D is for Domestic Rack Toys!

Picked these up at PW's show in May, primarily because they were cheap! But also, they are new mouldings or sculpts, made in China and sold as rack-toys despite being branded as a domestic 'new toy soldier' maker, although when I say "sold as rack-toys", they also produced large US-style play-from-the-box, 100-piece+, play-sets of famous battles, and in that context these header-carded-bags can be seen as top-up sets.

The play-sets were designed for bulk-orders with the Toysaurus, and when they pulled the plug the series rather petered-out as Mr. McMasters (the M in BMC - Bill McMasters' Company) had used the low-costs of large-unit contracts to over-produce so he could sell-on the 'overspill' to smaller retail outlets; a good reason - I'd suggest - for the Toysaurus pulling the plug?

Now, over a year ago a press release from Victory Buy stated that they were hoping to get the whole BMC range back into production and keep them branded to BMC, but as a lot of the output had been re-branded to Americana for most of the last decade, with some items only being issued by Americana, it remains to be seen how that's going to work!

A feature of BMC is the variance in quality, which can be very good or extremely poor and this is as true for the artwork on cards and boxes as it is for the figures. I'm glad to say this is one of the better ones for both sculpting and artwork . . .

. . . with the terrorist-insurgents giving the Brit's a thorough taste of cold steel down the right-hand side, while Washington chivies his men on, however the artillery in the background seem remarkably unconcerned by the number of air-busts incoming and appear to be in no hurry to organise any counter-battery fire!

The contents of the bag, 'Upstarts' in blue, 'Imperialists' in red, cheese-eating surrender-parasites in white and mercenaries in black (like their panzer corps!). I would put these in the middle of the figure quality - not up to the standards of the Iwo Jima sets (copied from King & Country metal figures), but not as bad as the cartoonish characters from the Alamo sets.

The 50-count seems to ignore the horse, and the figures are mostly realistically posed with plenty of animation, the real criticism is that the legs seem to be too short on some figures, while on others the short torso makes the legs look too long!

What I've kept; one of each which is around 66% of the bag's content excluding the 'free' horse! The rest go to charity from time to time, mixed in with all the spare 'Army Men' who come in.

Some Links

BMC's old but still updated  Blog
Victory Buy's still rather empty BMC page

Old BMC Page

Americana at Hobby Bunker