Here Come The Canadians!

I'm taking a little break from my Savage Mondo Blitzers spotlights to shake things up.  Just a bit.  Every now and then I like to pop into a dollar store and see what cheap wonders they have to be found.  And sometimes nothing beats a nice army man toy.  I usually get my army men by cashing in tickets won at arcades on vacation, but today I decided to grab a few bags just for fun.

I knew going in that I was looking for some army men, but I didn't expect to find any local boys!  I suppose it makes sense selling Canadian army men in Canada, but they still surprised me!  These guys are from the Combat Force "line" (or Forde de Combat if any of them are French Canadiens).  I found two teams - the red squad and blue squad.  Blue's not exactly a traditional Canadian color, but let's not get picky with dollar store stuff.

Real Canadian Heroes!

The Combat Force Canadians are basically your typical army men.  I know there's different scales of army men and probably hundreds of different sculpts out there, but to me these guys look fairly different from most of the army men I've seen.  They're slightly taller, and while they're decently detailed, some of them are also quite flat when you look at them head-on.

You have to be pretty tough to get your head crushed and keep on fighting!

Both the red squad and the blue squad come with jets that no one in their group could actually fit inside.  Also, the red squad comes with the blue jet and the blue squad comes with the red jet.  The figures themselves appear to be from different times in history.  Some of them look as old as WWI (others could be even earlier for all I know).  That makes the thought of them piloting jets even funnier.

I guess the red squad could be used as regular troops while the blue squad could be officers.  The blues even have two bagpipers, which aren't the most useful in battles on the toy room floor, but still a nice addition.  Maybe they could fly the jets.

Each squad comes with a Canadian flag on a flagpole, and I gotta say, it's nice to see.  It's always a bonus when you can play as your own country in your army men battles.  It makes me wonder if the army men in other countries come with their own flags.  It's something I think I'll keep my eyes open for when I travel.  It'd be neat to have a collection of army men from around the world, all sporting their own flag.  The jets on the other hand are super cheap (even for army men) and I could care less if they were included or not.

As happy as I was to find some homegrown army men, I went to the store for some regular army men, and dagnabbit, I got some of those too.

These guys are closer to the standard army men I know, and are still a part of the Combat Force "line" (because let's be honest, Combat Force is not really a toy line).  There's more figures in this pack, and they stand a tad smaller than the Canadians.  They feel cheaper all around actually, with less details than the Canadian figures and a lot more plastic flash that I tried to remove as best I could.

One of the figures came with his right arm almost broken off, so I had to glue it back into place.  There was another wounded army man in the set that stands out from the rest.  The standard figure should look like this:

The "wounded" figure (who I saw before I bought the set and made me choose this one over the others) looks like this:

I guess "wounded" might be putting it lightly.  This guy's dead.  With a large hole in the side of his face and another in the back of his head, he's seen his last battle.  I remember as I kid I found some army-men-type ninjas where the odd one had a hold in their chest or back.  I assumed the holes were deliberate and were made for running them through with swords or spears.  I never grabbed a set, and when I finally realized that the holes weren't meant to be there, I figured I'd never get the chance to find figures like that again.  Well, I guess they're still out there!  This guy's no ninja, but he can fall to a sniper or any other gun-toting army man.  He could even be used as an undead zombie soldier (made all the better with his outstretched hand).  There's a set of Zombies vs Zombie Hunters army men out there that I'm hoping to get one day, and this guy will fit right in.

Sniped!