I realised we'd got through a Rack Toy
Month over on the home Blog without posting anything here, and I usually manage
to get something up here in RTM, so a bit late, here's a quick overview of the loose
Vikings from the Giant Plastics Corp.,
of Hong Kong and New York.
We looked at the carded stuff years ago on the home Blog here, and will look at them again here when I've taken some
new images of the cards which are currently in storage.
The ship, sans oars and anchor, just to
give an idea of what it looks like, a simplified scale-down of the Aurora model-kit (reissued in the 1990's
by Smer), which has been scaled at
1:64th (by hobbyists I think, the actual kit doesn't give a scale/size?), and
which is here a nominal HO-gauge compatible or somewhere between 1:76th and
1:87th.
A recent one on evilBay with a blue sail and a
couple of crew in situe, they are provided with small locating studs or spigots
to keep them upright as the boat is rolled-about on the carpet or abused in the
bath or fish-pond! Ulike the Giant Romans where all figures have the hole for
the chariot spigot, here only the crew have a hole.
Each ship comes with a bag of accessories
consisting of the crew - typically; one commander, one helmsman and four
spearmen/sentries (but it can vary), an anchor, a steering oar (steer-board /
starboard / stab'd), 16 shields and 14 rowing oars. The reason they are missing
in the above shot is that I'm won't to open a mint pack!
The sample I'm working from is not great,
they are among the harder to find of Giant's
output, but not as rare as the backwoodsmen or early knights! Giant originals on the left, unmarked
copies on the right, crew above, fighting 'troops' below. You can see from this unscientific sample that about 2/3rds of all the Vikings out there are actually knock-offs, not Giant!
The copies don't follow the Giant donors exactly, with the axe-man
(red) being a composite of Giant's
spearman (yellow)'s legs with new torso, sword and shield. While the copier
didn't carry-over the spearman or Giant's
axe-man, when they did their pirating.
An interesting and accidental yet serendipitous
variation is found with the copy-set, where the ships commander can have a mild
form of short-shot (incomplete moulding), resulting in his wind-blown cloak
being reduced to a rod of plastic which resembles a sword scabbard on the right
hip! Both the figures marked with asterisks.
It should also be noted that while the
ship's crew are ex-Aurora, the
fighting figures are original sculpts, although that's original with heavy
influence from Crescent/Kellogg's knights
and Hausser/Elastolin Anglo-Saxons!
Base marks; there is a marked difference
between the fighters (above 'GIANT ⓟ MADE IN HONG KONG' in a typewriter/engineer's stamp font) and the crew (below 'GIANT ⓟ HONG KONG' in a DIN/sans-serif font) suggesting different
tools, if nothing else, but as both were early and contemporaneous it only questions
comments made elsewhere about using base marks to date these, all my carded
sets are early, but these are 'late' marks! The copies are unmarked.
There were cavalry too, not something the
annuls of Viking history are strong on, they must have had a few for farm work
etc . . . or to sell to the Rus for cash! . . . but they weren't noted
horsemen, being a maritime nation.
Certainly evidence - beyond the odd leader
on a 'prestige' horse (which might be lashed to the mast or a deck shackle and
fed from a bale or two), or similar 'grave-goods' horses buried with their
owners, as symbols of wealth or status -
is almost non-existent.
Four of the foot figures provide the bodies
for the Giant mounted figures, the
copy-maker didn't bother with mounted figures.
This came with one of my larger lots, and
is 'technically' the Mongol fort, but with the migrations/invasions from the East
and the Slavic neighbours, it would make sense to include the 'Asian' gate-house
version with Viking sets, however it has been given the 'medieval' or 'European'
turret roofs on the corner towers.
The door is quite oriental too! We will
have a whole post on all the forts, Giant
and non-Giant through to the Accoutrements-Archie McFee / BuM Slot reissues, eventually, with
all the combinations known.
Three identical wall sections are marked
slightly differently from the gate, but I don't suppose there's anything particularly
significant about that, the numeral ('1') is the same on all three sections and
is probably just a mould-tool cavity number, or pattern-maker's mark.
Some sets also seem to have received ballista
style catapults, more commonly found in the knights/Mongol sets, and pirated
from Marx Miniature Masterpiece sets,
where they were also issued to Vikings; attacking late medieval (from the suits
of armour) forts!
The elastic band is a replacement, but is
matched to the dried remains of the original, i.e. size (about a one-inch
radius), type (thin, square-section) and rubber colour (neutral tan), for which
jobs I have a large bag of rubber bands of every type! The Lone*Star Trebble-o-Trains car-carriers - for instance - take dentists
brace-bands to hold the vehicles on!
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But is it Giant?
Half and half on the figures, everything else is Giant, I forgot to annotate the type of horse marking on these, so another post another day!
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