Clearly based on the
Zang/Britains '
Herald' 54mm (1:32nd scale)
Combat Infantry issued a few years earlier, this was an odd set, as it was neither fish nor foul. The figures are basically cold war, 1950's troops for what the simplified detail reveals - which isn't much!), with the post-D Day/late-war helmet still in use when I joined in the 1980's, and weapons that from the box-art must be taken to be FN-licensed SLR's rather than Lee-Enfields, and Stirlings rather than Sten guns - although the difference isn't so marked between the latter, in real life.
Yet - as Airfix always did pairs of Friendly/Enemy sets - expected to face-up to the earlier set in time WWII German Infantry, a view backed-up by the fact that they were replaced with new sets at the same time?
A mild, but notable colour variation in the green on the box-art of two first type boxes, often I'd ignore a print run variation, but with one a blue-green and the other a yellow-olive, it's a clear difference in ink.
A late figure on the left carries longer pole-ends wherever he goes. It would seem that the holes in the hands are formed by two pins in the shell of the mould/bolster, and if they fail to engage properly or are pulled-back to soon a bit of still-molten plastic pops into the space where they should be, if you super-glue the vignette together, then fill the gap, he'd look quite good, but it's a lot of effort for little reward with what is only a form of flash!
Just me getting all artistic with the OBE's shown lower down the post! I was thinking of abstract greeting card or wrapping paper designs, which large numbers of figures or toys, or anything repetitive lend themselves too...still needs work...or a funny caption!
Above - Colour variation with this set is vast, early sets being darker olives, later sets being lighter, herby shades. The very dark one (left, second figure in) is part of a small sample I have (4 figures) and is almost charcoal to the eye, he is very early as well, if you enlarge the image you'll immediately see he's the cleanest, sharpest moulding in the line up. I've shot them twice with different results to show how they can change colour in front of you, even as a cloud move across the sun on a bright day!
The lower OBE image establishes a war games rule...all British blankets are green! In point of fact they are all a brownish-grey (I had to immaculately fold them day-in, day-out so I should know!), but war gamers have decided otherwise and who am I to argue with them.
A complete set laid-out on parade. This is a later paler set, but still quite clean mouldings, some did get a bit flashy, but they never suffered from the same level of degradation that the guards did, however they were replaced by the second version in the 1970's, while the guards kept being issued and would have sold in larger numbers as most of the London tourist sites and kiosks stocked them, leading to hard-worked mould-tools, while this set was confined to hobby outlets.
Other bugger's efforts, although second row down with the Hong Kong rip-off of
Action Man tiger-suits are my '70's efforts!
I like the orange and blue army below mine, they will be a 'secret army', based on the armies who always finished a James Bond movie back in the day, Felix Lighter would turn-up at the 11 hour with a bunch of black-clad Air America types, while the Bad Guy's forces ran around in colour-coded pyjamas...dying or surrendering!
Best-effort award here is probably given to the simply-painted ammo-carrier in the centre of the parade...or the guys at bottom left? Do you recognise yours? Your dad's?
More colour variations, photography can't do justice to the various shades - and there are many - so one is only looking for samples that are 'clean' and sufficiently different from the other samples to be worth the effort of keeping!
About 15 years ago, a dealer I used to help bought-in a larger collection from a war-gamer's widow, after days of sorting I was given all the painted stuff as it wasn't worth the effort of eBay'ing, bits of it will appear (already have on some posts) elsewhere on the blog, it still awaits sorting! This bag has the contents of maybe 40, 50 sets? They were colour coded for battle...
...by the simple expedient of painted helmets; each unit having a different colour. The 'black' force also had all-black packs (a special unit?) while some of the blues did too. There seems to be an HQ/Resupply force with grey helmets that consists of ammo-carriers, stretcher teams and officers only.
A size comparison between the contemporary 'Tiny Trojans' from
Trojan (themselves in part old
Crescent mouldings) and
Airfix's Infantry Combat Group, the
Trojan's are far larger, being placed in the
Skybird's established aircraft modelling scale of 1:72 while the
Airfix figures are toward the HO end of their flexible HO/OO moniker!
In the early days
Airfix seem to have been quite shocking pirates (
Begen-Beton figures, probably
Featherlite/Pierwood figures, possibly (?) flat animals from 'Margerine' premiums, cigarette-pack ships, later ships (?) the
Aurora Spitfire...) and this set is no exception!
"Hell, every toy-shop's got 'em, lets just make em smaller!". I think someone may have once said...
Side by side comparison (a size comparison will follow) with the
Britains/Herald figures upon-which this set is not only 'based on' but lifted from lock stock and two...who's figures are the stretcher-team based on...
Marx?
MPC?
Solido?....no, I suspect the first version
Subbuteo St. John's Ambulance set - probably by the same sculptor; Nibblet, - or even the
Britains other range; the
Swoppets?
But...it would seem Britains took their revenge? This Hong Kong era, late addition to the range, bears more than a slight resemblance to the Airfix predecessor! Just a better sculpt without the pack...I know, it's just wishful thinking!
The
Airfix set - only showing its age - against the
Atlantic '
Royal Fusiliers', the
Atlantic set hit UK shores in around 1975/6 (?), although they (
Atlantic) had been available in Italy since the 1960's (where the 'Dictators' and modern-looking Italian troops had been placed in boxes designed to match the
Airfix 'blue box' with black ends), this set (part of the WWII - proper - range) was a later addition and coincided with the move to a global market, adverts appearing in UK and US comics, and my buying several sets including a set of these in a village shop in a Bavaria, around '76 or '77.
Another comparison, this time with their replacements, the old set is clearly not up to the mark, and is both smaller and simplistic next to their younger (but better-fed!) brethren. The new chaps are nicely sculpted and set in the correct era to provide 'proper' enemy for the
German Infantry, but devoid of any war-like equipment, looking more suited to a range-day, or one of Captain Mainwaring's parades...they'll be looked at fully on their own post!
Comparison-shot with the contemporaneous and company-stated 'HO' figures by
Marx for
Marksmen via
Rado/Ri-Toys...least said; soonest mended...they're bloody huge!
Again looking tired and elderly next to the
Matchbox offering, this shot is only the close matches as they are really miles apart.
Montaplex did pirate the set, but for now I can only show the one pose which was included with paratrooper copies in a US set. Given how long the
Airfix set was around for, and the amount of piracy at the time in Italy, Greece and Spain as well as the Far East, it's surprising there aren't more copies of this set. The
8th Army suffered far more copyists.
The set was provided to
Quaker Foods in the early 1960's to support a promotion - as free premiums - given away in packets of the company's
Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal. You got 2 figures in a 'Standard' pack and three in a 'Family' pack, presumably the stracher team was made available, randomly in the larger packs as a three-piece 'unit'?
I've posed the figures to match the poor image which has suffered from being photocopied out of a magazine (TV Comic, October 6th, 1962), probably mucked about with in software, photocopied again for publishing (Cluck, Vol.1, Radcliffe) transfered to disc, cropped and mucked-about with again (by me!) and finally collaged.
There is a better picture here;
Sugar Puffs Model Army
I've also mocked-up the text, to make it easier to read! It's not exact in positioning or font, but the wording reads correctly. 'Tommy Gunner' is interesting as I've always thought he is firing a Stirling SMG, but "Tommy Gun" became a generic term and they were toys when all's said and done! Interestingly they are also described as "...modern British soldier"s, not World War Two, which brings us back to why did
Airifx then issue the Germans from that earlier conflict?
Note also that 12 figures are to be collected...ignoring both the fact that two of them are identical (the stretcher bearers) and; that one of them (not illustrated on the pack's art-work) is dead or dying! The guy being shot notable by his absence from the publicity, but clearly included in the packs. Can't be having that sort of casualty on the breakfast table...a chap nicely wrapped in a blanket is OK, but blood and gore is a no-no in the nation's morning routine!
Another private Army's come in since I took the shots above, these guys have blue boiler-suits with black and silver webbing...probably have special powers too!
Now adding the full
Montaplex frame refered to above, size-wise they are pretty good, but quality has dropped and they are flashy and less sharply detailed, colours varied and they were included in various sets from both
Montaplex and
Hobby-Plast, this being from the latter...
...the
Hobby-Plast set '
Mission Peligrosa' (Dangerous Mission). They came with a clip-together
USAF Cutlass jet fighter in approximately 1:100th scale and the ubiquitous
Montaplex Jeep; in this specific case with a twin cannon mounted.
With little else around this sort of image really fired-up the imagination back in the 1960's, the figures may be horribly dated now but they were hard to believe back then!
I think Paul Morehead at Plastic Warrior
magazine (link) must have given me this years ago, and if he didn't it's the
sort of thing he does tend to chuck my way, so the mention is no less than he
deserves!
Lone
Star comic issuing Airfix Combat Infantry as a prize in a competition! Not 'poses' . .
. attitudes! The one with the ammo-box is grumpy!
There's no clue as to date, but one has to
presume it pre-dates their issuing of their own scaled down figures, but as
their 54mm must have been in polymer (and direct competition with Airfix's 1:32nd sets) by the time of
this competition, it's still a quirky thing.
It doesn't say what the prize was for issue
6's competition, more Airfix figures?
And with the Sugar Puffs premiums
from Quaker (above), it's no wonder
they were as common as muck once!
Chris Smith (who some of you will know as
the go-to chap for Soviet and Eastern-bloc figures about a decade ago) sent me
a load of interesting figures the other day (December 2018 (in the future!)),
among which was this little chap (on the right in each image), and despite
having - literally - bucketfuls of HK and other copies of Airfix in small
scale, I have never seen another?
The fact that only the one has turned-up
leads me to the two obvious suspects; gum-ball machine capsules or Christmas
crackers? He is a copy rather than a pantographed-clone, and seems to have been
mostly machined straight into the tool (with a bit of hand-engraving on the
back-pack, pouches and/or helmet-rim?) using the Airfix figure as a pattern.
The arms and legs are simple tubes
channeled into the mould with a burred-bit, while a left-hand has been added to
the right side of the rifle, where it's gripping on the original, as a
non-descript lump of detail, despite the arm being positioned further-forwards
on the left!
I wondered if he was a copy of Set 5's 1st
version German infantryman kneeling firing, but there's more in common with the
Combat Group figure. I will get him on that German post/page though; when I do
the Eidai comparisons! Thank Chris, a
little gem!
Image from an undated AHM catalogue (US hobby wholeseller), probably from the late 1960's, I have the later 1972/3 issue, and this is a copy of an earlier tome. They look even more like the Britains figures they are based on in this artwork!
A couple of OBE's I thought we'd already got on the page, but they don't seem to have appeared, so here they are! They came-in at seperate times, the one a conversion to a sniper of the crawling figures, the other the ammo-box chap now dragging a tube of something as well, looks like it could be a round for a Cold War ATGW, or one of those para-droppable containers?
'Blue Box' artwork, with the line-drawing on the reverse, origianally or more usefully used to show how the constructions are supposed to be put together; gun teams, ect, but with sets with all stand alone figures, it was less useful, although the streatcher-team have the moment to shine!
