Marx Frontiersman

Marx 45mm Frontiersman. This guy came with the early Ft. Apache and Alamo sets.

Custer's Last Stand

Some time ago, I got the Custer's Last Stand playset produced by Toy Soldiers of San Diego. TSSD is quickly becoming one of my favorite producers of toy soldiers. The quality of sculpting, poses and level of detail on the figures are fantastic. Very high quality, but at the same time, they retain an element of "toyness" where I'm not afraid to get them outside in the dirt, and wouldn't haven't a problem with a young child playing with them.

Another great thing about this playset, is you get so damn much stuff with it. The wonderfully sculpted foam hill, lots of cavalry figures and horses, and of course tons of Indians. When putting together a playset, Indians at Custer's Last Stand are like Mexicans at the Alamo: you can never have too many.

When I first got it I set it up on my dining room table. Not enough room for everything:





Last weekend I got these guys outside and got a few more shots:

Crazy Marx Army Men Poses

Inspired by the blog post The Five Worst Army of All Time [via], I took some snapshots to explain some of this to the fine folks at Metafilter.

If you've read this far, you probably already know this, but below is illustrated one of the great mysteries of my childhood, and I suspect of a few other folks.

I never knew what to do with the guy below. Weird karate dude? What's going on? I didn't have a clue.



Then there was the guy below. At least I could imagine he was flying through the air. I usually ended up hanging on some of the barb wire coils.



The light finally came on when I got the special "Battleground" edition of Plastic Figure and Playset Collector magazine: