Influences, Part Two

ALX2000

This is a real guy also. Some regular folks that have been around, on-line and into 1/6th scale, and live in or near San Diego may know him. I know he doesn't know me, because we have never met--face-to-face, or person-to-person. Nonetheless, ALX has his own website and one section of it is called something like T.O.M.B.--Tear Open (your) Mint Boxes. He means to free your 1/6th scale troops from their boxes and stop the madness of collecting "Mint" boxes for a hobby and actually "play" with your troops!

Seems obvious, doesn't it, but years back, collectors had a real thing about getting at least two of everything--one to open and one to save for "investment purposes," or some such silly thing. ALX got me to thinking, "what was I doing--collecting figures or collecting boxes?" When I read through his website about TOMB, it really changed the way I viewed my collection. I started opening boxes and I stopped trying to buy "mint figures for investments." What a silly notion, really. Like...was I gonna be around in 30 or 40 years to collect on my "investment?" Well hell...I just wanted to have fun with my troops like I did when I was a kid growing up in Detroit.

Around this same time, IIRC, other companies were starting to come onto the market, most notably, Dragon, with their highly detailed 1/6th figs. These Dragon figures were head-and-shoulders above GI Joe and 21st Century Toys for authenticity and detail. They also cost a lot more at the time. An average GI Joe cost about $20-25, a 21C fig was about $25, and Dragon was about $35, IIRC. (And please--no need to bust my hump if I got the EXACT prices off a little--that ain't the point.) The point was that trying to buy one of everything was getting cost-prohibitive. Trying to buy TWO of everything was "mortgaging the house" time! Just madness!

So...ALX influenced me to play with my troops and lose the mint boxes AND to stop trying to "collect boxes."

Model railroading

Does this surprise you? Model railroading is sometimes more than just running a toy train around underneath the Christmas tree. Some of us actually devoted entire rooms, even entire buildings, to our model railroad "Empires." The thing that separates the toy trains under the Christmas tree and "model railroading" was size, yes, but a great deal more than that. Many model railroaders actually set up their trains to run "as if" they were prototypical. That means they set up a timetable with regular station stops for their model trains and actually "timed" the runs around their lay-outs, just like the real railroads did to avoid untimely, un-profitable, un-safe delays that could ruin the financial condition of the business, or cause a head-on collision between two trains using the same track! It's more like a strategy game to modellers. It can be complicated, depending upon how many trains you choose to run, or it could be fairly simple if you only ran a single train over your mainline or branch-line lay-out.

The whole point being to "simulate" the actual running of a full-sized, real railroad business.

Now, the influence here was that modellers run an entire spectrum of "realism" with their trains. At one end, you have the absolute detail-conscious "rivet counters" that determined their roads had to be as close to 100% accurate as they could make them, with motive equipment and running stock a complete match for whatever railroad line that particular modeller was simulating, such as the Sante Fe, the East Broadtop, the New York Central, or Virginia and Truckee, etc. There are, or were, hundreds of real railroads and modellers had many to choose from to emulate in miniature. The detail hounds built structures, added prototypical vehicles and detail parts to simulate their favorite road right down to choosing a particular "day" in history for their lay-outs.

At the other end of the spectrum, were the "eclectic" modellers, that could and would "pick-and-choose" the road and the details THEY wanted without worrying about being 100% accurate. They could run a steam locomotive and a diesel loco at the same time and enjoy the contrast. They could run Burlington Northern trains alongside with Louisville and Nashville and not give it a second thought. They ran their railroads as it appealed to them and tickled their fancy.

Or...they could pick the details of the railroad they admired and wished to emulate, while making up an entirely "fictitious" railroad company, terrain, and purpose! I chose to make a railroad that "could have been" in Michigan, that ran over several of the lines that actually did run in Michigan, but through entirely fictitious cites and countryside. All the businesses my railroad serviced were fictitious, but ran "as if" they were real businesses. I made up a name for my railroad that "sounded" like a real railroad. I set up a schedule for trains to operate to simulate when rail cars needed to be dropped at a business or picked up for forwarding. It's NOT a simple as it sounds, when you have move a train from one location to another, break the train, set out or pick up railcars in a particular order, in a minimum amount of time, AND clear the track or return to the starting point simulating the end of the business day! It really IS a complex puzzle to solve and a strategy game to play. The model-building and train running are the obvious "play" activities, but they are NOT the only activities involved!

The influence result here was to treat my collection as something of a real world "business." If ya stop and think about it, the US Army is a "business"--the business of protecting the American people and fostering the policies of the United States. All politics aside--we aren't going there and starting a flame-war--the Army has to run as a business and so does my collection of troops. My analogy breaks down somewhat here, but my collection needs something of a purpose besides just being cool dollies, and so I invented a business for collection. It is an "public" organization that trains private citizens in military subjects while also being a clandestine, under-cover "mission force" to help execute secret missions on behalf of the free western democracies when the overt use of governmental forces would not be "politic."

Think of it as Green Berets teaching American civilians, like "survivalists," and also being secret military agents for NATO. That's kind of how I think of, and treat, my collection of 1/6th soldiers, civilians, and consultants. I "picked and chose" the elements of the "real" Army that I liked and used that idea for my own purposes. I also use as much detail in my troops as I want to use and I ignore what I DON'T want to model. It's "eclectic" modeling.

War-gaming

G.I. Joe and war-gaming--ought to be easy to make the association here! I got started in war-gaming after I came home from Viet Nam in 1972 and met up with a guy at Ft. Knox, Kentucky. He, (his name was Guthrie,) another guy named Dobek, and I rented a trailer off-post near Ft. Knox to get out of the barracks and have some peace and quiet to ourselves and NOT be available when the First Sergeant came looking for "volunteers" after the duty day was over. If ya ain't there, ya can't be "volunteered" for extra duty and you don't end up being the senior man in the barracks when the other guys get all rambunctious and stupid! Ain't nothing worse than losing sleep because some other guys feel the need to get drunk, raise hell with loud obnoxious music, or start a fight with somebody. And, in a barracks, there's ALWAYS something needs cleaning--usually someone else's mess!

Anyway...to pass the time and have some fun, Guthrie taught us about Avalon Hill board war-games. These games, if you are NOT familiar with them, are strategy games sort of on the order of Chess, but simulating combat between armies--usually historical in nature, like World War Two on D-Day. You use cardboard printed "counters" that represent your various units and a large board-mounted or paper-mounted map sheet to represent the terrain you are fighting over.

More advanced and more complicated war-gaming uses miniature pieces like models of tanks, trucks, soldiers, and guns, even aircraft, to represent the units involved. This form of gaming is called appropriately "miniatures" war-gaming. You have to arrange and organize your miniature units into effective fighting units just like the real army must do, and you must employ your miniature models like the real army does. You have to learn "real tactics" or your units get "killed" just like real soldiers in combat. In war-gaming, charts, tables, and dice-rolling are used to determine the relative strength of the units in attack and in defense and to determine "which" and "how many" miniatures are "lost" in a combat engagement.

Here the influence to me is that I began organizing my collection of Joes "as if" they were a real combat unit of troops just like my miniature 1/285th and 1/72d scale armies, which GI Joe IS a "miniature" soldier of a type--a 1/6th scale soldier! So, my Joe collection began to be organized as first a squad, then a platoon, then a company, and so on, up to today, when my troops are loosely organized as a battalion of soldiers with some special reinforcing "attachments," like my Armor troops, my medical troops, and my Air Section of helicopters and jet aircraft. The fact that some of the troops are outfitted as World War Two soldiers and some are outfitted as modern '90's soldiers doesn't really matter to me. What matters is that all the Joe troops have an assigned "unit" they are in and that makes it easier for me to know what I have and where I have it.

Well, it looks like I'll need to run a Part 3 of my influences article. Hope you enjoyed reading about my collection influences so far and hope to have Part 3 ready by next week-end. Thanks for reading!