Mark at the Man of Tin made a blogpost on his blog 'Pound Store Plastic Warriors' about cheap and dreadful Matchbox copies fond in a local toy shop earlier this week. They were really cheap, and as you usually gets what you pay for, I didn't think they looked too awful. Not exactly great knock-offs, but not completely dreadful either. There must be something looking worse than those?
I vaguely remembered seeing some toy soldiers in a local toy store a couple of years back, looking so bad that I didn't even considered to buy them even if toy soldiers are rare to find in Norwegian stores these days. So I decided to pop by and have a look the next time I was at that department store. I did and they still had them for sale (!). I guess they just looked so awful that no one else wanted to buy them either. They weren't especially cheap either as they charged Nok 49,90,- or £ 3,63 or $ 4,99 or € 4,24.
So, slightly embarrassed by paying this price for a bag of so obviously shitty soldiers, I bought a bag to have look of what was inside.
For this, I must say, high price you get a bag of 'Super Combat Mission Armament' soldiers made in China:
The bag contains (only) 38 really sub level quality soldiers.
The size of the soldiers seems to be about 40mm:
They are flat and do not have good body proposition. The weapon sculpting is awful! These must be 'copies of the copies of the copies of the.......'
- copies of Matchbox American Infantry way back. Only the poses gives some resemblance:
While the rest seems just like copies of cheap army men copies:
These must undoubtedly be the worst ever toy soldiers made? -Especially to that price!!
It's a complete rip-off, and I'm convinced that these won't contribute to making the next generation wanna play with toy soldiers (again) nor experimenting with using them for wargaming.
I'm not sure what to use these soldiers for? It just feels too bad to throw them in the bin. Or like Mark says in his blog; My 'inner seven' like these too much even if they're bad. They're too small for using them as zombies with my other 54mm figures. Perhaps using them for plinking with my old pellets rifle like we did when we were kids (too bad many Airfix originals was wasted this way back then when the originals was easier to get than these cheapos). But this is how my 'inner seven' wargamed in the garden:
Or perhaps I could use some of them for another
Snowball-fight wargame again?
Only time will show if these figures will reappear in any future games or projects. Follow my blog to find out. If you have suggestions how to use them or have any worse soldiers than these please tell me in the comment-section.
