Pepe Tesoro / November 19, 2019

Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is usually regarded as one of the best testimonies of Cold War paranoia and early psychedelic ’60s culture. Even though it is a keen and pointed exploration of the growing anxieties over the exponential post-war rise of mass media and market capitalism, the central conspiracy revealed in the novel doesn’t reproduce itself through the then-new and fascinating forces of radio waves or cathode rays. Quite the opposite: the kernel of the conspiracy in Pynchon’s novel lays precisely in a clandestine communication network sent through old-fashioned, conventional mail. This network itself possesses roots that go back as far as medieval nobility feuds, its presence identified with something as ancient and basic as graffiti. Fredric Jameson attributed the true effectiveness of the novel to this anomalous feature. “[T]he force of Pynchon’s narrative,” he writes in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, “draws not on the advanced or futuristic technology of the contemporary media so much as from their endowment with an archaic past.”

It would seem that in order to perform an adequate exploration of the psychological and social and political disruptions of an era’s newest and most cutting-edge technological developments, sometimes it is required to take one or two steps back, as if the reflection over contemporary objects would be better served through the examination of old and already familiar realities. The long history and deep cultural footprint of retro-futuristic aesthetics in Pynchon’s fictional universe seems to point in somewhat the same direction. But this odd narrative movement doesn’t just go backwards; it also, quite interestingly, usually goes downwards. That’s the case of the The Crying of the Lot 49, where the occult conspiracy that our poor protagonist, Oedipa Maas, struggles to unveil, doesn’t just rely on the old means of the mail. Its members are imagined as marginalized individuals living in between the remnants and scraps of industrial machinery, as if the life of the vagabond would be the only true escape from the madness of modern civilization. These elusive individuals, as imagined by Oedipa, seem to be:

…squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.

This supposed conspiracy of the homeless and the outcast, not subtly named W.A.S.T.E., is then imagined as a hidden net that mimics modern global communication networks, and even lives as close as it can to those hardware channels. And precisely because of that, it stays totally untouched by modernity and is invisible to its gaze. The particular mixture of secrecy, homelessness, and clandestine communication systems in Oedipa’s imagination was not new at the time, and can be traced back to the life and especially the works of one Leon Ray Livingston. 

Livingston, born in 1872, was probably the most notorious American hobo. “Hobo“ is actually a rather particular term in American cultural history; it doesn’t merely designate an individual who lacks a stable location or place for living, but it instead indicates a quite idiosyncratic American social character, determined by the country’s own history of geographical expansion and industrialization. The hobo was a homeless man that crossed the entire continent, from city to city, throughout the growing railroad’s network, surfing the new, blossoming industrial landscapes a job at a time. Throughout the years, the hobo came to be recreated by the national cultural imagination as a romantic figure, a mystical outsider, a mysterious and almost invisible inhabitant of the modern world’s new industrial features, constantly at the edge of society, always trying to avoid unwelcome company and harassing authorities. That popular image was mostly the work of Livingston.

Livingston was not just a hobo; he was also a popular author. Under the pen name of “A-No1,” he published a series of books that fictionalized the hobo lifestyle and basically created from scratch the romantic and enigmatic portrait just described. But probably the most fascinating and persistent myth that emerged from the A-No1 books was the existence of a secret hobo code, presented in unnoticed and almost invisible chalk or charcoal graffiti. This code, composed of cryptic, seemingly ordinary and almost-childish hieroglyphs and symbols, was supposedly used by traveling hobos to transmit messages to their colleagues, such as “Dangerous town,” “Safe place to spend the night,” or “Here lives a nice lady.” It is known and well-documented (mostly through the work of filmmaker Bill Daniel) that the practice of signing the side of wagons and rail post with their personal monikers was and still is a spread practice for hobos and railroad workers in America. But with respect to a secret code that transmitted useful messages from hobo to hobo, there is not much evidence that it actually existed. After all, why would the hobo, a supposedly elusive and off-the-grid character, want to make public their own secret means of communication? It is not unfair to assume that the publication of the hobo code was probably nothing more than a ploy to fabricate and maintain that same legendary elusiveness.

Either way, thanks to Leon Ray Livingston’s works, the hobo’s supposed secret code became a common emblem of the intriguing and puzzling (and pretty much fantastic) mysteries of industrial civilization’s own underground realities. It seemed at the same time spooky and exhilarating to imagine that the unstoppable machine of progress was leaving behind, in its own dark residue, a striving secret society of outcasts and ostracized rebels living an almost chivalrous adventure, having happily exchanged social status and at times mental health to be free of the oppressive commands of power. I think it goes without saying how popular this common narrative has stayed throughout the years in science fiction and, more generally, in popular culture. The mystic figure of the marginalized can be tracked from the charming and magical homeless lady in Frank Capra’s A Pocketful of Miracles, to the cyberpunk Martian mutant separatists in Total Recall, to the Lo-Teks in Johnny Mnemonic and the Nebuchadnezzar crew in The Matrix series, just to name a few. These cyberpunk re-imaginations fall under the myth of the “hidden utopia”: the assumption that the hopes of resistance against the conspiracy of modern civilization lays in a counter-conspiracy of the outcasts, the unlikely sub-inhabitants of its most obscure and remote corners.

Leon Ray Livingston’s “signs used by Tramps” in his 1911 book Hobo-Camp-Fire-Tales, written under the A-No1 pseudonym.

This is exactly what is deployed by Pynchon in The Crying of the Lot 49. Or, at least, this is how a borderline-paranoid protagonist tends to imagine a seemingly active but always evasive conspiracy, as if the myth of the hidden utopia could be also a borderline-paranoid fantasy of those made anxious and disoriented by postmodern subjectivity. It’s also possible to observe the echo of the hobo graffiti’s legend in Pynchon’s book, as the W.A.S.T.E. logo, a simply drawn muted cornet, suspiciously similar to the purported signs of the hobo code, appears to have been placed all over the most seemingly mundane corners of Oedipa’s reality, such as on the walls of a public bathroom or on the edge of a sidewalk.

But the recovery and use by Pynchon of these older cultural cues is not an idealization of the hidden problems of the homeless and the marginalized. After all, any social articulation outside the limits of the community itself can easily turn into a contradiction, a fantasy, a paradox not allowed by the predominant culture. If the whole world has been conquered by malignant forces and crooked interests, the possibility of a constructive, non-nihilistic escape from this system literally lays outside of this world. That’s why Pynchon, as Oedipa, finds himself at a dead end, accepting that, if W.A.S.T.E. and its obscure conspirators were to exist, its own definition would prohibit the final revelation of its actual existence. That’s good for Pynchon, who playfully explores the literary potential of such contradiction, but it ain’t so good for Oedipa, who is still and forever trapped in modern society, and seems destined to always live on the epistemic edge of paranoia, unable to determine if everything she experiences is a convoluted prank by her ex-lover, if she has gone definitively crazy, or if W.A.S.T.E. is, in fact, real.

In a dream-like episode in the middle of the novella, Oedipa encounters an old ex-anarchist friend, Jesús Arrabal, who, torn apart by the demise of the emancipatory narrative, has to admit to her the metaphysical impossibility, or at least almost supernatural essence, of any revolutionary promise: “You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one.” Alien invasion? Religious intervention? Not quite, but similarly unlikely: the possibility that, under the all-mighty and ubiquitous forces of the Machinery and the cannibalistic and expanding logic of Capital, there could have formed a secret alliance of those who have been cast out of society, those who inhabit the obscure nooks of the dirt and the piles of garbage, under the colossal figure of the ominous constructions and highways. Like parasites in the wires of modern communication systems, these posited liberatory beings have been exiled in a land “invisible yet congruent with the cheered land [Oedipa] lived in,” barely but firmly surviving out of the realm of the living, right next to where we stand, but nevertheless unnoticed by the naked eye.

Pepe Tesoro is a philosophy PhD student from Madrid. You can follow him at @pepetesoro.

I finally have some solid information about this 1980s rubber fantasty warrior thanks to friend of the blog Daton and a recent ebay find.  I have him in my Misc Unpainted Figures post but it is time to take a little deeper look.  He came in a box of loose figures called Warrior Scented Erasers that is very similar to the CH Muscle Warriors box.  If they are actually warrior scented I assume that means they smells like sweat, blood and dirty a$$.  

He also came in a carded Ja Ru rack toy called Power Queen Dragon Guard which is very similar to Ja Ru's Hercules Hero of Strength line.   Then there are the Dragon Master Puffy Stickers sets which seem to show him in multiple stickers.  I would love to find out if there are more Dragon Master figures or products (maybe a game or a failed cartoon).  
I only own the first picture. The other pictures will be removed if requested by their owners.


Photo from imgur. 
Photo from an ebay auction.


Photo from an ebay auction.


Photo from imgur.

































































































































































Photo from imgur.

Reviews / November 14, 2019

Italianamerican
Directed by Martin Scorsese, 1974

After Martin Scorsese burst onto the scene with the one-two social realist punch of 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, he produced an ode to the milieu from which he sprang, a briefer-than-feature-length trip to his parents’ walk-up apartment in Little Italy for Sunday macaroni and gravy: 1974’s Italianamerican. The film is many things: an obvious love letter to Scorsese’s parents and to Italian culture, something of an anthropological expedition investigating his own roots, and ultimately an examination of how the combination of higher education, cultural assimilation, rejection of religion, and flight from urban ethnic enclaves to the suburbs changed the children of these first-generation European immigrants. Scorsese’s 1974 trip back to his folks’ house exposes the Italian-American experience in all its contradictions and quandaries: in gender relations, race relations, conceptions of social class, family life, and nostalgia and memory.

The relationship between (Luciano) Charles Scorsese and his wife Catherine (née Cappa) is obviously the center of the film. While Martin does appear and does prompt questions, Italianamerican is best when we’re watching the four-decades-married couple squabble and bicker and tease each other. One notable piece of Italian-American culture that emerges from the film is the complex web of gender roles and relationships that characterize the Italian family. Charles deals in a few stereotypical sexist behaviors that one might expect of someone of his generation, but it’s clear that Catherine (and by extension Italian-American wives and mothers) isn’t having any of it. One exchange on cooking (a topic that comes up again and again in the film) says it all; Charles explains with a smile that he doesn’t cook because “I’m not supposed to… it’s not my line,” while simultaneously claiming that, even so, men are the best chefs: “It’s been known that a man is a better cook than a woman any time.” Immediately, Catherine snaps back with a simple, “Then why aren’t you doing the cooking then!”

But ultimately both Charles and Catherine recognize the purely enormous amount of unpaid labor that Italian mothers had to do back in their day: cooking and cleaning for nine kids, all while taking on outside jobs that could be done at home, like sewing piecework: “Our poor mothers worked.” Modern conveniences such as washing machines have banished much of this drudgery, but both of the elder Scorseses seem humbled by the sacrifices their own mothers had to make. Charles, especially, is touching as he remembers his late mother being unwilling to suffer fools and quite capable of defending herself in any conflict: “As far as my mother goes, my mother was a strong woman… If she had to say something, she told you and that was it and you couldn’t answer her. My mother, she was a real whip.” After this statement, Charles’s hand goes to his mouth (as does Martin’s, I noticed, an uncanny example of familial mirroring), obviously choked up at the memory. Italian-American femininity, with its focus on being strong, being tough, being protective of one’s children, being able to hold one’s own in an argument, was born on the mean streets and tenements of major cities all over the Eastern seaboard in the early 20th century and most definitely would not have jibed with the contemporary WASP image of how a bourgeois woman, wife, and mother should act.

Mentioning the particular social environment in Lower Manhattan that housed and sheltered waves of Southern and Eastern European (and East Asian) immigrants in the early 20th century, it’s clear that even as ethnic groups formed their own enclaves, they were forced to deal with different groups as a matter of course in America’s “melting pot.” Charles recalls the way Little Italy and the Jewish enclaves on the Lower East Side would find themselves side-by-side in workplaces, public spaces (like the pushcarts and public markets on Delancey Street), and restaurants (Charles is insistent with Martin on making sure he notes that the home of “the original potato knish” is Schimmel’s.) “All together, Jewish and Italians, they all worked together,” Charles says, as he remembers lighting stoves and lamps for observant Jews on the Sabbath.

As Charles remembers the pushcarts, Martin cannily cuts in images of the Lower East Side, Little Italy, and Chinatown as they stood in the then-present of 1974: it’s still a multi-ethnic neighborhood with pushcarts and kids playing in the streets, demonstrating the continuity of four generations of immigrant communities in New York City. And it’s not just fellow white immigrants who the Scorseses identify as being unfairly treated by the power structures of the time. “People were afraid to walk through [Chinatown]; you used to hear so many stories about it, but it wasn’t true!” Catherine fairly screams. (Charles is admittedly a bit more ambivalent about Chinatown, but Catherine holds her own.) Throughout Italianamerican, Catherine demonstrates a very ingrained sense of racial solidarity, likely due to the awareness that Italians had been on the end of that exact kind of discrimination when they were “fresh off the boat.” Even when Charles makes a comment about how the preexisting Irish population of their neighborhood systematically mistreated the more recent immigrant arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, Catherine also makes sure to make a point of disagreeing with Charles’s intimation that the number of bars in the neighborhood indicated that the Irish of the time were all drunks.

With that in mind, it’s clear that there is some anxiety among the elder Scorseses’ generation around their immigrant identity and assimilation into the predominant American WASP culture. Early on in the film, Charles spends some time taking Catherine to task for “putting on”: elevating her tone from her customary lower Manhattan accent and mannerisms. After being hectored about this “code-switching,” Catherine responds in a broad New York Italian accent, shouting from off-screen: “I don’t know what you mean, Charlie!” “Talk the way you’re talkin’ to me now, that’s what I mean,” Charles responds with a knowing smile. This anxiety about assimilation and forgetting one’s origins in Italianamerican helps set the stage for so many of the subsequent conversations that the couple conduct about class, ethnicity, and making it in America. Throughout the film, the elder Scorseses discuss numerous gradual processes of cultural assimilation: for example, while Charles’s family didn’t believe in having a (American) Christmas tree when he was young in the 1920s, it’s clear from the Scorsese family photos from the 1950s that Martin grew up with American traditions like hanging stockings at Christmastime (from a radiator, not a fireplace). In a story Catherine tells about her father shaving his handlebar mustache after a week-long work assignment in New Jersey, which scared the kids because he looked so different upon his return to Manhattan, there floats the unspoken possibility that he was asked to shave the Old World facial hair for reasons of the job itself. (Speaking of facial hair, there are a couple of passive-aggressive generational pokes at Martin’s thick beard from both his mother and his father.) The most striking moment surrounding assimilation is the tale Catherine tells about her father’s citizenship interview, where Catherine’s sister had to act as interpreter; as the immigration agent’s reaction to the elder Cappa’s inability to speak fluent English is one of shame and disapproval: “Why that’s terrible!” Family lore insists that Catherine’s father used this opportunity to show off a little of the English he had picked up during his time in America, telling the immigrant agent, “Go and fuck yourself.”

There are also omnipresent reminders of class. The traditional tale of European immigration to America is the idea of fulfilling “the American dream,” usually by making one’s material fortune in the new land of opportunity. Charles notes the advice he received to not work for someone else, and instead work for yourself: “You’ll always have money in your pocket.” The hard times, the sacrifices, the traumatic journey to America itself (Catherine insists her mother was so scared of the prospect of a transatlantic sea journey that she had to be tricked onto the boat): these stories clearly loom large in the Scorseses’ family narrative, as with many European immigrants of the first generation. Details about the grimness of the tenement apartments and poverty abound in the elder Scorseses’ telling, but Catherine also luxuriates in the moments when her generation began to find work and make “real” money; the story of one of her brothers starting off as a messenger boy for quintessentially old-money WASP investment firm JP Morgan so that they can afford Christmas presents and “a proper tree” contrasts with Charles’s tale of his folks not wanting an American Christmas tree. Occasionally, it’s hinted that Charles’s family was a little bit poorer than Catherine’s; Catherine notes in a conversation about making wine that her family made theirs in the basement instead of the kitchen like Charles’s family did. Catherine makes repeated reference to her family’s wanting their house to look less like a tenement, citing the desire to “better yourself,” hinting that Charles’s allegation that she was “putting on” at the outset of the film might have been at least a little correct.

The perfect confluence of these issues around class consciousness and assimilation lie in the Scorseses’ tale of finally taking their long-promised honeymoon. Instead of their scuttled original plan to visit Niagara Falls when they were first married, they go (one imagines thanks to Martin’s success and largesse) on a two-week trip to the Italian peninsula where they visit family in Sicily and see Rome and Venice as American tourists forty years after their wedding. It’s notable that while Catherine obviously enjoyed all the trappings and privileges of the return to Italy, she also feels intense guilt about the poverty in the countryside that was still in evidence in the 1970s: “The land is so beautiful, but there’s no work over there!” She nearly weeps when she thinks about a young boy who wanted to be taken back to America with her, and makes a poignant Freudian slip in saying that she wished she could take him back on “the boat” before correcting to “the plane.” Catherine’s proximity to the immigrant experience of her mother allows for an empathetic realization: that her ancestors’ emigration was an escape from real endemic generational poverty, and that her position of privilege as a comfortable Italian-American on a two-week tour of Italy will not allow her to save the descendants of those who were left behind. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but it demonstrates that those memories of her ancestors left her with something tangible: a lasting, innate awareness of right and wrong.

It’s hard for me to remain completely unbiased about Italianamerican, of course, mostly because the Scorseses’ apartment, in its studied and cluttered Old World decor combined with mid-century Italian-American touches (plastic wrap covering the “nice couch” in the living room) reminds me vividly of my own grandparents’ apartment in East Boston in the 1970s and ’80s (as does Catherine’s insistence on vacuuming and cleaning up as soon as Martin is done shooting the film; my own grandmother’s obsessive cleanliness is recounted in family lore every time my father recalls being whacked with a broom to get him to clean up after himself). As examples of members of the generation that decided not to leave the old neighborhood for the suburbs like their late Silent and Baby Boomer kids did, the elder Scorseses are indicative of a bifurcation that was overwhelmingly common among ethnic whites in the Cold War era. In that move to the suburbs—under the larger rubric of “white flight“—came a concomitant distance from one’s neighbors, a certain financial and material security upon entering the American middle class, and a forgetting of one’s origins, both cultural and class, which led in many cases to an inevitable shift among many non-WASP whites to the political right. But those Italian-Americans of Catherine and Charles’s generation, still situated in the old neighborhood, didn’t completely forget that, once, we “all worked together.”

This awareness of the solidarity of the old neighborhood finds its most powerful expression in the way both the Scorseses tell their stories for Martin’s camera. In the final third of the film, with Sunday dinner being picked at over the dinner table, the Scorseses remember how important telling “fantastic stories” was in an era before the radio and the television, purely for purposes of entertainment. (It’s no surprise that the role Catherine eventually became famous for, as Joe Pesci’s character Tommy’s mother in 1990’s GoodFellas, involves her telling just such a humorous tale from the old country about a cuckolded husband, a story type with ancient origins in Italian literature and culture.) One of Catherine’s stories in Italianamerican, which touches upon the spooky and the supernatural matrix of the Old Country, oddly becomes an inadvertent parable for all the class anxieties expressed throughout the film. In this story, a mysterious visitor clad in silver appears, Communion-like, at the foot of Catherine’s mother’s bed back in Italy while she is nursing a young child—the next generation—and asks her to “hit me with something” to receive great wealth. Catherine’s mother, petrified by the visitation, hesitates, clutching her child (destined to be an American) to her breast. Years later, a trove of silver coins is found in the home after they’d left; family members, remembering the story, blame her for not lashing out at the mysterious alien stranger and becoming rich.

In a way, though, that sort of a devil’s bargain is real, and is expressed in the way the Italians, the Poles, the Greeks, and many other non-WASPs “became white” in the second half of the 20th century. And oral storytelling like this—from generation to generation—helps to convey important cultural messages that might otherwise be forgotten in the stultifying white conformity of the red-lined, middle-class suburbs. The stories our elders choose to tell and hand down are vitally important to not forgetting our origins as well as remembering and preserving moral lessons—lessons of familial loyalty, of brave, hard-working matriarchs, even lessons of class and cross-ethnic solidarity (even if neither of the Scorseses speak in such blatantly political terms) purchased at great cost. If every Italian-American MAGA-swallowing stronzo in 2019 who talks about their ancestors immigrating “the right way” could really listen to what the elder Scorseses were saying in Italianamerican about solidarity—solidarity with laborers, with recent immigrants, with working mothers, with the ethnic “Others” in the neighborhood, a sense of community hard won, prompted by real harassment and oppression of their own ancestors at the hands of cops and immigration officials—they might begin to understand why they’re wrong, and why they’ve always been wrong, to accept the poisoned pill of American kyriarchical “whiteness.” Martin Scorsese knew, even as a hungry 31-year-old filmmaker—and he remembers today, 45 years after Italianamerican was released—that the stories we choose to tell and to preserve matter, that the voices we choose to amplify with our privilege matter, and that even in a family lark like Italianamerican, that belief shines through, like a trove of silver treasure.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

UPDATE 11/10/2019:  Four new poses have been added to the Fantasy Creatures set; a knight; a minotaur; a griffin and a snake woman.


The new sets from SCS Direct are finally available on Amazon . . . only about two years later than expected.  They are only available on Amazon so far. I do not even see them on SCS's own website yet.  

These are nice sets of figures.  In addition to the "Fantasy Creatures" and "Robots" labels, they each have a decal identifying them as "Wicked Duals."  The figures are a bit smaller than SCS's zombie and monster sets. I like all of the Fantasy Creatures except for the pixie.  There was no need for a pixie.  I was hoping for a lizardman in this set, but no, we get a pixie.  The Robots score very high on the weird scale, and I like that.  I just wish they came in more, or better, colors.  

Fantasy Creatures

New poses added in 2019,




















Robots

I started to specialize my toy soldier collection in fantasy around twenty years ago when I realized just how many figures and sets are available.  Nobody else I knew of was collecting this stuff.  When I really got into it, I started having a blast finding and learning about a whole category of toy soldiers that other, and much older and knowledgeable, collectors were ignoring.  It has been my pleasure to share what I have learned through this blog.  
Some fantasy toy soldiers are much harder to find than others and some sets are very difficult to complete.  Their are fairly common sets with just one or a few super rare figures that make them hard to complete, and other sets are all very rare.  Below is my best guess at the twenty rarest. I have tried to add pictures of individual figures that make certain sets hard to complete.   These are all complete sets of original figures, no bootlegs and no worries about color variations, just the base figure sets.  These were all commercially  produced  and mass marketed.  There are no custom figures like the insanely rare sets made by the Alliance of the Free on this list.
My list is based on twenty years of experience collecting and conversations with other collectors since I started this blog. That is all I have to go on.  So, the rankings are debatable.  I have looked for solid information without any success. I even summoned Cthulhu last Christmas and offered up my brother's soul but he did not have any useful insights.  


20.  Toyco Demons & Dragonriders.











19.  Arco Dragons n' Monsters.

















18. Durham Fantasy Figures.








17.  Unknown 1980s Soft Rubber Weirdness.









16.  Skinner The Lurkers.



















15. Supreme Dragon's Lair Castle Playset Figures.










14. Simba The Legend of Zortan.









13.  Percy Jackson Movie Figures.











12.  HEI Vampires.













11.  Larime Blacktar.



 


10.  Galaxy Warriors.












9.  Unknown Ant Warriors.








8. Games Work Shop Fighting Fantasy. 





















7. Oritet Elves, Dwarves, Goblins & Fairy Tail Characters.
















6.  Unknown Vending/Party Favor Rubber Orcs.









5.  Polotoy Battle of the Ancients (and other titles).














4. TSR Dungeons & Dragons Character Figures.



3. Helm Toy Playset Figures.



2. Yolanda?  Horrors n' Heroes.









1.  LarGo Toys Stingers & Wings.

LOD just released this set of four foot and two mounted 60mm amazons as historical rather than fantasy figures.  These are intended to be more realistic female warriors than the sexy figures made in Russia.  Some have armor and most show a little less skin than the Tehnolog or Oritet amazons.  I like both styles.   
They are made from a soft plastic.  The quality is very good but the aqua color is a bit difficult to photograph.  A nice set but a little expensive at around $30 a bag for 10 figures (two of each foot pose).






































Scale Shot

10/2/2019 Finally completed my set of these guys and just in time because of the prices they are fetching these days.

These came in surprise bags released some time in the 90s or early 2000s.  There are 16 figures based on Greek mythology.  They are about 50mm, and are made of soft plastic.  Only released in Europe as far as I know.  Very rare.  Most people think they were made by Yolanda of Spain, but I do not know for certain.













8 Horrors







8 Heroes






















I found this picture on the net (MXD I think).
This picture is also from MXD I think
This picture is also from some place on the net.
Found this picture on the net a few years ago, I don't remember where.

These figures are amazing.   I cannot describe how cool they are.  Just look at the pictures.  60mmish.

I just found these three guys in an ebay lot from England.  I suspect that they are either bootlegs or a new run for the bags Toy Major sells them in with the pirates.  They seem to be just a little bit smaller than the original figures and the guy with two axes has his head in a slightly different position.  Now that I know they exist I will be obsessing about them until I find more.

EMCE has released four more boxed sets for the video game Fallout 76.  The figures include more people, mutants, aliens, robots and zombies.   The quality is excellent.  I wish the other Nano Force offerings like the Aliens v. Marines set were done this well.  There are so many figures in this set now that I am giving it its own post.   You can see the original video game figures post here Video Games.

Here are some more Russian made orcs and ogres.  I don't have any information about who made them.  They seem to be hand crafted in very small runs.  Includes three female orcs.









































































Scale Shots

UPDATE 10/12/19: New Anti Paladin and sets of 5 Goatmen and Dwarves.


UPDATE 4/7/19:  Even morehansa from Warhansa!  They just released 60mm Conan and Zena figures.   Copyrights?  What Copyrights?  There is also a cool new evil priest and sacrifice. 


UPDATE 2/25/18:  Morehansa from Warhansa!  They have relased new 5 figure sets of 54mm Asterix the Gaul and post apocalyptic weirdos along with a 4 figure set of 60mm ninjas.  There is also a new bad ass 65mm orc gladiator, and  a 28mm scale troll that works as a goblin in toy soldier scale. 

Original Post:


Warhansa is a small company that makes truly outstanding figures. They recently made their first 1/32 scale (60mm) fantasy figures, and I hope they make more.  These guys are a barbarian warrior and some kind of non-human assassin.  The detail is excellent. The smaller blue guy is called the Night King and is intended as a very large figure in 28mm scale. He is about 54mm. The figures are made in small batches, so they are kind of expensive, but the quality makes them worth the price.
I asked them to describe their company and this is what they wrote back:  
We are an international team united by passion to toy soldiers. We have been dreaming of making our own minis since childhood. We started our project 3 years ago. Production is based in Russia. We make miniatures according to our taste in relatively small quantities and gladly share them with fellow hobbyists.  
You can check them out here Warhansa.

Just about every Asian fantasy movie I have seen and story I have read revolves around one or more martial arts masters who's skills rise to the level of super powers. Asians love to mix fantasy with martial arts, and who can blame them.  Martial arts and fantasy are a natural fit.  Part 1 of this post is about ninjas. Part 2 will be about other martial arts figures.
Japan's supernaturally sneaky ninjas exploded into the world's culture in the 1980s and were quickly paid tribute in the form of cheap plastic ninja toy soldiers. The first ones to show up in the USA were made in Hong Kong and China.   Some very nice ninja figures have also come out of Russia more recently.  I see no reason not to include ninjas in any fantasy world.  Having trouble with pesky orcs?  Sick the ninjas on 'em.

UPDATE 4/1/19  


I found a bag of ninjas from 1997 made by Boley that I had never seen before.  They must be fairly rare.  Ego aside, if I miss something like this for 20 plus years, it has to be hard to find.  I also found a few of the unknown 54mm ninja that come with separate weapons that are very similar to the Marty Toy Galaxy Warriors figures.





Hong Kong/China Ninjas




Boley 1997 50mm

These guys are about 54mm if you consider that they are all bent at the knees.  They actually stand at about 50mm.  Four poses.

























Hing Fat 45mm.
The first ninja toy soliders I found were made by Hing Fat, but were distributed by lots of different companies.   These figures are about 45mm.







Photo from an ebay auction.
Photo from an ebay auction.






























Photo from an ebay auction.
























The red guys are copies made by Sopla of Greese.




Photo form an ebay auction.


Photo from an ebay auction.




































































Unknown 54mm.
These 54mm Ninjas are just about as common as the Hing Fat figures, but I don't have any idea who made them.

































Photo from an ebay auction.











































Separate Weapons Variation




























Redbox Return of the Ninja Playset.
This is the only Ninja playset I know of.   The figures are only about 35-40mm and are a little cartoonish, but the playset is very cool.
























GI Joe Copy Modern Ninjas.
These are 54-60mm copies of 3.75 inch GI Joe figures.  I have no idea who actually made them.  



































Other Ninjas.
These are 40mm from Blip, LLC's Ninjas v. Robots set.
These were vending and prize figures.  About 45mm.
These come apart the the waste.  About 45mm.
























Unknown
Don''t know a thing about these guys other than I want some.  Photo from an ebay auction.






























Photo from an ebay auction.







































Russian Made Ninjas

Russia is a little late jumping on the ninja bandwagon but they have made some exceptional figures.
Oritet.






















Tehnolog.













Unknown (because I can't read Russian).   90mm.






























Warhansa 54mm






















Mattel Guts Akido Force - Close Enough.


Mattel called these guys the Akido Force, but they look enough like ninjas to me.

Greek copies.

I recently found out that the bootleg barbarians in my Arco Sword & Sorcerer post were made in Mexico back in the 1980s or maybe very early 1990s.   The figures come with built in weapons and the riders don't the have peg holes in their butts to fit onto the original horses. They were sold in header card bags.  The bootleg sets include all of the figures and one of the two dragons, but no horses.  The figures are almost the same size but with much thicker bases.  The header card is all in English and very close to an exact copy of the original card backs.  
I got these figures in a trade with a collector and artist in Mexico.  I am very grateful to be able to get figures like these that I probably would never have found without help.  My benefactor is Nando Murio.  You can check out his art on pinerest here.  He also sent me an amazing bag of bootleg ninja turtles that includes some bootleg battle beasts.  I will post some pictures in my TMNT post.

































































Side by Side with Originals.










No peg holes in the riders.  They won't fit on the original horses.  

Video games are joining movies and television as a source of inspiration for toys and other swag, including a few new sets of toy soldiers.  McFarlane was the first (and in my opinion still the best) with the amazing Halo Heroic line but others have recently made nice efforts as well.  Over the last few years I have seen bags of toy soldiers associated with Starcraft, Killzone 3 and now Fallout 76.  
These sets tend to have a very limited number of poses and are expensive to buy in the after market.   I don't know if they came with the video games or had to be bought separately.   I have seen copies of the Starcraft Zerglings for sale on Ali Baba.  Chinese companies are already offing to sell copies of Blizzard Entertainment's intellectual property.  The Chinese have no honor when it come to bootlegging, and I love them for that.  I will be ready to take shameless advantage as soon as I get the chance to buy cheap copies of these figures.  I anticipate seeing bootlegs of some or all these figures sooner or later.    
These are all sci fi and post-apocalypse themed sets, but aliens and mutants can work as fantasy monsters.  They may not strictly fit into the fantasy theme of this blog, but I want to post about them anyway.  I can do whatever I want with my blog, so nah.   

STARCRAFT (2016)























KILLZONE 3 (2018)


























FALLOUT 76 (2018)

UPDATE 11/10/2018:
I have come across a new mystery line that includes some knockoff DFC knights.  This is the second mystery line to include bootleg DFC knights. They are marked "China" but that does not say much to narrow down who made them or how they were packaged.  They are just like the older knockoffs.  They are same smaller size and have the same modifications but some of them come in new colors like red, orange and salmon along with the more common blue. As with he old set of bootlegs, here is no copy of the DFC bowman.

The ones I have found came in ebay lots from the UK.  I have almost always found them mixed in with a set of what look like Robin Hood type figures which I first posted in my 45mm Army. They were probably some short lived cheap bag or carded set.  I don't know if I have a complete set of the Robin Hood figures or not.  I suspect there might be one more figure for eight total.  I want to get all the knights in the red, orange and salmon colors pictured and any other colors I haven't found yet.  Please comment if you know anything about these guys.

ORIGINAL POST:

There are surprisingly few DFC bootlegs.  The most common are slightly modified versions of the knights.  These knights are just a little bit smaller than standard DFC knights, and four have slightly modified weapons.  I have found only one example of these figures in original packaging and it is a strange mash up of DFC, Chinasaurs and The Sword & The Sorcerer.  The bootleg knights  also seem to be associated with the little gray figures pictured below, but I don't know were they come from.
I eventually found a header bag of knockoff gray knights from Straco, and a carded set from Gordy with both blue and gray knights.



New colors found over the last five years or so.






The new Robin Hood Guys.



Here are some side by side pictures with the older mystery set which also has Robin Rood type figures but are not as well made or detailed. 






Well matched with the knights. 


Oddly, the salmon DFC bootleg is one of the few figures that came from a USA ebay lot.  The color match is dead on.  



The older figures have similar stands to the DFC bootlegs.  The new guys have flat stands with no ridge.














































Older Bootlegs



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I have found these figures with the bootlegs more than once.  So, I think they are related.
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This undated set by Famus Toys has the blue bootleg knights, a Chinasaur giant bird, and the red boarder around the card is the same as on the cards for Arco/Fleetwood's The Sword & The Sorcerer figures. Very strange but very cool.









































Here is a interesting set from Gordy with both blue and gray bootleg knights.  King Arthur and the knights of Justice.   It even includes some authentic medieval razor wire. Dated 1992.





Stracos' set of the knockoff knights in gray.






































Joseph Svec III sold me this odd bag of MPC knights with DFC knights and dragonriders.
I don't know if these are a factory mistake, a bootleg mix, or some kind of strange joint venture, but I have never seen DFC mixed with MPC before.

Miner industries owned MPC.








































































Scale Shot.

They make these Devil figures in Mexico for holidays and because they are cool.  They range in size from 60mm up to 10 inches.  Some are anatomically correct. 























Picture from an ebay auction. 
Picture from an ebay auction. 
Picture from an ebay auction.

Dollar General has a new 10 figure set of mummy soldiers available for Halloween 2018.   There are 10 new mummy figures and 10 skeletons (in 8 poses) which have been around for years.  The mummies are 54mm and the skeletons are about 45mm.  These guys are a little cartoonish, but I like the concept of mummy soldiers.  They are only $1 per pack of 10.  Excellent price.

I posted pictures of the Skeletons a couple of years ago.



























2019 Versions.

I have been looking for this guy for more than a decade. He showed up on ebay in an otherwise average lot last week.  I was all set for an evil bidding war but I was the only bidder.  Lucky day!

Based on the other figures in the lot, I would guess that he is original Hong Kong production (as opposed to the PRC marked figures made in mainland China.)   Like the brown knights, he would be one of just a very few rare color variations to come from Hong Kong.

I can post pictures of this very rare catalog Dragonriders of the Styx playset thanks to David Pietila.  David says it is the Sears version and he should know.    This set seems to be missing the dragon, but that does not mean it wasn't included originally.   This was David's childhood set.  Here is what he has to say about its background:

Greetings,I have found a box of Dragonriders of Styx that has been in storage at my Mother's for years.  Apologies for the pics, but the item is 19 hours away from me. I had someone else send my photos. The box has instructions, I believe there is an order form on the other side. My mom had written on the box "If you boys open this again I will return it to the store." The box is a plain mailer, at one time it had a label that was plain as well.