could have/should have done three weeks ago, but life's too short and it's my 'eemies' who get excited about my odd errors, not me! These two ARE Guilbert from France, as is the horse, who is missing his tail.

 

This is a Colorado horse, which came with the Musketeer lot, also French, but maybe for Wild West? I have somewhere a bunch of painted French Wild West by several companies, in a little box which I think came from Sam of Sam's Minis, and I think they have been repainted, but I must sort them out one day, and hopefully there may be a rider for this beast?

 

These two are Ludorev reissues from the Rene Fisher lot below and like the lot we saw a while ago, one needs a new wire sword, which I will do in the fullness of time. I don't know about the half-barrel/bucket, which could be from anywhere, it looks like the kind of thing toy circuses make elephants or tigers stand on!

 

The Rene Fisher originals, which I think I called Guilbert (on advise) when we looked at them last time, I think we saw them all then except the Milady character figure, but in the meantime I had picked-up a third lot, which hasn't been Blogged yet, so we'll revisit Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan!

 

Bad rust on the two either end's swords, while an unstable red paint will need stripping which could lead to a repaint, but they are duplicate figures, so it'll be fun to give them a less toy-like countenance!

Thanks to all for everything last month; Peter Evans, Brian Carrick, Trevor Rudkin, Adrian Little, Andreas Dittmann, Gareth Morgan and Michael Mordant-Smith.

F is for French Relatives!

I discovered yesterday, while looking for something else, that Faceplant now hide or delete anything more than 3-years old on Facebook Groups? Scrolling back through my own submissions to a site, I came to a halt at May 5, 2020, I don't think it applies to personal timelines (for now) and - don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining.

 

There's so much duplicate shite posted by the simple-minded (and me!) all over the Internet, that it would come to a grinding halt if someone didn't do something occasionally to get rid of some of it. But what it does mean, is that I can get the 'Seen Elsewhere' folder emptied here, as it will all disappear there!

 

To that end, I posted these as separate posts over the bank-holiday, but I've pulled them together and added a couple of new shots and a couple of older ones!

Originally posted a couple of three months ago, these were a question mark to me, having something of the Starlux about them, but obviously not, and Brian Carrick kindly ID'd them as Guilbert copies of Clairet, both also French.

 

I have a larger selection of poses, but the others are a bit 'chewed', so these are the good ones, Guilbert above and Clairet below, I wonder if the Clairet are in fact the copies, they seem to be ever-so-slightly smaller, and there is a faint lack of detail on buttons and pockets etc . . . ? Also, I think Guilbert disappeared first, while we learnt, looking at the Knights years ago, that Clairet morphed into other brands and are almost/sort of still with us!

 

A few comparison shots, we looked at the Hugonnet and other copies here, all looks a bit muddled now, but we will re-do the French stuff in a year or two, as I have everything in folders (even Guilbert! Thanks, Vichy!) and can ascribe most of the stuff in the four posts of that sequence, more accurately now.

 

The 'new' sample of Bazaar figures, actually there are a few in that link above, so more future sorting to look forward to! They aren't by Hugonnet (as far as I know), they aren't Cofalu, and they aren't Vilco, but beyond who they aren't, I have no clues, I wondered MF, who did mono-coloured rack-toy bags of farm and others, but they were mostly Hong Kong-product jobbers I think?

 

A few colour variations, I suspect the chap on the right with the black equipment/weapon is slightly later, and another reason for suspecting the Guilbert came first ia that they are more realistically painted to what was being worn in Indo-China and North Africa (olive-greens, not camouflage), than the rather more toy-like gloss green helmets of the Clairet?

T is for Two - Eastie Westies!

Technically it's three now, but there is a narrative through them, and a connection (spurious it has to be admitted) with the other day's Jean posts . . . and I'm not starting T is for Three! A few minor things which arose as I was sorting Wild West recently;

So, we looked at a couple of Indians the other week and I had a few cowboys too, all in a soft rubber-like material (which is closer to silicon that PVC, in its properties?) and all from Lisanto in the former East Germany (or Richard Hopf, I'm not too sure, but neither are some of the German websites!).

The 'spurious detail' is the horses - I'm sure I read somewhere that they sometimes come with Jean Horses, these two have (but they could have been added/switched by the owner), and the horses seem better painted than my Jean ones - which isn't saying a lot my Jean ones are pretty tatty, as we saw last week; they are the same as the coach-horses I shelfied on JB's stall though?

But, some sites show them having their own Elastolin'eque horses, so I have my own doubts over the Jean ones? Anyway, the figures fit them perfectly, so they will stay for now! Do you know the truth?

We were then going to use the Eastern-European connection to move to France (next image) but I realised I had these odd copies of two of the Lisanto/Richard Hopf (?) figures, one coming-in quite recently I think, the other was in storage.

They are a marbled plastic, but only from scraps rather that an attempt at colourfulness or decoration I feel, and while the donors have a three part mould leaving flat bases, these have gate marks on a two-part mould's split-line suggesting huge runners, the sort you might find on an amateur tool, or hand-operated injection machine?

They also have a French Santon look about them (phew - still got a link to two/three!), but I can find nothing on them, anyone else got any? Who copied who?

Which neatly mentions France while holding the Eastern link; the right-hand figure here, in both shots, is - I believe - from the French maker Guilbert (but there seem to be various versions of him from French makers?) while the figure on the left is attributed to the Polish firm/organisation of PZG and which - you can see - is a copy, bar the changes to the knife hand, and more blood on the scalped hairpiece, which is ostentatiously blonde . . . it'll be that General George Armstrong' a'dyin' again and again and . . .