Interesting thoughts, Saara. I too feel fond of "Hard Copies" of games, and think something will be lost when games start moving more and more to digital distribution rather than physical disks. I just hope that our culture does not loose value of things that are tangible, but nor do I believe that only tangible things have value. In my opinion, a haunting, well-composed synthesized song can have just as much soul in it as an old folk guitar song.

Woo, a mention of Mike Glyer. I still have, somewhere around here, a half dozen hoaxzines he did (ooh, the Hogu Rankquet!) with ... Joe Weinstein? Was that his name.

I myself progressed from 'green army men', to the slightly nicer (and much harder to find by then!) Marx figures, to Airfix and Matchbox, to lead wargames figures. Oddly, I recently found a pile of those Marx toys ( I never really thought of them as 'miniatures'), and a small bucket of other kinds of 'toy' figures, including a bunch I can't identify. Want I should mail you a box of plastic? They're all at least 35 years old. Included is my long-incomplete Fort Apache with the tinplate building.

Oh man! You had a Fort Apache? I recall them having plastic walls, but they must be approximately the same thing. When I was a kid I envied others who had stuff like that, but I never seemed to get anything good for Christmas until I was a little older and family a bit more prosperous.

I did have a very odd bag of plastic soldiers that must have been WWI figures, the only one's I ever saw until the 1/72 ones many years later. They had those dish shaped helmets the British still wore in WWII, but also some had odd looking "tommy guns" with drum magazines. I think they may have had puttees too.

Some of the Marx soldiers were very good, but you had to buy them in a larghe boxed set, usually with other stuff like sandbag emplacements, barbed wire lenghts, a howitzer or field gun, flagpole, tents, boxes of ammo or first aid supplies, a pill box, etc, etc. I had one around 1957, I think the first they produced. In various incarnations they continued sellin those sets for years afterward, but the first was the best I think.

If you want to drop those in the mail, I'd be fascinated!

Sure. email me, blaze@speakeasy.net.

The walls of Fort Apache (mine aren't complete) are, and always were plastic. There was one tinplate building with a plastic roof in the early sets, later turned plastic. Most of these were given to me by uncles. I wasn't born until the late 60s, and by the early 70s, Marx was no longer making the good stuff. I even have three Marx monsters, in orange plastic. Wolfman, creature from the black lagoon, and frankenstein, altho I'm going to hold onto those. One of the items in the bucket is a bag of what I think were meant to have been revolutionary War figures, but they look more War of 1812ish to me. They are in red for one army and blue for the other, and are of an intermediate size, not 1/87, not 1/35. Despite the difference in colors, both sides are made of the same figures, except for 1 or two different figures per set.

Oh, I also had the 'Guns of Naverrone' set. One of the items I'm sending is a bunch of the Marx 'character' figures, which were large-sized. These are, I believe characters from the TV show Combat!

I remember the Marx monsters. Weren't they made of some odd plastic that was more britttle or something, and arms and legs rather easily snapped off? But those were more like Basil Wolverton or Big Daddy Roth monsters, not monsters from the movies. The later Marx 5" soldiers were universal at one time. I don't know if there were ever more than a dozen, or even half that, but they did come in three or four different "military" colours, so you could make sides. There used to be revolutionary war figures for sale in the back pages of comics for years... but I think those were only technicaly 3D. They were rather flat, and included flat canon in profile as well.

No, the Marx monsters are good models, although the plastic IS somewhat brittle (my wolfman's lost his fingers, mostly). They even have Universal copyrights on the bottom. The 5" soldiers came in several sets, and a couple variations, including with ring-hands and detachable weapons, some of which are in the bucket.

I may just barely remember the Universal studio series, but in the 50's Marx did make some hot rod type monsters that are quite collectable now.

Oh... those five inch soldiers. I had friends with those and I thought the sucked, sorry. Generally one hand was in the air like waving hello and the other by the guy's side, or stuck out front at a right angle. Other than the positions of the arms they were identical.

Marx also made some very wsll crafted solders around 1957 that were a bit shorter than that -- maybe 3 1/2 inches. They included riflemen, bazooka men, hand grenaders, even a couple of guys reloading their M1. The "other side" was represented originally by the same soldiers in mustard colour instead of olive. I assumed they were Japanese... Later, in the 60's they used some of the same soldiers but also made some high quality German infantry to go with them.

I don't know of any reference that covers more than a bit of this. It might make an interesting Google search...

I don't think it was Joe Weinstein, maybe Elliot? The right name escapes me. I'll have to look it up.

ELST! Still, that probably "fannish" for Elliot. If your name was Elliot, wouldn't you look for an alternative?