"Army Men" page

[R38 4010]

I agree, also, Robot Chicken made a parody of Nerf by using Nerf Stairs and Nerf doors (!!!)

[jumjum]

Okay, the Canada move is off: I just read handguns are banned there. I hadn't realized they sere serious about all that socialist stuff. Dang. Now I gotta check out the New Zealand highlands...

[The Last Unknown Soldier]

your in luck old jum, don't think they've done it yet, but knowing how all those former colonies are intertwined, they will sooner or later, but ya, all of this baloney about kids getting hurt is stupid, it just a bunch of panic mongers who have watch too much of those incredibly depressing new stations(example, in 1 hour, i watch about tv's falling over and killing toddlers, 50 of the most "unsafe toys" including magnets, dead people etc.) It's not the kids fault, it's just dumbass parents who don't pay attention. If the world actually payed attention to what they where supposed to
a) new like that wouldn't exist
b)people would be politically aware of who they are voting for
c) my personal favorite, liberal democrats would be extinct in less than 3 generations

[Captain Pyjama Shark]

Ahhh... good old army men. I'm glad other people still like them, I thought I was the only one.

[Yossarian]

Originally Posted by jumjum

Okay, the Canada move is off: I just read handguns are banned there. I hadn't realized they sere serious about all that socialist stuff. Dang. Now I gotta check out the New Zealand highlands...

They're not banned, you just need to jump through a lot more hoops to get it.

[jumjum]

I had mentioned using one of my grandmother's garden tools as my "artillery" against army men. It was perfect. The handle was the size of a light-duty hoe (we're talking tools, not...Oh, for God's sake, will you stop it?!). The actual metal digging part was a single "prong" or tine.

Here's a hand-held model; what I'm talking about has a 4-foot handle for use with two hands:



You needed a strong but skinny single tine so it would make a good "blast hole" and throw out a nice spray of dirt, but not just knock everything down at once.

I'd have my men spaced widely enough that I didn't just hit them with the hoe or knock a bunch down at one time. Then I'd chop down fairly hard at an empty spot in the formation and let physics do the rest by making a spray of dirt and debris fly up from the place I'd hit.

In my expert army man combat opinion, the explosion you could cause was the equivalent of something between a 60mm and 81mm mortar, throwing a "blast cone" (depending on the soil type consistency) of from 2 to 5 times the height of the army men. Any men knocked over or thrown around by the blast were casualties. Of course, there were occasionally those catastrophic injuries caused by the hoe tine hitting an army man, putting a huge hole in him, or chopping him in half, cutting off his head, arm, etc. But that was just all the more real I figured, although replacements sometimes were hard to come by. Good thing my little brothers had their own army men from which I could, uh, "draft" - secretly of course.

A word on consistency of dirt. Cultivated or plowed up soil was too loose, as was a sand pile. A grass-covered lawn was no good. Gravel driveway wouldn't really work if you wanted a nice blast hole. So we wound up making our own battlefield which had little grass but wasn't hard as concrete. When we finally got that perfect ground, where the dirt would explode like a real shell, and we'd wind up with our battleground covered by realistic craters and nice foxholes for a man or two to get into, life was pretty good.

[foodmaniac2003]

Does that look like a meathook to anyone else?

I don't know why i'm asking this, but im wondering, did you ever use firecrackers and what-not for that added realism?

[jumjum]

Originally Posted by foodmaniac2003

Does that look like a meathook to anyone else? ...

No, it had a long handle:

Originally Posted by foodmaniac2003

...I don't know why i'm asking this, but im wondering, did you ever use firecrackers and what-not for that added realism?

We only fantasized about taping cherry bombs (the real ones, which were powerful enough to turn your hand into a pink mist, not the pathetic little rip-offs of today) to gasoline model Stukas. We never got past how we were going to co-ordinate the lighting of the short fuse with getting the Stuka airborne and safely away from us - actually we never got to the point of even buying a gas model Stuka, but they were to be had.

I did, however, hang, shoot and immolate a GI Joe.

[JohnWalker]

Originally Posted by jumjum

We never got past how we were going to co-ordinate the lighting of the short fuse with getting the Stuka airborne and safely away from us

I woulda used a Tester paint bomb with like two minutes of fuse

[jumjum]

"Ooooh, yeah, and I read one time about these kids made these electronic switches and stuff, and they were like, remote controlled or something. We can do that!" That was about as realistic as our big plans were. But whatever unlikely method we came up with, it always ended with a vision of a flying, fully fueled gas-model Stuka with a cherry bomb strapped to the wing root. Thew plan was to set it off as it flew. We could not imagine any more beautifully and realistically violent scenario, complete with huge fireball and smoking wreckage.

Rivaling Stuka Burst was the the plan for a hand grenade. Take a cardboard middle from a roll of toilet paper; strengthen it by wrapping it with masking tape or duct tape; fill it with gunpowder; put glue on the outside; roll it in a pan of BBs until they completely coated the outside; insert cherry bomb fuze (they were of a little higher quality than the standard firecracker); light, and prepare to call the ambulance.