Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Wavymane Type 2 (Late Production)

Differentiating the Type Two Earlies from the Type Two Lates is far easier than differentiating the Type Ones from the Type Two Earlies, with them its more about finding the second horse marks and recognising a slight shinier-ness, while with the Early/Late boundary, it's easy, the Late version is much shinier (no chalk or talc), quality has dropped off a cliff, and there are two new horse marking types.

 

The 'master sample'

 

The horses, there are probably well in excess of a thousand, maybe several thousands, in this large box, which originally held the sticks for McDonald’s flags - a long story! The layer is about five-inches deep, and this Hong Kong hollow-horse type, is the commonest of them all. It far outnumbers all other types, including true Giant (almost as rare as Giant-anything, except the silver/black knights, they are pretty common), post-Giant 'Smoothies', and/or the other forms of 'Wavymane'.

 

Native American Indians

 

Cowboys

 

You can see the colours, of both horses and riders, is pretty consistent with the Type 1 and Type 2 (early) Wavymanes, with black or charcoal, white or off-white (watery translucent and creamy-yellow), brown and marbled brown with black streaks/clouds for the horses and the same red, yellow, orange, pale and sea blues, light and dark greens and the pinks and purples, but shiny, bright virgin polyethylene with no additives to mute the colours or matt the surface of the polymer.

 

It's easier to show you the old index-card, from when they fitted in one 6x9" bag, than try to rewrite the explanation of the two new marks. And, like with the early version's 50/50 split, the four horse types are approximately the same in quantity, through any found sample,, so about 25% of each horse marking, per-lot/sample.

 

Obviously, there is no reason for the numbering beyond my 'A' being first type, the 'B' second-early, and these - second-late could just as well be 2C1 and 2C2 (or, if we are being very pedantic; 2C(i) and 2C(ii), that's how they roll in academia!), but I've renumbered Wavymane several times and, indeed, will renumber them again before I've finished Publishing these articles, losing Type 4C and reinstating 5, so 2C and 2D, for the new horses, is good enough, and saves at least two digits!

 

This one, nominally 2C, has two stamps in the rear of the rump/back of the body cavity, one reading 'HONG' and the other 'KONG', and these stamps obviously came from one of the heavier engineering or machine-tool companies in the region, as they appear on many rack toys, sometimes quite well lined-up (as here), sometimes casually higgledy-piggledy, in-line (as here), or on top of each other. 

 

While this one - 2D - is the poorest version of Wavymane horse, being poorly sculpted, usually lacking most of the wave, which gave these their name, prone to shrinkage, possibly as a result of the sharply arched design, and unmarked; if they weren't so common, and always found with the other three; you'd be tempted to think they were among the mid-late 1980's junk, where we find the late types/production of 'Remould', 'Rim Saddle', 'Smoothie' and 'Toytown'.

 

On the subject of naming, numbering or other annotating; everything here is how I did mine, to have it make sense to me, I wouldn't expect anyone else to adopt all or part of my nomenclature, especially if they can't get their head round it, or have already got a 'system' of their own, but it's a guide as to how to do it, and things like arbitrary 'generations', "might be Giant" or 'Giant' & 'Giant Like', don't cut it, they're meaningless.

 

Apropos the previous post on a limited colour-way, clean sample of Remould, here is a group of Wavymane Type 2 Late, which cam in as a clean sample with a couple of red figures, and the majority in blue, green and yellow. You can see clearly the shininess of both horses and riders, and the poorer quality of the whole type/sample.

 

We'll look at the known sets by approximate age, and there are a few to look at. With all versions of Wavymane taking the lifetime from the sixties to the eighties, maybe even the late 1950's, and by late it could be '56 or '57 while the eighties may be a bit optimistic, with the late ninteen-seventies as their nadir, there was time for many people in the West to contract or just purchase the various sets,, assortments or configurations the middle men down at the harbour came up with.

 

I think this dates from the mid-late nineteen-sixties, and is obviously MPC then Multiple Products Corp, (of New York) although often using Multiple Toymakers on packaging, it has had several official titles/corporate structures over the years, including Loral Corp., Miner Industries, and Fundimentions, but always retained the 'M' logo, easily confused with MPC the model kit manufacturer; Model Products Corporation (of Michigan - General Mills, ERTL, Round 2 LLC.). Indeed so easily confused (both became sizeable and popular companies in the late 20th Century), I've yet to differentiate them on the Home Blog, it's too 'heavy' a job!

 

Contents include the ubiquitous Fort Cheyenne, and foot figures which we will look at in separate posts on the other stuff associated with Wavymane hollow-horses.

 

I think this may be a few years later, possibly early nineteen-seventies, and we have, on the left, a generic card (for the UK/European market, and, presumably, the local Hong Kong stores) while on the right a card overprinted for Larami (LIC) of Philadelphia, one of the more prolific and 'household name' jobbers/importers in the 'States. The Larami contents count has lost the '100 Pieces', and may have a reduced actual total?

 

This set, annotated by the famous collector James Opie to a Zodiac Toys store in Aylesbury, North of London, on the old A40, is dated to January 1973, and we have the miniature version of the Fort Cheyenne, brand-marked to Pocket Money Toys, and the same foot figures as the MPC set, along with a wagon family we're about to look at.

 

I believe these wagons were bought-in from a third party they appear quite often, but with various horses, and in sets from various eras from the seventies and well into the eighties. For most of their life they were red-green or green-red, but some, as with the coach insert, above, can be all red or all green, they can have other colours, like brown or white (and I mean blinding, snow white) canvas tilts, and they are in the later shiny plastics. With the last issues, still in stores in the 1990's, in that late tinny plastic, they had a long life, from 'Empire Made' to 'China'.

 

Based on the old Giant wagon, the most obvious differences are the method of attaching the draw-bar/central pole, and the fact that the stakes/staves don't extend up, beyond the edge of the box-body. And we will revisit these shortly.

 

PS - I ran out of Tags, so we'll have to look at the sets again, another day, to get them in the Tag list! 

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But is it Giant
 

No, nothing above is related to Giant in any way other than tangentially, and any mention of Giant in the text is purely instructional or conversational!

Sorting Hong Kong Horses - II - Clean Sample

Sometimes a bag of rack-toy junk is easy to sort, and as I garnered more of them, the plotting chart - seen on the introductory page - became irrelevant, as I quickly identified most of the main 'players', either with an associated brand, or a mint (or at least; unopened), generic set. If a sample I've ID'd, or think I've ID'd doesn't have either, I will only ever consider it 90% accurate at best, I like to think I'm a diligent researcher,, and try to bring some academic rigour to the process.

 

Not that it's even vaguely important, in the 'grand scheme' of things; the big museums are only interested in the big names, but it's given me something to do with an otherwise pretty average life?

 

And if you (one of the five people actually following these posts!) have been collecting similarly, you've probably reached the same conclusions, on most of the same commonest stuff as well, you may be further along than me, but everything so far published elsewhere, whether on Giant specifically, or Hong Kong hollow-horsed Cowboys & Indians in general, has not sought the same level of factual accuracy!

 

This is the sort of find which helps in that identification process, from the outside, just a 'bag' of rack-toy Wild West, but upon opening and sorting . . .

 

. . . we have a single-maker sample. So clean, both in terms of origin, and condition, it can go straight back in the bag, or be transferred to one of my standard sized bags, I use 4x5½" for most things, 6x9 for when a sample outgrows the smaller ones (also, increasingly used for the larger scale stuff I've been collecting since the Home Blog started), with double again for huge sets or set-contents, and teeny 1x2" jewellers bags for small components, or to keep vignettes, machine-guns/ammunition together, or similar tasks.

But the reason I think such a clean sample is worth a post (other than that this Blog has been neglected and needs more content!), is that it's nice illustration of how these are got-up in the factory, or by outworkers, in that the lady (they were almost always female) who had a container full of brown horses, also had yellow figures, the Lady who had black horses, had red figures, while the lady/ies with pink and blue figures or the white horse, were getting to the end of their stock container, where all sorts were at the bottom of the container! Some bloke (they were almost always males) would be coming round to top them up.

I think these are a sub-type of 'Remould', but not one I currently have ready, or near ready in Picasa, so possibly Type 4, or 5, we'll know when I post them in the future! When I get a sample like this, with a narrow colour-spread, I tend to give it a separate bag, within the larger bag, especially if the master sample is a more mixed selection of figure colours, or horse colours/shades, browns can differ greatly, for instance, and keeping them separated just reminds me the individual batches were tighter than the whole 'master sample' might sample suggest.

And the most obvious tip, is, if you are storing these carefully in self-seal bags (like me), or small component trays (as others do), you will more than halve the space taken up by the sample if you separate the riders from the horses! But than means you then have to include a note to yourself, on the matchings, in a sample like this!

 

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But is it Giant
 

No.

Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Wavymane Type 2 (Early Production)

This is where Wavymane starts to get a little complicated, and it gets worse, but should all make sense by the end, you have to have some idea of how Hong Kong works, particularly in the late 1950's and 1960's, and I did cover it in the early years of the home blog; FOB'ing, jobbing, contract-manufacture, middle-men, the harbour trade markets, agents with suitcases of samples from several makers . . . but also how  a bigger factory or firm (like Tai Sang) would go to very small, often (usually) family concerns in Kowloon's Walled City* for small items, components, header cards, whatever, and the end-product could then be cut-about or combined, and - ultimately sold to several European buyers, in different configurations.

 

It means that sometimes a set has something which isn't 'canon', doesn't seem to belong or looks like it belongs elsewhere, and there's your complications, but, again, once you find the mint sets, it all makes sense!

 

* The 'Kowloon Walled City' was an densely populated, ungoverned urban enclave in Kowloon, Hong Kong, famous for being the most densely populated place on Earth at its peak, In 1987, the British and Chinese governments agreed to demolish the enclave. Residents were compensated and evicted, and the city was cleared between 1993 and 1994.

 

 The sample I'm working with/from in this post.

 

Wavymane Type 2, are pretty-much the same as Wavymane Type 1's, but a second horse is introduced to the tool or, more likely a new tool with several cavities is got up, to manage demand from European and American rack-toy importers/jobbers. The obvious visual difference, is that a sharper, re-cut wave is seen in place of the soft curl of the earlier horse, also, the plastic is shinier!

 

 

The horse also has a more arched or pointed cavity with MADE IN HONG KONG along the inside of the cavity on the left-hand side, in a typical sample of these, the Type 1 marking (now in shinier polymer) is about 50/50 with the new Type  marked horses.

 

Again, the sample I'm using, or it was, when these shots were taken back in 2014.

 

I think, in the end, I laid them all out, and you can see, they are very similar to Type 1, a bit shinier, and with a few new colours, no whites and less of the warm oranges.

 

I couldn't be arsed to do it twice, so the Indians got a cloud-o-graph! Hardly any greens, but that may change with a future sample, which may already be in one of the two main TBS piles (TBS - To Be Sorted!) There are some nice shades of blue wih the Type 2's. And the caveat here; There will be a few Type 1's in this sample, there's nothing you can do about it

 

The type 1 sample is as clean as it can be, they are taken from clean samples with one horse type, but the very nature of how these would have changed over time, means there is nowhere to draw a line, and when in doubt, put the questionable ones in the evolved sample.

 

It's how it was in the factory, or sub-assembly suppliers, one day, week or month, new colours, another day, week or month, the new, shinier polymers, another day, week or month the additional horse pose was added, and those lines of demarcation were either lost in large skillages/stillages, for picking from, or in bags/on cards of finished product, long since lost, played to death or mixed into other crap for me to sort!

 

Simply, because you can find Type 1 samples, with just the one horse marking (and soft mane), so if there are two horse types - it's gonna' end up here! The same rule extends to the Type 2 Late Production (which we'll look at next), with subsequent types clearer, but also complications!

Here's a clean Type 2 bag, please note the card is marked EMPIRE MADE, this is relevant, as the card art is the most copied of them all,, with at least five versions, mostly 'Spikeymane' (which I'll cover after the Wavymanes - two types), but Baravelli also copied it and I think there may be another somewhere in the stash,, they all have subtle or less subtle (Baravelli) differences, and with the Wavymane card, it's the 'Empire' mark.

 

No hint of foot figures as two extended lines of mounted figures charge toward each-other!
 

But there are foot figures! The first big complication with Wavymane - half this set is Giant! It isn't of course, it's ex-Giant although whether spare/left-over stock, or a reuse of the tools while the Giant marks were still on them, we will never know, and apart from the Giant contents, a generic, unbranded set.

 

Indeed, an anomaly, in that the Wavymane 2's were probably bought-in to be added to the Giant items, in favour of any 'Smoothies' that were still kicking-around, carrying with them the 12 Wavymane mounted poses, rather than the six (and it's only six) Giant riders

 

And stylistically, possibly/probably from the same outfit using Giant barbed-wire in their D-Day Invasion set - The fourth image down on this post, on the Home Blog.

 

The figures are marked Giant,, but I've never been happy with these poor quality ones actually being Giant, their's were much nicer mouldings, in the same muted colour palette as all these early production sets, these are shiny, bright colours and suffer from heat-shrinkage, and I suspect someone was running them through the old Giant tool to fast, with a soft polymer?

 

And I would suggest the limited colourway sample at the end of this post, also on the Home Blog, are a bunch from one of these generic sets?

 

The fort is also the Giant model with, no name-board, which makes a change, as just about everybody else (including Wavymane, as we shall see) went with the Fort Cheyenne moniker!

 

The original record card with my manuscript notes from the 1990's.

 

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But is it Giant
 

Well, this is one of the questionable ones isn't it? You're not going to castigate a dealer/private seller from calling the foot figures Giant, and I myself would happily place the loose fort in with the true Giant stuff, so there are undeniably elements of Giant in the larger carded Fort Apache set, even though it's a cobbled-together generic rack-toy. The rest is not Giant, and the set above wasn't sold by Giant.

 

Wavymane 1 almost certainly pre-dates Giant,, and the Type 2 is probably contemporary with Giant  . . . there are similarities with figure colours, suggesting they were both using the same granule supplier, at the same time? But someone bought some Type 2's in to go with the Fort Apache set.

Sorting Hong Kong Horses - I - Small Mixed Bag

I thought, as we riffle through the ID posts, I'd post a few sorts I've done over the years (and I shot a few the other day), as a sort of guide, or to give an idea on how to sort them, or to illustrate things which can arise while sorting them, as it may help some people sort theirs?

 

So this was a small bag of obviously mixed Hong Kong hollow-horses and their accompaniments, typical of the sort of thing I find at shows, car-boot sales, get given by mates, or which come from Chris Smith, Trevor Rudkin, Peter Evans or others - Peter Herrington gave me a couple of fantastic samples many years ago. The cleanness of the bag, suggests that the source had bagged up a few bits in a new bag, so the empirical nature of the sample is already compromised As it happens most of them were already known/ID'd so it didn't matter.

 

Nevertheless, treat them the same as any sample, spread them out by type/style, and leave any figure who was still on his horse, next to his horse -  in case a clear pattern develops, not in a sample this small, but 'treat every sample the same'.

 

This gives us a nice bunch of unmarked post-Giant Smoothies, four Mexican Small's, 6 other horses of insignificant sample-size, various figures and a Tee Pee!

 

Because I'm fifty-years-plus and two-thirds of the way through the process, I can quickly work out that the Giant-like figures go with the Smoothies and Mexican Smalls, and while the Smoothies are unmarked, and of lesser quality than Giant (note the flaw in two horses, caused by 'short shot' leading to the locating hole extending down, as a gap, to the horses' belly line), the figures are still close, with the cone-like locating studs, later copies have straight 'bars'

 

This leaves the other horses and two figures, plus the Wigwam, it's obvious some of the remaining horse are 'Spikeymane', but without looking at the master sample, I'm not sure on the two remaining figures, so the obvious next-step is . . . 

 

. . . to get the Spikeymane master collection bag out, and check, while putting away the horses, along with a couple of others I had in a bag by themselves. There's also a 'Pre-Wavy' (top left) appeared in the frame, so it might have been with the buckshee Spikeymanes, or another single-horse bag? Ti-Pi goes in a bag, with a manuscript note to the effect it came - in a mixed sample - with the Giant knock-offs

 

Once I'm satisfied neither of the other figures go with the Spikymane horses, they join the tent (!) and a second manuscript note tying the other set into the sample. The aim being that once the 'temporary home' has been so-annotated a few times, one horse type may become the common link, then you can start to believe it's the horse the 'leather house' belongs with.

 

I wasn't happy about one of the other horses, so in the end he goes in the bag too, it's a sort of association bag, and there are quite a few of them, but sometimes, when a previously unknown series of horses, riders and sometimes foot figures have been properly ID'd through a few clean samples or a retail set, some of the bags loose their last obvious content, and most of what’s left (here, eventually, it'll be the two figures and horse) go in the unknown section, the big red shelter thing stays with the note.

 

Finally the Smoothie sample goes in the big box of Giant and Giant-like, and believe me, it's mostly Giant like, but that's all for another day, when we start to cover the Smoothies properly.

 

And that's it! If you have everything to hand, it takes five or ten minutes to sort a small sample like the above, in the early days it would take longer, and for the first few years, I just threw everything in a bigger box, in their various bags, as you can't start building sets until you have enough to compare samples, plot/create the patterns and/or sort against any retail sets which have come in.

Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Wavymane Type 1

We had an introduction to Wavymane a few years ago now, but it's time to get them all up here, and while I've numbered them from Type 1 to Type 4, it's not as simple as four types, and I'll explain as we go along, but suffice to say, the type one's are made of clean samples only, so currently number about 300-plus, but once the stuff here (last few years) and unsorted in storage (2010-2020'ish) are added, it'll be more like a 1000 pairs; horse & rider.

 

 

The horse, as explained previously, is a straight copy of the Crescent 54mm horse, used for various figures including their Cowboys & Indians, but also Arabs and medieval types. In this small scale it's still got very good and realistic musculature, something it really only shares with Pre-Wavy, and one of my greatest unanswered questions (likely to remain a mystery forever) is which came first and/or what's the relationship between the two?

 

The Type one is also quite matted, compared to later shinier versions, and this is partly due to the fine surface texture, which is more 'eggshell' or frosted, rather than sandblasting, and part age, these almost certainly date from the 1950's as opposed to the late 80's for some of the last versions (late Type 2's). There's also been a deliberate attempt to marble some of them brown/black. 

Marking is a clear, almost DIN (but fuller) HONG KONG in a sans-serif font, reading from the head to the tail, with a descent kerning gap between the two words. Flash is minimal, as is short-shotting, and these are nice horses to paint up and add to wargames armies, the pose is stylised and the flat inside legs detract from a full realism, but they are tropes carried over to all Hong Kong hollow-horses, and the 'West Germany' marked wagon-horses.

 

Figures, the two lower shots here are the original shots taken for the One Inch Warrior magazine articles, although I don't think they ever got used, there are six poses each, of Cowboys and Native American 'Indians', none of them are the Giant poses, but, like the Giant sculpts, will see themselves copied by other, later makers, of these small scale, ostensibly novelty, playthings.

 

Someone has tried to claim the cowboy rifleman, and 'witchdoctor' Native are Giant poses, I can assure you they are not, Giant have slightly cone-like locating studs with a little ball on the end, these have rounded rods, or more commonly pointed, faceted 'spikes'. Giant had six poses, Wavymane has twelve.

 

Colours are muted, and pastel shades predominate, where they aren't a pastel, they tend to dark red or darker marine blues. If you try counting them (by colour is easiest) there's about 150/200 of each type, and they are pretty balanced, which while 'fair', also suggests I've managed over the years to sort them quite accurately - see notes with subsequent sets/types!

 

Unlike the horses, short shots are common with these, and I think it's down to the level of fine detail, Giant originals (also finely sculpted) can suffer the same way, especially (with both) the tips of the revolvers.

 

Poses are taken from the 54mm Britains 'Swoppet' line, and one of the common problems with these, carried over to the Type Two's and Three''s, is that the native chap with full headdress can lose said head quite easily, especially now they are getting brittle with age, a weakness in the neck being the culprit.

 

The only set I've so far associated with them is this aged, unbranded bag, sealed with sellotape, and fogged with a powdery deposit on the inside of the bag, which could be a reaction between two polymers (the figures are polyethylene and the bag's crinkly cellophane), smoke/fire damage, mould, or something else environmental (seaside/salt air), at some point in it's long life?

 

It's  a little too big for all but the very largest Christmas crackers, which tended to better contents (to justify their price), so I suspect, if this is a retail item, it was for fairground prizes (hoopla, hook-a-duck, air rifle or coconut shies, &etc.), or possibly; arcade/end-of-pier crane-machines?

 

My original index card, with manuscript notes, it says the mark can read either way, I honestly can't remember now, but we can always return to them, and if you are using these articles to sort your own out, you may be able to answer that little quandary, yourself , first! Apologies for any typos, I was writing these for myself, with a lifetime's poor spelling!

 

A rarity in these, which tend to be quite colour stable, is this colour-bleed horse, but he may have been adjacent to something unrelated, and less stable, in a box or biscuit-tin for years, and some Hong Kong plastic is terrible for colour migration, especially the later production, from the 1970's/early1980's.

 

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But is it Giant
 

No, nothing here was ever part of or associated with Giant's oeuvre, except by the chap claiming two of the mounted poses are Giant, but I assure you they were never Giant, aren't Giant and never will be Giant!

Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Toytown Type II + Poor Texan and Hybrid Mexican

This is a more complicated ascribing than Toytown I, and for years, these were in three bags, but after I'd found a few mint-sets, it all became clear, and it's the best way of ID'ing these, a set or two falling from Toy Soldier 'Heaven'!

 

These are they, and apart from helping ID the riders, who were all in the big bags of totally unknowns, the big revelation was, two of the minor sub-horses (for want of a better word) were in the bags with the Toytown II's, namely the poorer Texans (already a poor version of 'Smoothie', with a tooled saddle), and a matching tooled Mexican Small, of which I only had one or two, in one of my smallest sized bags!

 

Card for what is as generic as they come, no maker, poor quality figures and horses, multi-generation copies of copies, culled from everywhere and a maker-less, brand-less card, this is the bottom end, or near-bottom of Hong Kong rack-toy production, and what tended to get Hong Kong toys a bad name.

 

The horses, the Toytown II's have less detail to the main or tail, the feet are far more pod-like, almost like they have hammer-heads for hooves, and the top of the body cavity is flat rather than pointed like the I's. The Texans, which I've named Poor Texan and the matching Mexican Small's have a sandblasted surface, and extra tooling on the saddles, but inherited from their donors, which we'll look at it another day, indeed, I think the dot-tooling on the Texan is following the dots on the Mexican, which was already on the donors as larger rings.

 

Obviously, we're into the realm of whacky colours with these, but that's an area even quite good Hong Kong horses can visit from time to time!

 

Toytown II on the left, Poor Texan on the right, there's the remains of a 'Hong' in the top of the Texan,, but I suspect that came-across with the pantographing/copying process, and might not extend to all cavities, if there are more than one (see below), but really they are unmarked as a set.

 

The matching Mexican Smalls. Note, both have short-shot rear-right legs, another way of identifying all these horses, mounted or foot figures, is the recurring damage some of them have, either from poor moulding or from poor sculpting!

 

Unmarked, flattish cavity.

 

I can't remember if these are the contents of a single bag, or the entirety of a loose sample, but you can see there may only be one cavity each for the Texan and Mexican, while there will have been several for the Toytowns.

 

The figures are dwarf-like and stubby, a vary small palette of only three main colours, and in addition to the six (and it's only six) poses taken from the Giant originals (via several-generations of copying copies!), we have an additional cowboy pose, a left-hooking  six-shooter.

 

I'm not sure I know his origins, nor if he was even in my original post on the figures in One Inch Warrior magazine, where I tried to point out the origins of most of the figures. He actually looks like the sculptor (plasticine-monkey?) tried to reverse the existing pose?

 

This shot is of the ID'd sample from bag-one, before I found (and possibly opened for the horse shot) another, so it's quite small, but it still gets them across well. As well as stubby, they're a bit lumpy or mud-like. Locating--studs are quite small.

 

This miss-moulded Indian, in one of the bags, has lost his shield and most of the spare spear, leaving him looking like he's got two vicious knives! He's gonna' get him some paleface scalp and no mistake!

 

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But is it Giant
 

No.