Dvelopment Blog: Setting for Those '80s "Real American Hero" Action Men

Yronimos Whateley

6/10/22, 5:50 PM

Oh, that's a great find there, another one that's totally new to me! Lots of great stuff there, but for some reason, the "Dr. Mindetwist" mad scientist character is my favorite:

Yronimos Whateley

6/16/22, 7:24 PM

I'm not familiar with Rubicon miniatures, but came across two 1/56 hard plastic army kits by them: Viet-Cong Fighters and USMC Marines, and figured I'd give a quick first impression of them here, as Cold War figure kits which can supply some bits for this sort of project.

First impressions: the kits look nice with a lot of great bits, 30 or so figures per box. The kits come with instructions, and probably need them: the arms and so on are not as interchangeable as, say WGA kits, there are a lot of little fiddly bits that don't look like they'll mix-and-match well, and there are a lot of cases where arms come in two or more separate parts, each leg has to be glued to a torso separately, and that sort of thing.

The USMC Marines look like they'll be the most directly useful kit for this project - as Joes, naturally: all but one sprue are identical, with the exception being a command sprue. Most of the figures will be equipped with Vietnam-era US helmets and flak jackets, with old-style M-16s (M-16A1, I believe, with the "carry handles", triangular handguards, 20-round magazines, and few if any rifle add-on accessories, as appropriate for the era.) A few M-60 machine guns are also included, along with a couple M-79 grenade launchers, M-72 LAW Rocket launchers, a couple M-203 grenade launchers mounted on M-16s, and a BAR, a combat shotgun, and a handgun or two on the command sprue. Plenty of ammo pouches and backpacks are also included. The command sprue also includes a few of the sort of odd hand-held bits I really enjoy for making specialists and characters: portable radios (with handpieces which look similar to cell phones or sci-fi communicators), maps/charts/orders, binoculars, and my favorite bit, a hand holding a cigar (or large cigarette?) On the whole, this kit is a great way to field a bunch of rank-and-file "Green Shirts" easily, with plenty of classic Cold War weapons, and a lot of great bits to cook up some eccentric characters with (or simulate popular Joe characters with!)

For those who cannot wait for the WGA "Ooh Rah" set, the USMC marines should kitbash nicely with the Death Fields Weapons Sprue and/or Cannon Fodder bits to stand in for Aliens style Colonial Marines, and they might work well as proxies for those 40K "jungle fighter" factions, though they would certainly not be as over-the-top in musculature and oversized weapons and the like.

The Viet-Cong are not directly as useful for the Joes' Cobra enemies, unfortunately, but are nevertheless an interesting kit with some weird and eccentric bits: the kit inclues several sprues of male Viet-Cong guerillas or soldiers, and two sprues (about 8-10 figures) of female Viet-Cong fighters. The costumes are of the infamous "black pajamas" variety over what I've heard referred to as "Ho-Chi Minh" sandals, with a couple distinctive helmets, some "boonie" style soft hats, and several couple conical "rice hats", and most figures are armed with either SKS or AK-47/AKM carbines, though some handguns, grenades, RPGs, and SMGs of various sorts are also represented. Plenty of ammo pouches and other add-on bits are also included, as are a couple portable radios, binoculars, and other bits.

The Viet-Cong kit would be most useful in this project as a source of kitbashing material, mainly in the form of up to a couple dozen of the ever-popular AK rifles, the classic 20th Century (and beyond) "bad guy" gun, and always a great choice for Cobra soldiers. The RPGs are likewise useful bits to ue for similar purposes. The mag pouches, radio bits, and binoculars could come in handy as Cobra (or Joe) bits as well.

The VC kit is likely to be one of the few - if not the only - source of 28mm scale SKS rifles we're likely to see, and includes a bunch of them - the SKS was imported in large (and cheap!) quantities to the USA after the Soviet Union dissolved and cash-strapped former Soviet nations sold off old arsenals, and is more or less a ubiquitous redneck truck gun and ad-hoc militia weapon of the sort that would be found by the attic-full in post-apocalyptic and zombie settings. It's also just the perfect thing to arm up impoverished militias around the world, and ought to kitbash well with WGA's Afghans, while the VC, with a little creative kitbashing, might possibly be mixed in to proxy for Middle-Eastern or North African fighters such as Afghans and Somali pirates, with the AKs, RPGs, and other bits being just as useful for these conversions. (Maybe Cobra "consultants" are arming and training third-party terror cells or pirate armies?)

The VC bodies are otherwise out of place for this project, but ought to play well with other kinds of pulp gaming: for example, with swords and staves and other melee weapons, they ought to mix well with WGA's Boxer Chinese for general Kung-Fu fighter or ninja fighters. The female VC figures in particular are some interesting bits that could prove useful for assorted projects, given how difficult it is otherwise to find a few good female figures in a historical kit, or indeed a wargaming kitof any sort. The "black pajama" style costumes with sandals are just generic enough to blend into the background of all sorts of impoverished, war-torn, colonialized countries, so these figures might easily be kitbashed with different weapons to represent armies from central/south Ameria, the Mideast, Africa, and across Asia, from the 1800s until the present, depending on how you arm them and what you can come up with for hats.

Overall, both Rubicon hard plastic figure kits are nice kits and probably broadly useful for Cold War gaming purposes and a few uses (in the case of the Marines) that might push them over into modern and even sci-fi gaming, or (in the case of the VC) backward in time as far as the Victorian era for rebel fighters and other peasant soldiers for historical and pulp gaming. For the purposes of this project, the Marines make great Joe "Green Shirts" and hero characters, while the VC are most useful only as a source of AKs and other Soviet bloc weaponry to arm Cobra troopers with.

Geoff Maybury

6/17/22, 6:53 AM

@Yronimos Whateley This post is amazing, go back a while to when we were scale chating remember when I said to you 1/56th is our true scale, 1/64th, and 1/50th work for some cars and civilian lorries, but if you do use 1/48th be prepered for over size, a police cruisers wing, comes to the chest of a man, some times even to his head,( all makes are not equal), yes even 1/48th difers by manufacturers, sadly I know. If it Si/Fi any scale make it work for you. Use 1/56th items, jerry cans, tarps, correct size guns, winches, radio anteni etc, all can give the correct scale illusion, finally alter the doors down or up to suite figures. "LAW MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU, I WANT IT, I`LL HAVE IT, DAM THE SCALE"

Yronimos Whateley

6/17/22, 5:40 PM

Hand grenades and horseshoes, when it comes to my resources and budget :)

The 28mm figures I'm working with are about the same height as the 1/48 scale drivers, and some of the (nonimally 28mm) Reaper figures I've got positively dwarf the 1/48 figures.

I haven't assembled any of the "1/56" figures i just got for comparison yet, but they look pretty close to the 28mm Eisenkern and Cannon Fodder guys I've been comparing the 1/48 drivers to.

if anything, the 1/48 driver is a little smaller than the Eisenkern guy! Cannon Fodder are not really any shorter than the Eisenkern guys....

I think most of the "28mm" figures I'm working with are much taller than they're supposed to be, and are closer to 1/48 than 1/56....

I'm also willing to entertain the possibility that the driver figure is actually closer to 1/56 scale than 1/48 and is actually dwarfed by the vehicle he should be driving - I can't rule that out!

It's the 1/35 stuff that's in danger of stretching credibility as scale models, though - that's where we see chest- or even shoulder-height IFV tires! That is where the real "it's sci-fi so a wizard did it" hand-waving is going to happen.... (It doesn't look any weirder than the typical 40K dimensions, though, to be fair....)

Regarding the painting and assembly of the models I'm building up to eventually test the gaming out with, I'm working in my usual slow motion, but I do have about 80% or 90% of my assembly done (the Cobras and as much of the vehicles as I can without finishing the painting of the vehicle interiors), and all the priming done. I just need to motivate myself to break out the blue and ODG paints and start painting before I can get any further....

EDIT: I've just run across this video, which really made my day - apparently, it's supposed to be prototype next-generation weapon mockups for the Ghanaian military, though it looks a little bit more to me like some Ghanaian sci-fi cosplayers have built some futuristic concept weapons for fun. Is it real, or is it Memorex? You decide:

Either way, bravo to Ghana for getting into the spirit of this sort of thing - the "G" in GI Joe might just stand for "Ghana"! :D

Geoff Maybury

6/24/22, 1:22 PM

@Yronimos Whateley Brilliant vid mate, one day you`ll have to tell me how you manage such long posts. Did you like the Jack Rabbit 4x4 we nearlly brought. Great for GI Joe, if only we could get WA interested in a machine like that.

Jimil Louis

6/29/22, 10:56 AM

A great idea! I only have gotten through half the thread. Will go back and reread the rest later.

Did you know Larry Hama, the original comic book writer, picked up the series again ( disregarding everything that happened under other writers) and it is still going strong?

Grunt, the basic infantry Joe, eventually became a combat engineer after leaving the team and going to college.

JTam

6/30/22, 7:34 PM

@Benjamin Hayward

Got around to watching GI Joe: Retaliation.

Entertaining.

Shame Magic Mike was only in the film for a short while. Also, I love Titus Pullo as much as the next man, but that was the WORST American??? accent I have ever heard.

My favorite part was the on rappel, running sideways, cliff ninjas scene. That was a lot of fun.

Were you suppose to watch the Snakeyes movie first? Because it kind of felt like Snakeyes, the female ninja, and the blind master guy came out of nowhere.