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Comment by jansan | Hacker News Reader

I did not know that this was a hobby for adults and I find it interesting that the one kid's toy if the other person's collectible. When I was in primary school in the late 70s we used to buy lots of 1/72 scale soldiers on second hand markets and had buckets full of them. Great battles were fought, and we lost lots of them, because we often played in the garden and we apparently were really good at camouflaging those tiny soldiers. For us they were just consumables, but it seems that we had the same Airfix soldiers that collectors buy today.

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As a kid I had a bunch in this scale in the ‘90s, purchased in bags of something like 50-100 pieces each from an Everything’s-a-Dollar.

They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.

My experience is that a lot of dads are getting into these hobby at around the same time their kids are also the age for it. It's something to spend time with the family, as well as multiple families to do together.

Yeah, I would have assumed that the volumes purchased by kids outweighed collectors by a ton and so the peak would be in the late 90s to coincide with Toy Story 1 and 2

22mm is a lot smaller than the standard “green army men”.

Army men came in various sizes, and one of the most common one was always close to 1:72, or at least that has been the case since the 1980's.

I remember one of my friends had larger, maybe 40mm army men, but my collection was only the smaller size ~1:72/22mm. Same sculpts and colors. Various random no name toy brands.

The green army men of Toy Story and (for example) the Army Men video games were (searches) 1:35. The ones that were that shade of green (or a particular shade of tan—gotta have the other side) and in those poses with those exact sculpts, that every toy aisle or toy store had (in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the US) even if they did also have others.

Can’t edit, so self-reply: the legitimate current producer of this style appears to be called “timmee toys” and a search turns up a whole bunch of exactly the army men of that type, plus a ton of vehicles and such made from the same type of plastic that look familiar from decades past.

My guess is the vast majority of those were/are cheap, generic, Army Men types, usually clones of clones of some 1960's Airfix sculpts. You could buy those in large bags in toy stores in the 1980's and these days you can get literal buckets with hundreds of them online. Much cheaper than the hobby boxes.

I remember as a child I managed to convince my parents to buy a box or two of real Airfix figures in some hobby store, but the bulk of my old collection are generic no-name clones.

I was allowed one set as a kid and chose this to pose with my 1:72 Spitfire & Hurricane.

https://plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=46

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