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.

Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Toytown Type I

An easy one to name, as while it's probably got its origins in the same 'Smoothie' as most of these running horses, it's been simplified and stylised to such a point it's almost cartoony in its appearance, and wouldn't look out of place charging about with the Marx Miniature Masterpiece 'Babes in the Wood' Guardsmen!

 

Almost a rocking horse, without the rockers, a sharply detailed mane and tail, with minor flash compared to some Hong Kong horses, it has no markings, a pointed body cavity and less 'poddy' feet than the Type 2, which will post next. Also the back leg is kicking-up more than on other horses, and the long reach of the forward leg, only helps with the cartoonish look. Colours are all quite realistic, with a nice marbled one, bottom-right . . . possibly a mould-purge?

 

I had a few spares and in the interests of research, cut some in half! You can see the arched body has a differing thickness of side walls, almost certainly down to hand-tooling of a number of duplicate cavities in the mould, and come to a sharp conclusion.

 

Figures have been identified through several clean samples over the years, and a quick note here, a clean sample is not just a sample where they are all, or appear to be all of one type, but it needs to be of equal quality, preferably all 'clean' as in barely used or played with, but if dirty or dusty, thy all need to be of the same level of grubbiness, to suggest they have always been kept together, and not thrown together with items from elsewhere, by a dealer offloading 'junk', or parent clearing an attic!

Reasonably bright colours, the figures are chunky, lacking fine detail, and have fat, stubby locating studs on their calves. Individual cavities can be identified - several of the cowboy riflemen are firing at a skyward angle, while the Indian in full war bonnet has a version with the shaft of his spear attached to his leg, and others without.

 

The small light-blue firer, and several of the brave with tomahawk and shield are heat-shrinkage victims, when the runner is removed from the tool too early, and the still hot polymer shrinks and deforms without the constraints of the mould cavity keeping them in shape. The yellow war-bonnet is also miss-moulded.

 

It's funny, but several clean samples, and no set identified, means only a few shots, they are what they are, and if they look poor, believe me, we'll be seeing poorer, before we get to the end of the Hong Kong hollow-horses!

 

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But is it Giant
 

No, not even close, although, again, they have copied the six (and it's only six) ex-Britains Swoppet poses of Giant mounted figures, but here as fifth, six or higher-generation piracies.

Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Pre-Wavy

Looking at possibly my favourite or one of them, primarily because it took me a long time to tie this well done horse into a set of riders, and it was pure luck that I did so, but I'm now over 75/80% confident I've done so, if I wasn't, I wouldn't be posting them.

 

This is basically the old Crescent horse, which as a Hong Kong hollow horse I call 'Wavymane' (because when I was naming them I was a dedicated small-scale collector and wasn't familiar with the Crescent horse), but with the wave removed, or sculpted over, but with no other visible changes, the good musculature of the Wavymane remains, and the quality is high, equal to the early examples of Wavymanes.

 

Colours are mostly realistic, and a wide palette of chestnut, dun, and rowans accompanies the usual black and white horses, and a couple of marbled grey/brown And this is about half the entire sample, which had come-in in ones and twos, usually in larger mixed lots, but one or two on their own, with a bunch of Airfix or Matchbox mixed figures, something like that.

 

They never came with an obvious figure, the kind of large mixed lots (dealers have always throne all these hollow-horses and their associated figures/accessories in a big bag, tray or tin) of small scale junk, are hard to ID things from But were easy to ID once I new what I was looking for, and slowly they built up; during one of the 'Big Sorts', I went through the many thousands of Wavymanes, and found a few more, where some were hiding from before I'd recognised them.

 

There are three marking variations so far identified, and with such a small sample, there may be more one day, but using the lower picture of black horses, we have in the middle (as the rowan) a clear HONG KONG (with a gap) and a bump, forward of the saddle position, on a flat underside, at the bottom, a less clear HONGKONG (no gap, both in a round sans-serif font) on an all flat underside, and a pointed domed cavity with no markings at the top (as the dun).
 

It took maybe 30-odd years to finally 'call' these, when one of the dozens of bags in the last big-sort, proved to be pretty clean,, maybe one or two obvious other-runners or runts, and suddenly I had a half-dozen or so, clean Pre-Wavys with matching riders.

 

Turning to the two bags of still unidentified figures, I found, among the 60-odd figures a dozen or so more, and this is most of them (one of each colour/per pose, I think). Again, there's a couple of thousand waiting sorting from the last few years (I don't buy, or 'hoover up' this stuff like I used to), mostly from the donations of Adrian Little, Chris Smith or Peter Evans, and a few big bags from the Plastic Warrior show, including this year, when I got a big bag of well mixed hollow--horse stuff, so there may be a few more to add by now,, but it may only be another half-dozen, maybe less.

 

The figures are early post-Giant copies of the six (and it's only six) Giant poses along with five (two Indian and three cowboy) of the poses associated first with 'Wavymane', but again, given the small sample, the other seven of that 'set' may turn-up in the future.

 

The obvious identifying features are the bright colours in a quite pastel palette, and the relatively neat, ball-ended locating studs on the riders calves, which while similar to Giant's, lack the cone-like shafts of the Giant versions.

 

The figures are copies/sub-piracies of those associated with Wavymane, and specifically the mini-forts from the small 'pull-bags', with the two holes/release-pin marks missing,, and a Hong Kong mark, and, while again, a small sample, it looks like they are all coloured to match the rider, and more poses are still to be found.

 

I have a feeling though, there may be a bunch more somewhere, which could mean they were bought in by another hollow-horse issuer, or that the foot figure attribution is less solid, maybe 50% or less, only time, and the next Big Sort will tell?

 

It's quite a faint mark, and it was easier to fade out the colour and tone down the contrast to illustrate it. On the Wavymane figures small holes, like golf-holes are found roughly under the feet, here the base is smooth other that the raised mark, and the figures are of a poorer quality than the donors, which were with an early version of Wavymane, and are, obviously, also, copies of the Britains Swoppet 54mm originals.

 

This is the entire sample, and one of the best tests of whether you've ID'd them correctly, is how the various items add up, and here it's about right, with the foot figures being a slightly smaller sample, but there may have been less of them per issue, or they may only have been included in some iterations/sets, or as stated, as a caveat above, they may be interlopers?

 

But compare the bag of foot figures, with the bag of mounted cowboys and there's nothing in it, so I think I've called it right, it's just that I think I may have more foot figures somewhere, and they may be in the unattributed box?

 

Note, each element gets a 4x5½" bag, and all four bags join the horses in a 6x9" bag, they will get three Pelt drawings (with more added if new marking variants turn up), and a large index card stiffens the bag (so it can stand up in the box with the other one-off samples), where all the other notes are to be found, including findings, sample sizes, how many foot and mounted were found together, &etc.

 

My own feeling, given how few turn up, how they turn up in single figures, and the overall better quality of them, is that they may have been Christmas cracker exclusives, or an unremembered comic/cereal/other food premium?

 

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But is it Giant
 

No, easier for unscrupulous dealers or ignorant sellers to claim so, do to the quality of the horses, and the similarity of some of the mounted figures, but they are not Giant, they are a minor group, possibly used as premiums of some kind, cracker toys or gum-ball capsule machine prizes?