Toy Soldiers 1: Waterloo Troops

(Part 2 of my comic review will come maybe next week.  I didn't want to reschedule seven posts.  I'm being lazy here, I admit.  I shouldn't have scheduled so far out when I've probably got more weekend sports reports to post.)

I love Toy Soldiers.  I had a bunch in several different sizes, including the large scale ones.  I had the standard green troops and some others in that size.  My best Christmas present ever was receiving the Guns of Navarone playset in 1975.  I still have it and even still have some of the soldiers with it.  At some point, I’ll take some pictures of it.  It is magnificent. 

 

And I had these small scale soldiers, of which I’ve kept a bag full.  When I was a kid, I had a friend who had these and introduced me to this scale.  There was a bit of a toy soldier arms race amongst myself and a couple of other kids in the neighborhood.  That was why I had some of the large soldiers, because I was in competition with another kid.  I couldn’t compete with him though.  After seeing my Navarone, he had his dad make him soldier mountain out of blocks.  Neither of us could compete with another kid, who had piles of Star Wars figures.  He could reenact the Battle of Hoth with several Walkers.        

 

These small troops are H/O scale, that is to say they’re roughly toy railroad scale.  They were sold in my area at a local hobby shop.  They came in little boxes with maybe 48 soldiers or less, if there special pieces inside.  They were displayed on a spinner rack and produced by the model company Airfix.  Most of the ones I bought were WWII era.  There were others available that I remember, such as Indians and even astronauts.  They must not have been terribly expensive, since I got a bunch of them.

 

I kept them in their boxes and kept careful track of them.  Over the years, the boxes came apart.  I kept the front covers with the army paintings for a while, but eventually dispensed with them.  I’m sorry.  This would have been a cooler series with pictures of the boxes with the action painting on the front and the painting guide on the back.  I never thought about painting them.  (A Warhammer modeler might balk at trying to paint these troops.)  It seemed like an impossible task as a child and still as an adult.  I sold off most of the soldiers later and only kept the ones I liked or had plans for.  

 

   

I haven’t seen any of these toy soldiers at retail for a while.  Airfix still makes them.  I’d love some modern troops like Desert Storm US Army or Vietnam-era US Marines.  I look over the model section at Hobby Lobby whenever I’m there.  All they’ve got are the larger-sized figures in plastic bags, like cowboys and Indians or knights.  They’re kid’s toys, though not really at kid prices.  I did get some larger scale Lead soldiers at an Estate sale, but that’s the most I’ve been tempted to buy.

 

This intro has run overly long.  I’ve got more pictures, I swear.  First up, are my favorites: Napoleonic French Cavalry and Russian Grenadiers.  I’m sorry I didn’t set out all of the troops and carefully arrange them.  I literally did all of the pictures in a rush at work.  I don’t have any historical information on these armies, but I can tell you how I got them.  These troops were produced by Ertl/ESCI.  I haven’t entirely had success with this companies’ figures, but these are excellent.

 

I’ve always wanted a set of Napoleonic troops since reading a biography of Winston Churchill, where he played with them as a child.  I referred to them as “Wooden Soldiers.”    My parents probably would have obliged, just to keep me from continuing to ask for them every year at Christmas, but there was nothing like them to be had at retail. 

 

A decade or so later, I was at a toy store in El Paso with my best friend, Kyle, and we came upon piles of the toy soldier boxes, like the ones I’d bought as a kid.  (Him and his brother and sister collected piles of action figures, so he wasn’t interested.)  I had no money to purchase any and it would have been childish.  However, when Kyle petitioned for my help with his college accounting class in doing a practice set, I offered to do it in return for a set of Zulus and Zulu War British Infantry.  I should explain that we were fans of the TV mini-series, Shaka Zulu, at the time.  (This was in the 80’s.)

 

I did the set and Kyle bought me the figures.  I’m not sure if he said that that practice set was either the best grade he got in that class or the worst, but he dropped the class in any case.  I was slightly disappointed that the British troops were actually from another set, the Kyber Pass, as there were Sikh troops mixed in with them.  (No offense to the Sikhs.  I just wanted troops that were setting appropriate.  These guys are like from the movie, Gunga Din.  Boy, there’s a movie I’ll never get to see again.)  They were close enough. 

 

However, the Zulus turned out to be a titanic disappointment.  The figures were fine, but totally unassembled.  I don’t know what possessed the model company to make these things with the little bitty spears and shields all unattached.  With slightly different poses, surely most of these could have been molded in one piece.  It was a nightmare of nitpicking.  They wouldn’t stay together.  I had to glue them together, which didn’t work well.  Later, I used a little hot pen to weld them together, which still didn’t work well and I ruined a few in the process.  (If I still had them and wanted to paint them, I got a couple of Osprey books on the subject at the Estate sale.  They provide detailed army painting guides.)             

 

 

This is a long way to go to talk about troops from Waterloo.  I told Kyle about my travails with the Zulus and he must have felt bad.  For Christmas, I handed him Rush Limbaugh’s new book.  He handed me these Napoleonic troops.  My eyes lit up and I immediately embraced him to his shock.  He’d had no idea I’d been pining away for something like this since I was a child.  I must not have noticed them when we were at the toy store.  In any case, it was a great gift.  I set them up around the Christmas tree to mom’s disapproval.  “They’re like toy soldiers from the Nutcracker,” I said.

These are quite lovely in sculpt and details.  The poses are great.  Unfortunately, I missed getting the French cavalry commander in the pictures.  He’s standing beside his horse with his helmet off, so he’s not in an action pose.  These guys are all I ever wanted in toy soldiers.  Of course, I had gotten a bunch of other toy soldiers before I got to this point.  I’ll go over those next.