Giant Plastics Corp: Job Lot No. 1 of Western Toys

Toys from Giant Plastic Corp (aka Giant of Homg Kong) have been featured here on the blog before but mostly Roman/Greek and Viking stuff. I haven't begun to cover the Western or American Civil War or Little Green Army Men or Space toys they offered back in the '60s. The Giant brand was among my favorites as a kid and I had a bunch of them. They were cheap pocket-change toys and nearly all - if not in fact all of them - were carded rack toys. No big sets here folks - albeit some of the carded sets were  kind of large - but no boxed super sets. Giant made a lot of toys but the the ones that seem to have captured collector's attention the most are the 1/87/ HO scale figures. They had: Little Green Army Men, Vikings, Romans (at least that's how they were marketed, but many were based on Greek models), American Civil War, Revolutionary War, Space, and Old West. There were foot soldiers, mounted figures, forts, wagons, chariots, ships, cannon's, tanks, bunkers, teepee's, and a slew of other accessories. Awesome stuff for 99cents back in the day!!

On that note, I'm gonna show you some stuff I've picked up this past year or so. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

I'm posting this as a 'Giant' lot because some of the Western figures, mounted cavalry, and cannon with limber are all marked Giant. The two wagons and the remaining figures were either clones or Airfix, or...?

This Fort Cheyenne is actually in fairly rough shape and in order for it to be set up properly, will probably need to be glued to a base. Notice how far down on the walls the ramparts are! The pointed ends of the 'timber's' are up - as they should be - but those ramparts must have been put there by a drunken toolmaker!

A note on what we tend to call 'Giant clones'. It is generally agreed that Giant marked nearly everything as 'GIANT' - figures on bases, forts, wagons, etc. However, they apparently had a reputation for cloning themselves! They would remove the 'GIANT' markings on the tooling and sell the figures as unbranded 'Made in Hong Kong' sets. When you look at many of the carded/bagged sets that are still available in the collector's arena, their progenity is clearly 'GIANT' - not Airfix, not Italieri - GIANT! They did this in apparent attempt to avoid lawsuits and copyright infringements, etc. Clearly, many of their figures and accessories were copies of Marx toys pantographed down to 1/87 scale. Later of course they would be sold openly under the 'Helen of Toy' label or 'Lucky Clover'.

There was only one guard tower in my lot

I posted this still sealed Fort Cheyenne set back in April 2020. It is unbranded and the packaging only says 'Made in Hong Kong'