Looking at the various rack-toy sets, in
the small scale, rack-toy universe, manufactured in golden polymers and ostensibly
of 'Romans' most of whom are actually copied from Britains Trojans, who were themselves sculpted as Classical Greeks,
albeit with a cloned Marx Roman or two in the mix for good measure!
Sorting sets and scanning images to get
some order to this post I actually found a third fort type which may-or-may-not
be connected to the third figure type (later in the post), so there may be four
generations of 'stuff' here?
We've looked at the Lucky Clover branded sets before, so a bit of a reprise, but we're
comparing today. Packaging of the No
6646 / 9 Tower Fortress With Soldiers is best described as '1950's gift
chocolates', with a pull-off lid and tray holding the contents, viewable though
the large window.
Two pinches of figures making half a handful
(heay, at some point in the past I'm sure these were official units of
measure!), a two-horse, articulated, chariot and the standard Hong Kong fort in
17 pieces with the 'oriental' turret-roofs.
You can see this one is annotated in James
Opie's hand as having been purchased in Layton (I suspect East London rather
than Blackpool?), in August 1969, which means these other sets were coming out
as Giant faded away, and were partly
responsible for that fade; if you saturate a market, the early leader will lose
out for being over-extended or over-invested in a diminishing return. And note
the instructions for the Wild West Fort Cheyenne
are included on a generic tray designed for all the Lucky Clover sets.
Four pinches making two half-handfuls! You
can see there is little attempt at a fair sample or equal distribution of the
figure poses, with one getting only four of the six available poses, the other scraping-in
with five. They would have been jumbled up in a big skillage somewhere in the
corner of the warehouse and fed to smaller stock, component or tote boxes on
each packer's bench. Obviously aiming at six figures per pocket, one got seven.
The Lucky
Clover chariots; mentioned before, there seem to be four types, two-horsed (Biga) or
four (Quadriga) and more generally (more widely within all these type of rack-toys) can be found
articulated or rigid, the articulated ones survive better, the rigid ones
tending to brake where the drawbar/centre-pole meets the body of the chariot.
The horse is a very good example of what I
call 'Mexican' and is as good as anything Giant
carried, but these - and their attendant chariots - are unmarked.
Fish-scale flags plug-in to the 'oriental'
turrets, I call them that to differentiate from the round-cone roof pieces of
other forts in this family of similar rack-toy forts, the design can be found
throughout Europe, so isn't really Oriental, but, well, that’s why that is . .
. ! One set gets contrasting jade-green flags (pennants?), the other matching
red.
The fort sections are marked (in contrast
to the chariots/horses) with a heavy HONG KONG in a rough, capitalised,
sans-serif font, twice; above the 'gate-house' and below the left-hand walk-way
(arrowed).
Fully assembled and to the untrained eye
identical to a Giant fort, the
seventeen pieces assemble into a fort with roughly the same footprint as the
concurrent Airfix (and other) forts,
that is: eight-inches by eight-inches on the sides, but lacking the
sophistication, or height of those domestic models.
The other relatively clear type to identify
- No. 445 Roman Fortress - is quite
common, and can be found as a generic (top) or over-printed to the Woolbro brand (bottom). Artwork (which
shows the round turret-roofs on the front of the card) rather dates this to post-1960's-psychedelia,
and more toward the simpler 'comic' graphics and block-colours of Glam-Rock, Habitat and Mary Quant, so early 1970's?
Which makes them the second of these, but - as always with this stuff - it's
not that simple!
Also - as both generics and under Woolbro - sister sets of Astronauts,
Khaki Infantry (with the 1-ton Humber mini-trucks) and a 'Fort Cheyenne' (all stock-coded '445') were issued in a fuller 'line'. I have a Gordy International Wild West set (and a generic), so they (Gordy) may have issued this - Roman set - on the other
side of The Pond?
Obviously aping the Lucky Clover set, or a later version from the same source (we will
probably never know), they are the same black polyethylene with red fittings
(including pennants), no markings though and you can see the mould is tired
with damage 'dinks' to the flat surfaces, but it makes it easy to ID lose ones
as there's no mistaking the eight or so 'pimples' on the back of the gatehouse,
and the long diagonal scartch to the right - clearly they only had the one
tool/cavity.
But I have parts of an interim/different
one; yellow fittings (but no firm idea as to turret tops or pennants),
high-quality moulding with very smooth walls, none of Lucky's markings, none of Woolbro's
dinks.
However, the three walls are roughest of
the lot and marked - similar to Lucky
Clover's front-piece - but with a full MADE IN HONG KONG in a slightly
smaller font.
A few recent bits (the fort from Tony among
them) were added after this shot was taken, and while I've numbered them, and
seem to have photographed them the wrong way round, there is no real
significance to the numbering and '2' could be the oldest or the newest, also -
as we'll see with the figures in a minute - may be the third or a forth 'type'?
What I am sure about is that the Lucky
Clover sets pre-date the Woolbro/generic
Roman Fortress sets.And I don't want to be seen to be 'showing off' here, I'm showing you the vague size of the sample so you can gauge the veracity or fallacy of the blurb for yourself , I'd hate to be thought to be the type to make it up as I go along, like some peep's around here!
So, to the figures; as the forts are all
black, so the figures are all gold, but differences - when you look - are
marked and plenty, all are poorer than Giant
originals, who we will look at another time.
The top row are Lucky Clover, all six of the Giant poses, below them are a row of Woolbro/generics, they are almost smooth,
detail wise, and only seem to have used five of the original six poses.
Below that are some OBE's from an unknown
artist of yesteryear and a single survivor of my Greco-Romano-Trojan-Macedonian-Carthaginian
army! I gave them gun-metal cuirasses . . . can you imagine going to war in a wrought-iron
bell-cuirass!
The bottom row are the 'turd on the snooker-table'
of this otherwise quite clean ID'ing exercise, as they are a third type, closer
to the Giant originals and coming independently from the 'interim' fort, so not
necessarily going with it at all? And a six-pose count.
As well as the gold plastic rule and the black forts rule, the other rule which unites this branch of the tree is that none of these have been associated with mounted figures, indeed the inclusion of the unknown set is because they came without mounted figures in a clean sample, they haven't been linked to a black fort per se.
Bases; The interlopers (middle) have a Giant-like
MADE IN HONG KONG in a neat DIN-font, which extends over the edge/boundary of
the product in some cases leading to floating or missing letters. They all have
the hole for locating the spigot-mountings on the floors of some chariots, and they
are also a more golden gold than the others.
Top are the Lucky Clover, they have the remnants of a chariot-mounting hole (their chariot has no spigot)filled in and
are marked with a very uneven, or arcing HONG KONG in a more generic engineers
letter-stamp format, gold is a darker, bronze-gold, if that isn't an oxymoron!
While at the bottom are the Woolbro/generic figures, easiest to sort
as they have smooth, unmarked bases, and smooth un-detailed bodies! I've shot a
darkish gold set here, but they can be found in a verity of shades . . .
. .
. as can be seen in the lower shot here, where we have the archer in artists
gold (left) a washy, semi-translucent gold, a 9ct gold and the darker shade.
The upper shot is my 'old soldier' and the OBE squaring-off - "To the death Achilles!"
===============================================================
But is it Giant?
No! Nothing in this post is by Giant or was sold as Giant, although the interim figures (and
possibly the yellow-door fort) may be from old, tired, ex-Giant tools? One could ponder all sorts, raise the questions of Bi-A-Toy or World Toy House, but I haven't seen these 'Romans' in the former
packaging yet, while the later carried marked Giant originals.
If I was being tortured for an answer I
would try to stick the unknown figure set and fort together, and possibly place
them contiguous to the Lucky Clover
set, or even slightly earlier as the first post-Giant copy/variety, but there is no evidence for any of it . . .
yet!
More on these here; my notes on the unknown goldies shown there, vis-à-vis the Lucky Clover figures now looks a bit
dodgy, but the etched detail on the Lucky is better, while the unknown's are
'closer' overall (size/pose) to the better Giant
originals. One should also note the figures on PSR's Giant page, with
the possible exception of the unpainted silver rider, are not Giant, but later copies.
No comments:
Post a Comment