Giant and Giant-like Vikings - Loose Examples

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!

Giant and Giant-like Astronaut Spacemen - Part II - Giant Originals

So, to the figures issued by Giant in the early to mid-1960's, the same figures would have been found in The Toy House or World Toy House (same firm) packaging. Figures are marginally the largest at a tad over 21mm and a mean/average, and also the best sculpted, these can paint-up well, but are scarce, so better to use commoner copies for that sort of thing!

The boards I used t shot these have left a bit of a shock on the eye, vis-à-vis the base-marks, but if you enlarge the images (right-click and 'open in new tab', or window, then left-click the image if a plus-sign is showing) you'll see they are clear enough.

This is what I call the command poses, four-of-nine, with detector man (it's sci-fi he could be detecting anything, not necessarily mines!), a spotter with binoculars, a squad/section signaller/runner and the O/C - Officer Commanding; we know that's who he is as he's the only one with a side-arm . . . or ray-pistol!

The squad troopers, armed with various lengths of space-rifle and a recoilless, tube-launched weapon, undoubtedly capable of some cosmic devastation on an epic scale! Giant originals are all clearly marked with the mark more associated with the later retail production (black and silver knights, Mongols &etc.), including the spurious ⓟ-mark! - "GIANT ⓟ MADE IN HONG KONG"

Someone sent me this about ten-years ago, maybe twelve (2007/8?) and I can't find the eMail to thank them, they are - sadly - only empty cards, but I think we can tell they would have contained - from the left; a random (of three designs) space-tank and a handful (20-odd?) of figures [3907 Space Patrol], a larger single blister of (40/50-odd?) figures [Space Men], at least two tanks, with the missile-launch mechanism of a third, along with a sample of figures and possibly one of two things yet to be identified (?) [5933 Space Brigade] and finally; one of the big rocket-ships with a dozen or so figures [5932 Space Launch].

Not clear in this low-res shot is that the Space Launch set has an integral sunken tray like the Viking longship sets, and later simpler blister-packed sets existed including another Space Men and a Space Explorer set.

I don't have the tanks or rockets yet, so until I track them down, which I will, here are a couple of past feeBay lots with two of them, they all have the same twin missile-launcher as a plug-in and the same dodgy running-gear as the WWII tanks, but three different superstructure/bodies of which there are two seen here

Compared with the 23mm'ish Airfix Astronauts, you can see the diminutive size of Giant's figures, the bino's guy looks smaller-still because he's bending forward slightly and foreshortening has 'dwarfed' him!

This image (left) is now on 'Worthpoint' except theirs is a fuzzy thumbnail you have to sign-up to see properly (which I'm sure involves money or endless spam, probably both!), but the eBay original can still be found at a higher resolution, it came in an opposite colour-way (blues for reds and vise-versa) and while being now some sixty years of age, bears a remarkable resemblance to Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship 'Heavy Lifter' (main image), which is designed to land on its tail fins like all those 1950's pulp-cover artwork and kids comic vessels!

Vintage and modern as the current HexBug Nano - Nano Space/Nanobot's space ship disgorges a troop of Giant's intrepid finest to  . . . err . . . check something out! Please note; There were no gold astronauts from/issued by Giant

I think I've bored you with this before, but Giant's figures are problematical for me with what passes for OCD in an Aspergic; namely they are armed, so should be 'Spacemen', but they are clearly wearing NASA-era spacesuits which makes them 'Astronauts' . . . doh! And hence the titles of this series 'Astronaut Spacemen'! Although Giant get round the quandary (it's real!) by using the separate words 'Space Men' across the whole line - not 'spacemen'.

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But is it Giant

Yes! Apart from the obvious prop in the last shot, the four Airfix and most of the figures in the filtered first image, this IS the Giant Plastic Corp of New York & Hong Kong issued product.

Giant and Giant-like Astronaut Spacemen - Part I - Introduction

So, a five part overview of Giant's spacemen and the more numerous clones to be found out there, and more by accident than design I ended-up with an image which was so useful, I've used it - with masking - on every subsequent post, but we can see it here in its entirety!

First though, this is an idea of the size of the sample I've been working from, these were actually the ones in storage, and others were here, while a few more have come in recently, but you can see that the main 'types' we will be looking at (Giant, C1, C2 and C3) are all represented in largish quantities except the Giant originals (bottom-right, nearly empty pack) which were mostly here already! Silver predominates, but as the 'C2' we also get gold, scarlet and metallic blue & maroon figures, while . . . hold on! This is all for the next image;

Right . . . Silver plastic predominates, but the C2's were also done as gold, scarlet (not shown here, but peeking in the first image - above)) and metallic blue & maroon figures, while as C3 we sometimes find painted figures, a finish which may be of factory origin.

The C1 may not be the first copy, but is the best so earned it's moniker by dint of being closest to Giant's issues, while the C2 was by far and away the commonest, and the C3 is a separate issue, possibly (and only possibly) copied from the C2's as a third-generation piracy, on their post I will look at this further.

The Enemy; as far as I know there were no instances, either as Giant or otherwise, of the two being issued together, or established/flagged as protagonists, the one line being 'stand alone' spacemen, the other 'stand alone' aliens, but they would likely - in Giant's case, and probably as The Toy House - have been hanging next to each other on the rack, so the link (as belligerents/foils to each other) is there.

I don't have a Giant set yet, so this toy house one will have to do, but we looked at them all recently here;

Giant Originals
Toy House Issue
Dodgy Copies

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But is it Giant?

The figures in the bottom right-hand bag of the first image and the figure (3 angles) in the left-hand column of the second image are Giant product, everything else (99%) is not. The third image is dealt with on the relevant post (second link above).