Each year it seems to take me longer to recover from the Plastic Warrior Show, it's probably something to do with getting older or perhaps more to do with the excessively hot weather we've been experiencing this past week.
It has become something of a tradition now that Peter Cole uses the event to showcase the new products he has created for his personal firm Replicants. This is very appropriate because Peter was among the first of us enthusiasts who met at Peter Evans place in North London, talking toy soldiers and unsuspectingly creating the lifelong bond of friendship which became the very heart of Plastic Warrior.
Peter's offering this year is a bit of a curve ball, a set of French Resistance fighters which could equally be used for the Spanish Civil War, or pretty much any urban conflict of the last century.
First up a radio operator with clandestine wireless set, next to him a man throwing a Molotov cocktail, a woman wearing headscarf and bandolier firing a rifle (although to my eye it looks a lot like a flintlock musket) and a man kneeling firing a Sten gun (Shepherd Turpin ENfield), the eponymous automatic weapon favoured by Resistance Groups across occupied Europe.
Showing the underside of the woman firing rifle, Peter is now moulding the Replicants logo into all these figures. A Saboteur about to press the detonator and blow something up is watched by a woman, clutching her baby while drawing a revolver from inside her coat! Originality of pose like this is something we haven't seen in plastic before but have come to expect from Peter.
And finally two crawling figures, a man and woman, who were previously released many years ago as climbers but have now had plug in rifles attached to them. At one time they were also sold mounted on pins to be worn as broaches, the Replicants workshop is situated in the basement of an artisan jeweller shop and the broaches were sold through the retail outlet above it.
The kneeling radioman was also a previous release making his debut at the 2025 PW Show as an individual figure, being an homage to Roy Selwyn-Smith who had been a signalman in the Navy during the war, I didn't manage to pick one up last year so glad to see him included in this year's lineup.
