B is for Best Toy Ever . . . Again!

Some best-toys win on features or playability (the Tri-Ang Battle Game), others win on sheer quality (The Britains Land Rover), but when I awarded the Britains Land Rover BTE status, I hadn't seen today's entrant, which trumps the Land Rover by a country-mile, making it look all a bit cheap and placky!

It's the gonad-challenged leader of the 4,000-odd-day Reich; Herr Adolf Hitler, in his Mercedes tourer, with straight-backed driver at the controls. Shot two years ago at the then September Sandown Park show, this has been sat in Picasa ever since, but two years is about par for the stuff in the queue! Adrian Little of Mercator (link) is to thank for allowing me to photograph it.

I can't remember if Adrian said if it was Elastolin or Lineol, but it has a porcelain-head Hitler so it could be Elastolin, although other people bought-in the figures for their vehicles; Arnold, Bing and Karl Bub, for instance, so I stand to be corrected.

The detail of the model is on a par with modern, similarly scaled (and unnecessarily expensive) 'executive desk toy' type limited edition things, and compared with my Land Rover, is in a different league.

The main construction is tin-plate, but much use is made of die-cast and white-metal parts, down to the little door-handles! The wheels are almost scale replicas with rubber tyres, steel rims and cast hubs on rod-axles.

If one thing lets it down it's the steering-wheel which is a simple tin-stamping which doesn't look right next to all the other, finer detailing? The Fuhrer also has a moveable arm so he can do his flicky-little Nazi salute, or madly wave at his granny!

I can't remember where this came from; it's cropped out of a larger (but un-watermarked) image, from somewhere - auction catalogue on feeBay? Anyway, you can see the cheaper, rival Märklin model has all-tin wheels/tyres and simpler figures, albeit three of them, probably small O-Gauge/40mm to boot? Whether the main-subject above is also a 1936 model Mercedes or not I don't know, there are differences between the mud-guards of the two vehicles?

A worthy - if temporary - winner of 'Best Toy Ever' I hope you'll agree; despite it's background politics, it's a beautiful thing and many thanks to Adrian for the chance to photograph it.

F is for Follow-up - Wüsolin!

Finishing-off a Nazi day (not words I ever thought I'd put to the record!); this will hold the F is for Follow-up . . . record for time between post and follow-up for some time to come, if not the whole life of the Blog, whatever that may prove be?

We looked at this funny little 40mm composition on styrene-base'd dictator nine years ago and I promised at the time to take better pictures when I got my next camera, but that happened after the figure had gone to storage! I've worn-out at least three cameras (I think I'm on the forth?) since then, but here - as promised - are the follow-up shots!

Best to view these in the context of the original post; XYZ is for Busolin, Fusolin Musoline, or Dusolin! It's all there, especially in the comments; where Bod's Paul solved the ID and found some on-line which I've posted below.

The peskey base mark which caused all the problem last time, still not clear, but a heavy mark especially on the cursive 'W' and umlauted 'ü' have rendered it hard to read in any light!

This group was on feebleBay at the time and you can see the bases are the same clipped-corner lozenges, a bit like old Fisherman's Friends (which I quite like, but being a bit of a wuss; have to consume in quarters! But they definitely warm you up in a snow-hole!).

Sadly, apart from the stuff which Paul turned-up at the time, nothing much else has come to light on these, a few auction lots and a metal (demi-rond) naval band on the same plastic bases? But not much else . . . I don't know if they are in the new book? Dates of availability or a potted history of the company are the main missing pieces of the jigsaw. Although mine is obviously Hitler, in his 1930's-on party uniform, the other two - I think it's fair to say - could pass for late WW I staffers, as could (WW I) most of the other figures I've tracked down?

H is for Hitler - He Only Heffted One Heir-Henge

Stones? Oh never mind! Apparently there may have been some truth to the rumour (which might have let Pike of the hook, (pike, hook - I'm on a roll here!)) but I doubt it. Anyway, he may have had an un-descended testicle; there is a scientific term but I can't remember it!

Why didn't they use vacuum-cleaners? Apply the nozzle to the scrotum, switch-on, when the patient screams, switch-off, bingo - two descended testicles! Might have saved the world a whole heap of trouble...?

Atlantic, closer to 60mm than 54, and looking like he's about 21-and-three-quarters, it is the devil incarnate, Adolf Hitler, and, not half as rare as its price at toy shows would suggest! They've got the hair right though and the little 'tash is present, so he could be painted-up quite adequately by someone more skilled than me.

We have actually seen the whole set in1:76/72nd scale here so this is a real box-ticker, and there is no difference between any of these other than the rear-axle of the Volksdunekubelbuggyvargen which plugs-on (like the front one) in small-scale but slides through holders in the large-scale one.

Also there are various extra holes (in the larger scale), which I think may have been for seats which were replaced by clamps before final tooling, these are to hold Der Fuhrer when he's standing in the back ranting some racist bollocks at gullible, stupid people.

The rest of the mob, don't they look happy! Nothing like a bit of genocide to put a smile on your face; ask the Burmese, ask Bolsanaro! Note these are in a completely different colour, a sort of purple-brown to the previous chocolate of the Hitler and vehicles, I've also seen them in a ginger-brown; so they must have had at least three runs of the tool and can't be rare, just hidden!

To be fair I've seen toy-show dealers with multiples of the Hitler and Mussolini/Carabinieri band sets, the hard ones to find (in both scales) are the Mao and Stalin set, but only because they sold better, however they do turn-up in dribs and drabs in lots of colours, so again plenty made.

Yer'man again! Maybe it had descended, and got pushed back up again by the wearing of all those tight jodhpurs and tailored cavalry twills? No wonder he had a temper! They should have adopted battle-dress earlier - baggy as a sack, but at least your own sack hung free!

We wish! But to be fair - I don't think it would have solved anything? As you can see; the figure is well over the line for 1:32nd scale.

B is for Brown Shirts

I don't really have a 'wants' list, as the dozen or so 'big ticket' items I'm still looking for are obvious, while the list of things I still haven't tracked-down probably runs into the tens, or hundreds, of thousands, so a list would be pointless, although I do see people going round the shows holding thick wodges of A4, with double column lists in what appears to be 8pt. text, so clearly some do try to list them all!

However, this was definitely one of the absentees...only I had hoped to get it in the smaller pack as I have the 'other' four sets in the little packs, but beggars can't be choosers!

The artwork...like a lot of Atlantic stuff; this set is surrounded in myth, and while I'm sure it wasn't on display in every country it was available in, I'm equally sure it wasn't a universally 'under the counter' item, being one of the first of the Atlantic sets and running for some time...however, the nature of the subject and it's treatment by sellers and collectors over the years have made it undeniably hard to get.

This was my final purchase at the Plastic Warrior show, and I nearly lost it to one of the chaps up from ACOTS in the antipodes, but luckily for me he was tempted by an Airfix play-set instead, and I was able to take it home and then settle-up the following week at Sandown Park!

The two different frames (the only difference is an additional character figure of Hitler with the resultant snuffling down the runner of the other figures), from both sides.

It is another of the oft-quoted myths that Atlantic put anything in a box - I've handled many sets in all scales over the years, my own collection, a collection bought-in from the States and a dealers stock, and can say that actually with the odd exception, the contents are usually pretty consistent.

If there are anomalies, they tend to be the total sprue/runner count in the larger HO play-sets, or the figure count in the later 1:32nd scale blister packs. There is also a problem with the two artillery sets in the red 'export' series, in that the box-packers couldn't get their heads round the two variations, so both sizes can appear in both boxes! (that will be a future post!)

However, while the sets content are usually consistent, there is the problem of the contents not matching the given contents as stated, here the six frames are way off the advertised contents of "94 pieces"...

...so back-of-a-fag-packet maths was called for! The closest are the five runner combinations, specifically the 1 Hitler-runner and 4 others combination, but it's not quite there.

The six runners (3 of each) included in my set make the box bulge, so can't be right, and with one a little less opaque than the others I decided to 'de-sprue' it for a photo-session, my lose examples being in storage. I suspect this is one of those cases where the artwork was signed-off with a typo, as there is no way you are going to get the maths to tie-up, no matter how you cut it? Later boxes did away with a contents total!

So here they are, I will post better images of the large-scale versions one day as they came in the big purchase in 2010 but are also in storage.

The 'jeep' looks more like one of the post war Iltis/VW Safari vehicles than anything that rolled into the land of the Rus in 1941, and unlike the 1:32nd scale set where the windscreen clips in, with this set the pantograph has reduced that clipping-in detail to the point where it just 'sits in', and is therefore easily lost.

W is for Wüsolin...not Düsolin!

Badly needed help with this one and it was rapidly forthcoming after I published a fine post on Düsolin - that well known (once, now long forgotten;) manufacturer of floor-polish made from crushed beetle-juice and camel-dung!

In the last photograph it's so clearly a 'W' now, I don't know how I could have struggled with 'D' for two weeks, although in my defence I had tried Oüsolin and Wüsolin! Anyway thanks to the efforts of Paul from Paul's Bods (link to left) we now know it's Wüsolin and that they are apparently very rare, appearing quite infrequently on German eBay and were designed with the intention of enhancing the small range of 40mm composition figures issued by Lineol alongside the 70mm biggies.

This was given to me by Adrien (Mercator Trading) at Birmingham, and seems to be an unusual piece of Nazi memorabilia, if such a thing isn't an oxymoron...Nazi nightmarebelia?

This one is clearly [Ha Ha! the beauty of the edit feature!...read the comment section!] marked 'Wüsolin' (and the sharper-eyed among you will also have realized that my camera's CCD is failing, so we'll see what Fuji have to say for themselves), it could be named after the brand of what would have been - then - a 'new' plastic?

This [Still] needs input from German, Austrian or possibly (?) Swiss-German readers/followers, as apparently the firm is still in existence, indeed, they may be modern figures? But that doesn't really tie in with the asking-price of a couple of non-character figures on evilBay recently.

Questions then; Does anybody remember this or the other figures in the range? How big was the range? When did they florish? Has anyone got some in their collection or tucked-away at the back of the hall drawer, or in the attic/cellar/shed/garage?

Clearly depicting the single-gonad equipped, short-tempered, arm-wagging, foot-stomping, war-mongering, young-men in uniform loving, Parliament-burning, poor-footballing, crap painting, take-us-all-to-hell of many a rhyme or ditty...Herr. Adolf Hissler (as Nostradamus tells us he should have been called) is painted in the style of a composition figure, and has the rough texture of one too, so may BE composition? The paint is also slightly tacky/sticky, but I'm not going to start scraping/poking what might be a very rare figure?

More for British/Antipodean followers - It is interesting to note he seems to have ended-up with one of Baldric's theatrical 'licorice' mustaches? I guess Baldric left it in the dug-out the morning of the Big Push and the opposing unit's painter & decorator found it while measuring-up for new wallpaper, once General Melchet had moved his drinks cabinet 18 Inches back in the direction of Paris? BhaaH!

Joking aside (and I'm half-German, so it's not like when I have a go at the French!) it looks scarily like Hitler...and while the figurine may be composition...


...the glued-on base is clearly an early injection-moulded piece of plastic, and here you can see (through the rainbow tinted lines of a 60's TV, indicating the failure of expensive modern photographic technology) the machine-tool marks, as the recess in the mould was ground-out in a circular motion.

If the figure is plastic as well, that might explain the tackiness of the paint as industry had to relearn paint technology in order to deal with the new plastics as they came along. It's not the polystyrene of the WHW figures, but seems too 'good' to be a phenolic/cellulose-acetate from that time (mid-1930's to 1944'ish?), which one would expect to see warping/shrinking/cracking by now.
[the above was written when assuming an age they may not - now - have, so does not apply if they are modern'ish of course! And the two on eBay are much smoother looking, I'll try and get permission to use the image...]

Disclaimer; The subject matter and all images pertaining to it including the part-Svastica/Swastika symbol are presented here as a historical artifact/curiosity of possible importance or interest to the small community of Toy and Model Soldier Collectors and/or any Militaria bods who may find it, and in NO WAY represents my views, political affiliations or approach to fascism, and should not be taken as any attempt to glorify or form of glorification of; The events of the mid-20th Century, the National Socialist movement in Germany, The Holocaust and/or the Second World War.

Indeed, having mounted guard on Hess, I can tell you they were nasty pieces of work.

PS; I'll re-post these photographs at some point when I have a better camera, but a new camera is not on the horizon - budget-wise - for the foreseeable future.

Which I did nine years later - here!