Having seen them briefly in a previous post, let's look at one of the - probably - post 'Smoothie' horses, the one I call 'Longmane', simply because, as with all the others, the most obvious difference from other horses tends to be how they got their name, and no, you don't have to use the same names, call them what you want, this blog is about identifying them, and the differences between them, so we can stop calling the 99% which aren't Giant, "Giant"!
A nice sample of the horses and the colours they can be found in, I have a reasonable sized sample of these, from many sources, so this while not necessarily definitive, is a good primer. Colours are reasonably realistic horse colours, with a pinkish tinge to some, which might better be found on some deer!
Riders are non-
Giant, with the exceptions of the rifle-shooting cowboy, and the fourth Indian down with tomahawk and shield, so when sorting you need to be careful, but their leg-studs are completely different to Giant's, and usually with a bigger bag of mixed stuff, the colours of the figures will help differentiate.
And, no, I don't know why the first few rows are the same poses, then the order breaks-down, lower down, but there would have been some reason when I originally did it? They are taken from Britains Soppets and so far all six cowboy sculpts and five of the Indians have turned-up, with the colour range growing slowly with the pink and semi-transparent dark jade-green examples.
This sample was very brittle and adding nothing to the knowledge, by way of poses or plastic colours, went in the recycling bin with the milk-bottles! Note, the red cowboy on the far right, a blobby, flashy one who could easily be mistaken for another maker's figure in a mixed lot, but this was a clean, if brittle batch!
Also, while the horses are quite good, quality-control wise, the figure samples are all poorly moulded with lots of short-shots or miss moulds, most weapons tend to be missing or partial, especially with the Native Americans.
The horse, from my original handwritten notes of 25-years ago, when I started to cover these in
One Inch Warrior magazine - similar to
Giant's 'Smoothie', particularly the saddle and rump, but with a deep striated mane and very bushy tail, it has large hooves and is of high production quality, marked Hong Kong in quite large, slightly uneven letters.
That marking, the two words are quite close together, but there is a discernable breath or punctuation gap, unlike some Hong Kong marks where the two become a continuous word!
Having said the horse are of better quality than the figures, I do have some poor horses as well, and it's short-shotting which is the problem. But the horse has been re-cut by the maker, and tends to a good quality with sharp detail, while the figures are sub-piracies of earlier production from other sources, and it shows!
The pelt! I haven't yet found a full bag, or obvious set for these, beyond the four in the
HG Toys wagon set, but the numbers they're found in, suggests they did have a rack-toy issue of the more common type - lots of mounted figures in a bag!?
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But is it Giant
Definitely not, but they have been associated with the HG Toys wagon sets, so could have been in a Lido set at some point?
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