Marx 45mm 1st Series GI's (look like Payton) - Pose 1 UPDATE

When I started posting playset pieces for Marx's Training Center and Battleground playsets back in May I had no I idea the series would run this long and - with no end in sight - it's gonna be running longer!

I thought that my last post of the Marx 45mm Series 1 GI's back at the end of August would be the end. I was wrong. At the time I had perhaps nearly 100 figures total (loose plus what was in my boxed set) but as I scoured the The Cave looking for more Marx pieces to photograph, more and more of these little buggers kept crawling out of the woodwork! Now, there's nearly 200 of them! This has enabled me to see more differences and do more comparisons. Let's look at what I found out about 'Pose 1' (named that for no particular reason other than it was the first figure I photographed).

Ed

Here are the two Pose 1 figures posted back on 9 Aug:

No Base

Small Base

Since then, after looking at all the figures and photos in the collection, I determined that Marx had modified its tooling such that a 'medium' sized and 'large' bases can be added to the mix. One can see by the 'no base' figure that these were probably a real bear to stand up on their own when played with by Junior. My educated guess is that Sears and Montgomery Wards (the two largest sellers of the Training Center playsets) were receiving complaints from their customers which they, in turn, passed on to Marx. The tooling was modified slightly with small bases added to most of the figures. Apparently, the small bases - which hugged the bottom of the GI's boots - didn't help that much either, and the bases were again modified to a 'medium' size. 

The last release of these 45mm Series 1 GI's saw several changes: 

-the bases were enlarged yet again to what I call 'large' base figures

-the color was changed to a deep brown

-the plastic was more waxy.

This photo was taken just less than two weeks ago and shows 'no base', 'small base', and 'medium base' figures

Medium Base

Large Base

Okay, something odd happened out in The Cave. These next photos were taken back in 2021 when I started my Marx vs. Payton photo series (which will start being posted once the Marx stuff is finished). The photos clearly show a later issue dark brown GI with a large base. The problem? I can't find him - he went AWOL!

(BTW I don't know why the other two figures came out looking such a light color - probably poor editing on my behalf)

The figure on the far left is clearly a 'large' base

Fortunately I did take several photos back in 2021