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I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Monday 2 October 2017

Battle of the Black Forrest Mini Military Playpak - DFC - Multi Toys Corp.

This set is in the same vein as the other two, and has almost identical contets to the Stalingrad set, whether the likelihood of getting two jeeps or an armoured car in each set was fixed or random I don't know, but one day will track-down some duplicates which will answer that particular question!

Again we'll lead-off with the box scan, hint's of a German tank are going to prove misleading when the purchaser opens the box, but at least this time we have US forces on the cover!

Of course; there was no major combat in the Black Forest in the Second World War - the people who started the bloody conflagration escaped remarkably unscathed, as - indeed - in the case of the Austrians, they had in 1918, after starting that 'show'! Some of the Cities had been bombed, often heavily for years, and there were some limited actions against fanatical Nazis in some towns, but generally Southern Germany and Austria escaped the worst.

The complete contents vis-à-vis the figures and in keeping with the two sets above ('newer post' or click the DFC tag) we get two colours of Matchbox US infantry copies, 15 in one colour and 16 in another; figures are reasonable for what they are, early 1980's piracies from Hong Kong.

It's seems amazing; but with random pose-numbers and plastic colour variation, it looks likely that the figures were hand-sorted/counted into the boxes, each of my three having exactly 31 figures with a 15/16 split as far as main plastic-colour goes.

Two Jeeps, again as per the Battle of Stalingrad set from the same brands (Dimensions for Children / MTC) and within the same retail liner, from two sources; one is a common HK design with star on the bonnet (hood), the other looking a bit 'quatsch'!

Well, it says Battle of the Black Forest and for once the play-mat delivers! Two connected, twisty paths for your handfuls of figures to rush round, stalking each other, a bit narrow for the jeeps though!

It's a 1:1 scan for anyone who needs to print-off a paper replacement for a missing plastic one - the original is basically printed on plastic carrier bag material; Polyethylene (PE) film/sheet.

What's clearly a missed opportunity with these three sets is that despite the similarity of the contents and the fact that they were sold as a trio in a cling-film wrap with card-tray, they (the designers, shippers, jobbers) didn't think to make the mats line-up . . . a bit of tweaking and they could have matched-edges like Lego base-plates!

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But is it Giant?
 
No - date is way off, source-material for the piracies is way-off, plastic play-matt is not Giant's style, although some of the comic-stuff with Giant figures did have similar play-mats; they were paper.

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