B is for Blast...From the Past

Or...rather a bit of a fizzle...there was something a bit disappointing about the Atlantic sets. We had seen the little outline or silhouette adverts starting to appear in comics in the mid '70's, and had been dying to find them. When we did they had fantastic action pictures in comic-art style on the boxes, matched with Airfix style line drawing on the backs and we couldn't wait to get them home and opened...

...but when we did...huge bases, gawky poses, massif figures...disappointing! There were some good poses and some good sets, but overall; disappointing.

I bought these in the little Totto-Lotto shop at the crossroads in Neuhausen ob Eck (then a large hamlet - now a small town!) in about 1976 or 1977. I bough the Russians and Germans first and went back for these and the Americans a couple of days later, two boxes of Japanese and the Indian Brigade followed when I managed to talk my long-suffering little brother out of his two-Mark piece - they were a mark each, which at around 5 Marks to the pound was about equitable with the 18 or 19p they were going to cost in 'Blighty' a year or two later.

I was disappointed with them; they were clearly too big, and there were some duff poses, the 'being shot guy' is the obvious dancing loon, but the grenade thrower is none-too-hot either, the prone crawling seems to be doing press-ups and the carrying-casualty vignette never went together the same way twice, nor ever looked like the line-drawing on the back of the box.

But they grew on me and one day in about 1983 I put paint to figures. Dug-out the other day for some comparison shots on the Airfix blog, the paint has survived well over the years, the soil has mostly rubbed-off the bases, but I used to pour it onto wet (ish) paint, so that's no surprise and the paint is going shiny with over-handling. They are a bit too green but otherwise I'm still happy with them - they used to have their own bit of shelf as they wouldn't really go with anything else.