A Toy (soldier) Story

The Toy Soldiers from Toy Story

As some of you might already have noticed in my previous post, there were picture of a MP-figure there which was not from the Tobar's Matchbox clones which I reviewed in that post. The figure is from another "budget source" though.


As mentioned before, I'm planning to use these figures as gaming pieces to play different miniature skirmish wargames, which rulesets are published online and free to use. I'm not an experienced 'wargamer' and I don't want to spend a fortune on expensive, thick and complicated rulebooks, which I have no time to read anyway, nor spending even more on expensive miniatures to go with these spesific games. I want to try to keep this wargaming-edeavour as  easy and simple as possible, on a Budget and most of all FUN. One such free wargame ruleset I plan to use is FUBAR, which covers a lot of different periods. Just go to the download-section to have a look for yourself. One thing with the FUBAR-rules is that is differs between different troop quality ranging from 'green' to 'elite'. If my previously previwed Tobar/Matchbox GIs are going to represent the regular and 'seasoned' infantry, I was going to need some other soldiers to represent a more skilled and better equiped squad on either 'side' representing 'veterans' or 'elite'. I found the answer very quickly at a fleamarket, were someone sold a bucket of 70 soldiers in 10 different poses for just 50 kr, or about $ 5.5 or £ 4.3.

This Bucket was actually a licensed 'Bucket O Soldiers' from Pixar's/Disney's Toy Story movies. The figures are about 2.5" tall and a tad bigger than the regular 54mm/1:32 scale and are made of very soft plastic. Therefore they were in pretty good condition as they're made for a lot of handling, but I'm not sure if they're going to hold paint very well despite propper washing and priming before painting. The soldiers themselves are a representation of the army men from the Toy Story movies, and are based upon the M16 Army Men from Tim Mee. Many poses are exactly the same as the Tim Mee soldiers, and some others are from the movie (as the saluting Sarge and a couple of others). The 2 paratroopers were missing in action, and were not in my bucket. I did'nt mind as I was not going to use them anyway, as with some of the other not so suitable poses for wargaming. I was only going to build a 'veteran' squad of 10 men on each side, and didn't need that many figures. The little more modern look with assault rifles fitted perfectly as they are supposed to be higher skilled than the regular infantry, and assault rifles gives 2 firepoints at close range with the FUBAR-rules. These are going to have both more expertise and firepower than the regular infantry, and will fill the role of better trained and capable troops.

All of the 10 different poses in the bucket. The saluting Sarge. and the 2 soldier to the right of him are not identical to the Tim Mee poses, but the rest of the figures are.

They are pretty large

Again I wanted a generic and credible 'Green vs. Tan' approach to these figures. They also needed to go along with the earlier previewed and painted regular Infantry from Tobar, and at the same time be different enough from them to sort the 'regulars' from the new 'veterans'. This time I painted the UN-troops with khaki uniforms, again identified by their blue helmets. I've found prototype for this among both Norwegian and Swedish UN forces. For the opposing forces I did just the other way around from their regulars; Giving them olive uniforms and tan helmets and webbing. I found this suitable for both Israeli paratroopers, Egyptian troops and the Iraq republican guard. To make the assault rifles a little bit different from their UN-counterparts, I painted the butt and foregrip in a wooden color.

Note the base was too small for succesfull wargaming, so I enlarged it a bit.

Even though I washed them, primed them, painted them and sealed them, the figure to the right flakes alleready…

A larger base was also needed on these figures.

Since this bucket also included figures firing light mortars, I decided to include some support weapons to the regular infantry, and painted them like I painted the Tobar/Matchbox soldiers previously reviewed in former posts.