Not a set that ever really got me that exited, I did colour a few for my ACW armies, but generally I found the poses to be stiff and unrealistic, with a shortage of poses, and while Nibblet's sculpting style didn't bother me with the other sets he did, here I felt - even as a young child - that 'the' sculptor hadn't really tried...4 crawling cowboys, what were they doing; an assault course?!
A complete set of the Cowboys in the later cream plastic, like the High Chaparral set, this is the least common colour to find the set in.
The opposite of the photograph on the High Chaparral post showing the full set of cowboys on the left with the changes caused to the mould for the High Chaparral set highlighted on the right.
Wearing a quite convincing cavalry jacket or double-breasted 'shell jacket', this chap makes a dapper ACW conversion, not sure it you wouldn't have to hide the cartridge-belt? He'd need two rows of shiny brass buttons, but a quick Google reveals some quite smart painting options;
- First Virginia Cavalry (Stuart's Horse) having a pale grey ground with contrasting black/charcoal facings and 'hussar's bars'.
- Enlisted musician's in the US cavalry having an edged kite-shaped lozenge of bars in gold on a blue ground...
I'll go and CAD them up...
1st V. to the left, US Cav. Musician in the middle and the more typical arrangement of buttons on the right, I've found them with red, green and yellow trim! The collar is all wrong though...Doh! Most of the jackets I found have stand-up collars.
Courtesy of Kostas from Greece, this scan of the 1975 catalogue shows a photograph of a box (note the hanger hole) for the
Cowboys, the same page also advertised the
High Chaparral, an almost identical set!
Comparison shots of the crawling pose and the standing horse, the other crawler being the Union Infantryman while the horse is the mount of the officer from the French Foreign Legion 'early' or first type set.
Airfix versus
Merten cowboys...he's not too bad a match for the two loose ones, but is much bigger than the boxed set ones, my study of
Walter Merten hasn't told me yet if these are from two ranges, or early/late production (it's the same with the Indians), so a question still to answer there?
Lone Star, early in chalky-brown with no base on the horse, late in shiny-red with bases.
Marx/Marksmen by Rado/Ri-Toys.
Accessory!
On the left are some of my favoourite OBE's;
Captain Scarlet! The left-hand pair are converted from cowboys, the two on the right are
ACW Artillery figures, while the other pair, inset on the far right, are City gents for the cowboys to prey-on!
I picked these bright-coloured piracies up from Abid at a Sandown Park Toy Fair back in 2018, which is a measure of the size of the long-queue, and the interesting stuff still hiding in there! They copied all the poses bar the crawling guy, who, let's be honest, is only useful for roofs!
While these are copies of all twelve
Lone Star figures, with four of the
Airfix (a pair each of Cowboys and Indians), still no crawler. Quality is poor on these, but interestingly, the two mounted figures seem to be the ones we've seen previously a few times on the Home Blog as Christmas cracker prizes, in meany other colours.
These shots are courtesy of Paul from Paul's Bods, and seem to show a set similar to the coloured ones above, but here of slightly lesser quality, and issued by
Il Giocattolo in Italy, who we've seen before, carrying the 1st type 8th Army.
All in brown, but with quite a variation in shades, there was a mass of production somewhere, at one point. Two poses from the Lone Star line-up are missing, but we now have four Airfix cowboy sculpts added to the two Indians, including, strangely, the crawling guy, but standing - being shot, it looks like!
More OBE's, this time making some pretty convincing Roman auxiliary cavalry, dressmaker's pins and a bit of shaped card with a blob of
Araldite always worked for me! But these aren't mine, and mine tended to be cruder, but I was about 11, and things were a lot more basic back then!
White or 'Corner' box, as opposed to the equally white 'Long' box! Front artwork was some of the best, it's all happening in the one shot, far too busy for a movie, but rewards a bit of study!
The
AHM artwork, this is not a scan of some old photocopy, this is a high-res scan of the actual catalogue, most of which was of much higher quality than the two HO
Airfix figure pages. Some artistic licence has been employed with the rider's horse!
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