Author's Note: This is just a story I'm writing because I'm bored, but I might as well post it anyway. Even if it is a little silly.
Call of Duty is property of Activision, I own nothing and make no profit from this whatsoever.
Who here remembers the army men? You know, those little green plastic toy soldiers that have been around since the 1950's and are still around today?
Army men are one of the most timeless classic toys of the modern age, and chances are that if you were a boy in America anywhere from 1945 to the present day, you probably owned a set of army men or at least you knew some other kid who certainly did. They're cheap to the point of being practically disposable, you can buy a whole bag of them from the local dollar store, supermarket, or Wal-Mart for a dollar or two, and you could fit them into any scenario you wanted, anything you could think of! For a very low price, you could get a whole platoon or company of little green plastic soldiers, and sometimes even get extra goodies such as little plastic tanks, jeeps, trucks, helicopters, artillery, planes, Humvees, armored vehicles, or even light fortifications like field tents, sandbag walls, or barbed wire fences.
Army men were one of those toys that were extremely versatile. You could play mock battles with them in the sandbox or on the living room floor, have them fight your toy dinosaurs or monsters, play out games of pretend scenarios, or if you weren't the imaginative type, they were still fun to take out into the backyard and blow them up with firecrackers or soak them in lighter fluid and melt them with an open flame. We used to call that one "Roy Mustang Fire Alchemy" back in the day.
(On an unrelated side note, a good M-80 firecracker can blow up a mailbox completely over a house! I later found out that was a federal offense, but in the hills of rural Appalachia, that was a cool Halloween!)
The most common type of army men were modeled after American soldiers of World War II and The Vietnam War, with companies like Louis Marx being well-known for their World War II G.I.'s and Tim Mee was better known for their Vietnam War and Cold War era troops with the M16 assault rifles and other similar military equipment of that era. In fact, most of the cheap army men you find at the dollar stores and Wal-Marts are usually Chinese-made clones of Tim Mee figures. Louis Marx also made other World War II army men and they included both the enemy troops such as the Nazi Germans and Imperial Japanese (albeit with the more politically correct modern flags of Germany and Japan) as well as other allied troops such as British soldiers and Soviet Red Army troops.
Louis Marx went out of business around 1980 or so, and Tim Mee did go out of business for a while only to resurface in the current 2010's decade, proudly manufacturing high-quality army men right here in the United States of America, including their famous Vietnam War-era troops as well as World War II troops, military vehicles, and other figures as well such as historical soldiers, Cowboys & Indians, zombies, and sci-fi spacemen and aliens.
That's right, there were other types of army men figures out there in addition to the typical World War II and Cold War G.I.'s and there still are some of them out there if you know where to look.
The most common variants were good old-fashioned Cowboys & Indians from the Wild West, obviously intended for Wild West-themed games. The typical accessories that would so often come with Cowboys & Indians were things like horses, old-timey Civil War-era cannons, covered wagons, stagecoaches, wooden fences, canoes, totem poles, tipis or other historical Native American dwellings, campfires, and tents. i really liked the Cowboys & Indians because I loved old campy Western movies as a kid, and I liked the fact that as a general rule, they also worked very well with my toy train sets.
There were other types of army men-type toy figures as well, such as historical soldiers from the American Civil War or the American Revolutionary War, along with more exotic historical combatants such as Pirates, Knights, Vikings, Roman legionaries, Ninja, and also rarer figures like Cavemen, Samurai, Greek hoplites, and even Celtic barbarians. You even had a few civilian figures such as police officers, firefighters, paramedics, construction workers, and the like. One company even made a now very rare set of 1940's-era Mafia gangsters in fedoras and pinstripe suits, armed with the stereotypical Tommy Guns, baseball bats, and handguns, the figures themselves molded in black or gray soft plastic.
There were even a few sets of fantasy monsters as well as sci-fi spacemen and aliens based on the classic pulp sci-fi books and B-movies of the 1950's and 1960's. Modern companies even make zombie figures that can easily be found around Halloween as well as from online stores, and they are typically in a bright neon green color.
However, World War II and Vietnam War troops molded in dark green soft plastic were by far the most common types of army men figures, with Cowboys & Indians in a somewhat distant second, both in popularity and availability. But enough of the information dump for now.
I hope you enjoyed this nostalgic trip down childhood memory lane. I know I certainly have enjoyed it. Now that the history lesson is over, it is time to start the story itself. A story of real combat and plastic men, of toy soldiers fighting real battles of toybox warfare.
It is time for Call of Duty Jr.