Son of Fundin wrote:
Something completely else, but stop the video at 5:57. There you can see a standard "plastic" Númenorian warrior on the left side of Elendil with a bent sword! This obviously proves that GW uses metal versions of the plastic kits for a least a few of their production pictures!
I don't want to go too much off-topic, but to answer this:
Yes, a lot of old plastic kits (definitely until the Mordor Orcs/WoMT era) were also made in metal for the box art and probably as prototypes. Check out this topic:
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=22177&start=500Our former member jmh_stirling (who seems to have disappeared of the face of the site), had posted some very interesting pictures in there. There were pictures of metal High Elves, Mordor Orcs (not the first ones), WoMT, Numenoreans, Rohirrim on foot and mounted and Goblins. His profile seems to have been removed (maybe a GW claim??), and so have his posts.
The bent weapons were indeed prove, and so were the Rohan horses, and the shields of the WoMT (there are pictures with normal WoMT with normal shields and next to them different WoMT with clearly different shield patterns).
But sorry, maybe this should be continued in a different topic.