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Bully rounds up the greatest ads of all time.

The Beat is showing her age, but it is fair to say that nothing entranced this young comics reader as much as those ads (drawn by the great Russ Heath) for toy soldiers of various eras on the backs of the comics.

12 Shooting Infantrymen!

12 MARCHING Infantrymen!

Dear God!

Our own wonderful mother, perhaps wearying of treading every night over our standing armies of dinosaurs, cowboys, Indians and Africans (one of the best and if you had it, you know what I mean) quietly discouraged our interest with brutal reality checks, such as “They wouldn’t actually look like THAT, you know.”

In fact, here’s a website that has ACTUAL PICTURES OF THESE SETS! AND THEY DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THE PICTURES!

Comicbookflatsrevwar

The possession of one of these sets was — like our dream of a tabletop football game — never to be realized. That’s why they call life poignant. Thanks for the reminder, Bully.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Holy Wayback Machine, Batman! Those ads take me back!

    However, upon reflection, it might explain my own fascination later in life with Heroclix figures and fantasy miniatures.

  2. Thousands of years from now, archeologists will discover these plastic toys embedded in sandstone, surrounded by other sedentary soils. Some will be horribly disfigured.

    My friends has some of those generic WWII soldiers. They are still produced by someone, available in buckets. (Napalm not included.)

    Myself, reading the ads in my brothers’ Gold Key comics, I was more entranced by the counterculture sew-on patches and the movie posters (especially Raquel Welch’s fur bikini)… and the strange toys which only lasted one season, like that makeup dummy for boys, a master of disguise.

    And could someone please mash these ads with the sea monkeys? That would be cool.

  3. I actually sent away for the medieval set of knights and used them in a history report in the sixth grade for Sister Mary Nativity. I wasn’t disappointed in the set in the least.

  4. I had that set. I used large marbles as cannon balls, and smaller ones as musket shot. the glorious days of fantasy, bloodless battle.

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