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 Set No.982 Chariot Race 59¢ 1963

So to the third of my contiguously numbered 1962/3 Giant Roman sets, purchased from Mr. Opie about 16-years ago, with this one we ditch the 'Legion' for some extreme sports - vegan crown to the winner, hoofy-death with tyre-marks to the loser!

Dotted-line guy had the day off! Otherwise it's clearly part of the same line. As the Marx 'influencer' was the Ben Hur sets, it's fitting that we have a teeny-tiny clone/take on it here, with three standard Giant chariots (four horse, non-articulated chassis) and the three figures needed.

"S'mine-now, s'all mine!"

Two red's and a yellow chariot body, with contrasting coloured overlay frets with the fancy, decorative stuff. We know they are/were based on the Marx set because of that fret (which varies between clones and is the best way to ID different sources) and the weird spiky stuff on the front of the cross-bar - which is more of a stabby-spear/de-heading blade arrangement on the originals.

Horses are all the same brown batch, and marking are almost impossible to work out, but they will be genuine Giant 'Smoothies' of one sub-type or another. And we get the Marx knock-off spearman and two of Britains finest (Ulysses) as crew. Both the ex-Marx figure and the chariot wheels are the same brown as the horses - when trying to sort all these HK small-scales, exact shade is as important as markings sometimes for tying things in together!

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But is it Giant?

Sure as the other two, but I think it might be Boysie-Boy's now!

Giant Set No.981 Roman Legion Assault Group 59¢ 1963

The Romans weren't strong on cavalry, they did use them for scouting and patrolling the boarders of empire, sending signals and such like, and the books tell they were recruited from or tended to be the Aristocracy, but in fact they would have used horse-riding peoples from around the Empire for serious mounted work.

But clearly a few 'Toffs were allowed to ponce about on the edge of the battlefield, picking off stragglers or retreating enemy while staying relatively safe? Anyway - this set 'Assault group' is half and half cavalry and Infantry, and both disappoint to one degree or another!

Packaging follows the rules laid-down by set 980 (previous/older post), with the two-colour, screen-printed card folded-under and stapled to trap the rim of the blister in a sandwich of card, and the dotted line (which most developed humans in the 1960's knew to mean 'cut-here') indicating where to dig!

Blisters are the same size, which means more Infantry (about 40) that cavalry (10) as those hollow, 'Hong Kong' horses are room-occupiers with all those arms and legs and tails and stuff!

But . . . the mounted element consists of nine standard-bearers (meant to be Agamemnon in the Britains Herald universe) and one bloke with a shield so big it would shelter a family!

So to the disappointment with the foot-arms; it is that at least six are not ancient Romans (or Greco-Trojans!) but Giant medievals, and while it may be a case of making-up the numbers, that they are mixed together quite well, would suggest a deliberate act, probably applied to the/a whole batch, which, by modern terms would be a fraud, not that they worry about such things in rack-toys, then or now, but still a bit of a swizz!

We'll look at the Medievals in detail another day, but it's interesting to get them together like this as we can see two marking's running side-by-side, quite early in the short history of Giant's output, later Medievals (the smaller black & silver versions) would get the full 'P' nonsense, but here they have a cleaner GIANT over HONG KONG in a DIN font. The true Romans get a more scrappy mark , which I've previously looked at a possible history-of, on the Home Blog, here.

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But is it Giant?

Yeap! As sure as shit's found in a midden!

Giant Set No.980 Roman Legion Chariot Attack 59¢ 1963

As I've mentioned before elsewhere, this set (and two others) was (were) purchased by the inimitable James Opie exactly one month short of one-year (to the day) before I was born, which - today of all days - makes them at least 59-years old!

I've explained elsewhere why I believe these sets put Giant at forming around 1961/62 and not the '59 or earlier, of some sources, and the two-colour screen-print card is evocative of that age, whatever the date! Folding back on itself to fully enclose the rim of the blister between a card 'sandwich'.

There are dotted lines on the reverse indicating where you should go digging with knife or scissors to obtain the contents . . . now of course, I would just cut carefully round the base of the blister with a scalpel, but then I'm a vaguely intelligent adult! However, back then the 'blister pack' was a newish concept, especially in this sealed form, even Giant used staples only, through the blister, on some of their simpler/unfolded sets, while heat sealing the blister to the card was still a year or two away - requiring the added expense of blister-contoured hot-iron stamps.

Seven mounted Romans and two four-horsed, non-articulated chariots make up those contents, with two 'foot figures' as chariot crews; these plug to the floor of the chariot.

The chariots; the plug (chariot floor) and hole (figure base) attachment is clearly visible on the archer (ex-Britains pose), and the other vehicle has an ex-Marx sentry pose as it's 'rider/driver'. The chariot is based on the Marx Ben Hur Playset design, but reduced in size and greatly simplified.

Note that each chariot has matching horses, which are standard Giant 'Smoothies' (as I call them) and 99-times out of a hundred get a contrasting coloured wrap-around detailing fret, you do occasionally see them with same colour frets, but they don't look 'right'! When you find the on feebleBay they are usually hideously overpriced for what are quite common, both as Giant and as any one of several clones, to which (the clones) you can add two-horse-team sets, and articulated versions which pivot at the back of the drawbar/centre pole.

The cavalry; A very disappointing figure/pose mix here with five of the diminutive blobs which pass for a spearman, and one each of the other two figures, however the horse selection is quite good with a fair mix of black, white and two shades of brown, so swings and roundabouts I feel! Again they are pretty standard Smoothies, but which sub-variant remains unclear . . . but then I haven't listen them all yet! Looking at the brown one on the middle, they are the ['GIANT' to the left of a smaller 'HONG' over 'KONG' with no idiot 'R'-mark] type! Crew and Chariot marks can't be determined.

But they may have additional marks along the sides of the cavity? So I can't be 100% - things in blisters are harder to investigate than loose examples, but we will look at the Smoothie properly one day, with a view to boring you to death!

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But is it Giant?

Yes! Yes-yes-yes, without a shadow of a doubt, absolutely, assuredly, positively and only Giant! But - bought in the UK, in 1963, not in the US - God forgive the carbon-footprint* on these cheap, ephemeral rack-toys!

*1961? Coal or oil-fired tramp-steamer from Hong Kong to the West Coast, diesel locomotive (or Kenworth/Peterbuilt!) across the breadth of the US to New York, then another steamer to the UK, with more vehicle movements from Ipswich, Tilbury, Bristol or Liverpool? It's staggering really!

'Wavymane' - The Original, Hong Kong Made, Hollow Horse?

So, I covered a couple of the easier horses at the start of this Blog, now it's time for one of the hardest, not as many variations as the Giant horses ('Smoothie' and 'Mexican'), but enough variants, and probably the original of all the hollow-horses, certainly the most numerous, by country-miles.

This is it, the horse I dubbed Wavymane, because I'm a simple chap and it has a wave in its mane, a curl - if you like - or, with the lighting on this shot, a bit of a loop, clearly visible on the right-hand horse's mane, about half way down the neck.

I was going to highlight it with an arrow, but some of you may decide to use these close-ups to build a ready-reckoner guide, so I thought I'd keep them clean!

My total sample, as of April 2016, there has been some growth, with a fair few in the TBS box, but I don't buy the quantities I used to when I was first trying to sort and annotate the 20+ main [named] types and 100+ variations, which is mostly now complete as an exercise.

We'll be visiting each sub-type in its own post here and we'll look at their marks when we do so. This is just a guide to what I have been working with/from, but there are a few points to note;

Type 1's are best quality, with a chalky (but not brittle) look, good musculature to the horses and subdued, but rich colours to the riders, with no accessories yet tied to them, they are definitely the oldest, may be the first HK horse of this HO/OO-compatible model, and - due to that age - are less numerous.

Type 2's introduce both new marks and a glossier plastic for both horses and riders, the carded set seen is 'theirs' as are some generic pocket-money bags. They are commoner than the 1's, but as clean 'Early' samples not much more numerous.

As Type 2 Late however, they are the commonest Hong Kong hollow-horse out there, there are thousands of horses in the box and the riders fill two large bags, with sets from A Pocket Money Toy (H - 502, a phantom brand?) and Larami (who also carried other Hong Kong hollow-horses, at other times, in the same packaging - so almost certainly bought-in, probably from third-party.

The Type 3 is the cake-decoration candle-holder version, and the numbering is purely arbitary, but was placed before the 4's, as it would have been an early application of the moulding, contiguous with the 2's if not originally the 1's, it depends on who had the idea first (decoration buyers, or horse seller) and how soon they arranged contracts, new tooling and deliveries of first orders!

While Type 4 covers all the late production which includes exceptions to rules, bought-in accessories, different riders or foot figures &etc. Some of these may still be in stores somewhere, but probably not.

Large sets from the Type 2 ('Empire Made' left) and Type 4 (YF, right) eras; The 2 has both ex-Giant foot figures and an ex-Giant fort without the bunk-house, but the riders are all Wavymane, while the 4 has new riders (ex-Timpo poses) and new foot figures.

US readers should note that while I don't have an MPC set yet, I've seen enough on evilBay to know they are within the Type 4 oeuvre, and specifically are packaging-graphic variations of the Blue-Box lookie-likey YF blister-card seen here. The foot figures also being issued with truncated versions of the fort as seen in the previous image - all will be looked at properly in the Type 4 post/s.

Also it should be seen/noted that YF produced ex-Giant second version Knight sets (tool passing through to Archie McFee/Accoutrements and ultimately BuM), yet there is no ex-Giant content in this set - although everything above is described as Giant by unknowing or unethical sellers on that there interma'web thingy!

Wavymane is basically a straight copy of the Crescent 54mm horse, down-scaled to a 1:76th/72nd or HO/OO-compatible size. The horse is technically galloping, although at full gallop the horse only ever has one hoof firmly on the ground at any given moment. However it's important to note that the sculptors at Crescent went with three hoofs grounded; one (front right) coming in, one (front left) lifting and one momentarily firm - rear right.

You can see I have highlighted the wave with arrows here, it is carried over from Crescent donor to Hong Kong piracy, along with all other details of mane, tail, saddlery and halter/harness, the location hole being raised to receive studs higher-up the scaled down legs of the small-scale riders.

Britain's had gone with a two hoof down pose for less stability, but greater realism, the front going down, the rear lifting. To the right of the Britains is a recent (and still findable) larger scale version of the old small-scale Hong Kong hollow horse, with the tail from one ('Flicktail') and ex-Giant 'Smoothie' body, but fitted for a base.

Timpo followed Britains with the two-hoofs-down gait, and when I sat 'followed' check out the sculpting of the tail or the ulna (shoulder) and carpus (knee) of the front left leg!

So, to the contentious bit; the Giant horse is a copy of the Wavymane! It's smaller because whether pantograph or hand cut, it then got reduced as the fine musculature of the Crescent horse was smoothed-out! Hence 'Smoothie' but they retained enough of the saddlery details - specifically the funny little flaps of 'Front Skirt' and/or 'Fender' (yeah - I had to look all this stuff up!), for us to know the Wavymane came first, the Giant is second generation, but re-cut to quality . . . to begin with.

This is important for two reasons, one; it will annoy the Giant purists and if you are annoying a specific group of fan-people you are usually getting something right, and two; because all the subsequent horses can be either 2/3/4th generation from Wavymane, or 3/4/5th generation copies of Smoothie - which is why studying them is so hard. Add stand-alone's and other 1st generation copies and it's all very complicated, but it has to be got right . . . or ignored.

A couple more large-scale offerings from Hong Kong, one which is clearly the Crescent horse, but now seemingly the donor for the small-scale horses I call Spiky-mane and Flicktail as it's had more work done on both features, to hide the Crescent origins? The other a Britains/Timpo hybrid with Britains take-off base.

Three of the previous images scaled-together in Picasa for a full comparison. The Timpo looks bigger, but that's because A) it has a rider and B) I've lifted the image to fit it in the corner to match the bottom-left corner, for graphical purity!

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But is it Giant?

Obviously the two used in the comparisons are, but the Wavymane specifically and all the large scale ones in general; no. However, you will find Wavymane's with Giant product as bought-in 'mix-and-match' sets, they are post- or ex-Giant.

Hong Kong Hollow Horses - Modern (Type I) - W - Western Warrior

I do know (or have known in the past to be more accurate as I clearly don't know now!) what the W stood for, it's not Wing Lung (who are responsible for larger - 30mm - Airfix piracies), I don't think it's Welly (but I'll check!), it's not the Woolworth's mega-brand 'Big-W', nor is it Wentoys (although from that same late 1980's-early 1990's era of rack-toys), if anyone does know, let the rest of us off the hook, otherwise you'll have to wait until I remember/find the reference, and update the post...which will be...er...when I update it!

I'm pretty sure also that these late production figures have enjoyed more than one issuing 'Brand', so if you have them in another packaging, consider a guest-post to elucidate the rest of us! A couple of shots of the header card, and any variations in [wagon or tee-pee] colour are all that's needed.

Arlin Tawser (who believes the logo might be a double 'WW') reports on Plastic Soldier Review (PSR) that these were also sold as a set called "Cowboys, Indians, Horses and Wagons” in the 1990's, and further reports that his version of the set shown here has the foot figures marked 'CHINA', mine however have the normal smooth/unmarked bases.

Quite familiar to collectors, both because they are the more recent, and because they have a useful set of Airfix piracies as foot figures, instead of the tired-old ex-Giant/Britains Swoppet mouldings or Crescent 54mm's that everyone had been using for the previous 30-years.

You also get a wagon which is easy to sort from similar examples, a cloned (and miniaturised) Britains Herald Totem-pole and the same donor's tee-pee/tipi, so - lots of play value.

The horse hasn't got a specific title in my 'system' being a Smoothie who's also a Remould, and made (like the rest of the contents) from a tinny, rigid ethylene, that's quite distinctive enough to sort-out of mixed lots, the whole set oozes 'new production' when compared with the bulk of HK hollow-horsed Cowboys & Indians from the 1960/70's.

Basically I call him 'Modern' as I do several other, dissimilar, mounts also known as moderns, so for tagging: I've called him 'Modern I'. Crudely marked with a quite large 'HONG KONG' in the top of the body cavity reading head-to-tail in squared letters, it's also got quite think sides. Note also the reinforcing on the inside-legs of the black one, about 10% of all the horses have this, presumably one of the cavities was so treated, probably to prevent curving of the legs after release from the mould-tool?

The all important shot in this post . . . at last! Someone designed some new figures! OK, they took them from Airfix's 54mm/1:32nd scale cowboy and Indian sets, but as Airfix hadn't seen fit to update their own small scale atrocities with better figures, even with their own large-scale, pantographed down, we were just happy someone had!

Six-each of both foot cowboy and foot Indian poses were nicked, and they were issued in four basic primary colours, although (as always with these cheap figures) much variation in shade or hue between batches.

The mounted figures can be mistaken for other set's figures, a couple of them (Indian archer and full war-bonnet) are old, tired, rehashed poses, and the colour variation is wider than for the foot figures - they may well have been bought-in from a third party - but there are a few signature features that make them reasonably easy to sort-out of larger mixed lots.

The Mohican haircut of the brave with flapping jerkin sets him apart from similar versions from other sources, while two of the cowboys are all new; Britains Herald lassoer and Swoppet twin-six-gunner (I think the other guy may be the Crescent firing-back pose?). Then there's the aforementioned dense, tinny plastic for one, large, reasonably long and directly-opposite locating-studs for another, the flash on some of the figures &etc. Once you have ID'd a few you will get a feel for them and it's easy to find the rest in a big lot!

The wagon is very easy to separate from other HK wagons by dint of having a standard towing eye at one end, and - for no explicable reason I can come-up with - a crude copy of the Giant chariot drawbar-front, combined with another towing eye at the other end! As that original Giant feature was itself a ruination of the - even more original - Marx chariot's ornate tooling, it is a complete mystery why someone in the 1980's decided to sculpt it onto the other end of an otherwise OK covered-wagon!

The wagon is also much shallower than most HK Wild West wagons, having only one plank, more of a tray than a box-body! In other respects it is the same basic ex-Giant design, based on the old Tudor Rose vehicle, with the tilt-tabs punching through four locating slots in the corners of the bed.

The other accessories so far associated with these figures/this set are the very crude copies of the Britains tee-pee and Totem-pole. The pole is - I think - unique to this set (in the small scale that is, I think it was also issued with 45'ish-mm figure sets?), while the rigid plastic separates this version of the tee-pee from earlier softer ethylene ones issued by Einco and others.

Now Known to be from the Wing Wah (WW) Plastics Factory, of Smithfield Road, Kennedy Town, Hong Kong (Hoo Sai Industrial Building).

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But is it Giant?

No! Don't be silly! This is a tail-ender of its type from the ay'tees! All 'big hair' and shoulder-pads, T'pau, Frankie Goes to 'ollywood, Top Gun and Max Max III with that Tina Turner; "Why, you're just a little raggedy set of Cowboys and Indians"!