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Plastic Army Men

So I bought some 28mm Miniature Plastic Army Men from Amazon more believing that I would have some more fodder for 28mm WWI and WWII war memorial statues than usable 28mm modern military figures. Boy, was I wrong! Well, kind of.

Here's the whole bag outlayed. Yes, they are cheap, soft plastic. And they have horrible divets where they were released from the mold. And lots of flash. But they are a decent 28mm size and have a reasonable amount of detail. If you are a pro painter or a WWII enthusiast the detail will be lacking and a bit wrong. If you want to field four squads of WWII guys as filler or cannon fodder and think $5.00 is better than $100+ to do that, you might have some use for these guys.

Yes, I said four squads. That is, 52 figures or 4 x 13 guys. The astute observer might have noticed that Amazon bills this as "70" pieces. And they are correct. I got 55 Army-type guys. But I also got 5 space-ranger types, and 12 little kids throwing snowballs. You can actually see this in the Amazon pic, but you have to know what you are looking for. Still at 10 for a dollar, that's not too bad. And I can probably do something with the other figures, too...

Let's start with the regular amry guys. The variety of poses is decent. You get grenadiers, kneeling shooters, standing shooters, and charging riflemen. There are also guys on the radio and an officer-type with a pistol. With the distribution I got, it was pretty easy to split them up into squads and fireteams where membership was obvious (a fireteam was a comm guy with three riflemen in the same pose) by looking at them.

With four different paint jobs, I got Americans (green) vs. Germans (grey) above and British (brown) vs Japanese (tan) below. Like the figure selection, the paint job gives a visually obvious cue to who is who, should the figures get in close and mix it up a bit.

Second off, we have the remaining three army guys, in green with UN-blue helms, that will make a nice utility peacekeeping something at some point in the future. And the scifi guys. In a box, not in an action shot. This is because, even though the detail appeared to be commensurate with the other figures, I could not get them to look right. So, I think these guys will get a new paint job to become statues or maybe holographic display models for a museum.

But wait! We're not done ...

Little kids with snowballs. OK, I can work with that. There are only two different figures, but since they are in modern dress, I can use color for variety. Also, since they are kids and bundled up, a pice of string for a ponytail or two for pigtails helps break up the uniformity. It works, but not very well, so this is the largest size force (6 vs 6) I can stomach without modding soft plastic. Which is not fun. Limitations aside, if I accept the 50 army guys for $5.00 as decent enough to use, these are basically a free little weird vignette. It's all good. All the time.

So, for five bucks, this actually turned out to be a nice little project to support some massed forces for a modern, scifi, or pulp game.

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