Modernising toy soldiers

As I was sorting through the box of plastic soldiers looking for a Habib-lookalike, I started to ponder how little they changed since I was a kid. I paid $20 for a tin of the little buggers at the Canberra markets last year, and junior has been rapt with them ever since. Now that we have a sandpit, he can build some great battlefields that don't involve rearranging the lounge room.



The above photo is a representative sample of what we got.

• A British tommy with mine detector (WWII)
• A tommy from a different set with a flame thrower (had to put that one in there to please some of the members of the peanut gallery)
• A soldier of unknown nationality from the Napoleonic wars (I am not that good at identifying uniforms from that era - comments welcome)
• Another pom, probably a Commando (WWII)
• A nip (WWII)
• Another pom, with Vickers (also to satisfy the peanut gallery that like that sort of thing), and
• a sausage eating surrender monkey

Note the lack of French. I think the box might also contain some septics, but I wasn't going to spend all afternoon sorting through hundreds of little plastic figurines going "Nope, nope, nope". I know that they exist, because I had a set of larger figurines as a kid that you painted and glued together, so you could pose them anyway you liked. I had a set of Marines. They were something like this.

It is now time for Tamiya to enter the 21st century. I am not talking about something along these lines. The problem with producing a set of modern US infrantry is this - who are they going to fight? Where are the fedayeen, the suicide bombers, the exploding children and the torture chambers and the men dressed in burkas?

I'm not sure how Tamiya is going to handle that one. Might be best if they discontinued anything from the period after about 1953.