Wee Men: My Box of Plastic Toy Soldiers

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..."

I have been fascinated with plastic toy soldiers for a long time now. Big. Small. World War 2. Medieval. Soldiers. Civilians. Painted. Unpainted. Boxed. Bagged. Sprued. Loose. Toy figurines. Scale models. And everything in between. If it's plastic, odds are that I like collecting them.

 A toy soldier is a miniature figurine that represents a soldier. The term applies to depictions of uniformed military personnel from all eras, and includes knights, cowboys, pirates, and other subjects that involve combat-related themes. Toy soldiers vary from simple playthings to highly realistic and detailed models. The latter are of more recent development and are sometimes called model figures to distinguish them from traditional toy soldiers. 

from Wiki's entry on Toy Soldier

I can still remember summer days playing with plastic soldiers on our carpet, lining them up in rows and imagining leading them into epic battles. I had small cowboys and indians. Vikings and knights. Germans, Brits, Japanese and Americans. Farm animals and dinosaurs. Aliens and firemen. I graduated to "military miniatures" and started buying figures from Tamiya, Airfix, ESCI and Matchbox. I had favorite figures, those special figures sculpted in iconic poses. Somewhere along the way, I started collecting model armour, wargaming models and action figures -- and I still do -- but my fascination and love for plastic soldiers remained.

I've always included pictures of my toy soldier collections in my other blogs, one for wargaming and another for general toy collecting. But I've reached a point where I felt that I wanted a specific blog to highlight one of my favorite collections. I've been collecting for some time now, and although I've already lost a great portion of the toy soldiers I grew up with, I'm slowly building up a new collection, one I'd like to share with fellow enthusiasts. Thus, Wee Men was born.

To prevent overlapping content with my other blogs, my criteria for including content here are the following:

• plastic only
• figures must be depictions of uniformed military personnel from all eras and may include knights, cowboys, pirates, and other subjects that involve combat-related themes
• Figure scale must be in the ff scales: 1:24, 1:28, 1:32, 1:35, 1:56, 1:48, 1:72, 1:76, 1:87 and even smaller scales
• Posed figures only; no work-in-progress pictures
• Painted or unpainted

Expect pictures of my collections as I get them, paint them and display them. Picture sets from my other blogs will also be ported here, to bulk up the content and to centralize the visual collection. Enjoy!