MASH is for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital

4077^th is for a lot of fun! If any service-based comedy (and there are lots, it's the perfect set-up for a situation comedy) comes close to Dad's Army in my heart, or pokes the nostalgia-button quite like Mainwaring, Wilson, Pike, Jones & co., it's MASH, and there have been several sets/toys over the years based on the long-running TV series and Movie, this is one of them . . .

. . . the Hong Kong (or Macau? See next post) maker Zee Toys (Zyll, Zylmex)'s sets, nominally 1:87^th, the figures are a reasonable 1:76^th while some of the vehicles scrape in at under 1:100^th! This set contains the latrine vignette and some of the more common Zylmex vehicles, and was found and saved for me by Peter Bergner many years ago, in fact; the year I started the Blog!

We saw the Jeep recently when I was putting them on the Airfix page, but here's another! The truck is a sub-scale thing, but which goes quite well - size-wise - with the Indiana Jones German lorry from Galoob! It's red-crosses are looking a bit tired! The figures have been home-painted and consist of two guys emptying 'thunder-boxes' and two guys running, who double-up as a stretcher-bearer in one of the other sets.

Peter actually found the missing, folding-propeller unit a while later and brought it to the last show I did before the move here, sadly it never got married to the helicopter and they went into storage separately, and while I know where they are, this has already gone away again and they'll have to wait for a future Chinook round-up - they weren't in service for Korea, but we'll ignore that!

The little Bell 47 / UH-13h Sioux is a delight, one of the first convertions I ever attempted (with some success) was a pair of - rather crude - outboard stretcher-beds on the Airfix Westland Scout which I made from stretched-runner and loo-paper when I was about eleven-years old! This, too, is a bit small, but it does the job; so long as you make the "chugga-chugga" noise as you swing it into the valley and line-it up with the little hillock!

The latrine!

I don't recall now if it was a joke in the series (or the movie) but picture the scene, the camera reversing in front of them in a long panning shot, Radar and one of the officers are walking down from the main camp, deep in chat about that episode's plot-thread; they arrive at the enlisted-men's door and in goes Radar; the officer turns to his own door, mid-sentence . . . cut to aerial shot of interior; the conversation continuing from where they left off! Maybe there's also a chalk-line on the floor?

The doors are cut to hinge-open but it's an old, un-played-with toy and I didn't want to force them. The 'wriggly-tin' roof would make a useful scratch-building piece in any fixed-position/defense-work modelling, or a parasol on an Ork war-machine!

The pre-issue, publicity material all show the half-track in place of the latrine - more usually available as a smaller blister-carded set (as seen on the PSR page) - but it was dropped for something more connected with the tie-in branding by the time the set hit the retailers, note also: the 'group photo' shot is different between mock-up and finished artwork; often the way - catalogues and packaging are only ever a guide!

A is for Airfix Posting - Jeeps

A new recurring title, for a while at least; I must get the rest of the Airfix stuff up, or at least enough to get each page-post going! Then I can look at finishing the blurb on the existing posts!!

Jeeps today, the Airfix Attack Force Jeep, with comparisons of a bunch of others, there will be more to come, these were the ones in the 'Jeep Tub' which doesn't include a lot of the named stuff, nor most of the larger Hong Kong/China pieces, but it's a starter guide!

A few points beyond the Airfix aspect of the linked-post; I missed a small silver one (upper image) which comes somewhere between the Spear's Trek (left) and Kinder 'minis' (right) Jeeps; I've also shown the three colours of Kinder Jeep.

Below left image puts the two Marx mini's next to each other, the die-cast offering has the slightly more realistic windscreen position, but both are overall pretty poor sculpts, and copies of the larger-scaled one from the big playsets.

The bottom-right picture compares the two Zee/Zyl/Zylmex and/or Motormax/Redbox Jeeps, one of which has a MASH sticker. They are also different colours and have slightly different wheels.

The little silver Jeep seems to go with the two silver/gold cars we looked at a few Christmases ago, to which I've added blue and green ones which were in storage, although they are both cleaner sculpts with fatter tyres and an undercut on the wheel-arch and may be from an earlier/separate issue [wave]. They show all the 'hallmarks' (small, inexpensive, monoblock design) of being gum-ball machine capsule-prizes or Christmas cracker-novelties?

No Dulcop racing cars (or are they PRB or Crescent. . . heh-heh-heh-heh!), but - obviously - they're in the long queue. Too funny, their 'idea factory' now seems to be my 'forthcoming' posts, but I already knew that from the other day . . . all the stupidies sticking together like a pack of mangy dogs!

And now he's bleating he should be allowed to get things wrong, oblivious to the hypocrisy of correcting my Jecsan with the hysteria he did? Too funny, the loons are trying to run the asylum with the support of more loons!

C is for Chopper

And not a Triumph, Harley Davidson or an Indian 'Iron Horse' anywhere to be seen! Nor a hover-boarding graffiti-hooligan - one for the 2000AD fans there! Although; that might be a duplicate title; there's not many but - they are starting to sneak-in!

We've looked at some other shots from this photo-session in the past (probably when we last used the title!), here's another one . . . a line-up of vaguely 1:76th/72nd scale two or four-seater helicopters from various Far Eastern origins, from the left:

• ·         Modern Chinese generic, basically a Jet-Ranger/OH-58 Kiowa shape in military paint, all plastic (styrene body and bed, propylene rotor-blades) and pretty-much current.

• ·         Zee/Zyll/Zylmex (and others) M.A.S.H. Bell-13/-47/'Sioux' with a die-cast body and plastic detailing in ethylene (coloured pieces/details) and styrene (canopy).

• ·         Classic late-1970's - mid-80's rack-toy inclusion; a very simple moulding of a Bell Huey Cobra gunship, grandmother of all modern attack-helicopters - hence AH-1!

• ·         Die-cast and plastic OH-6 Cayuse type recce/liaison/observation-type, like the first; from 'China' rather than Hong Kong.