After a long dry spell in which I did not notice Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy being played on TV, it has seen a comeback and is being shown fairly regularly now. That re-ignited the interest I have in these Play Along Toys figures which came out ~2004 and which I posted immediately after the blog started in Oct 2010. The only prompt for this figure was to remove the base and place in realistic terrain.
Ed
The dimensions of the new diorama board were determined entirely by the materials already available. I already had a scrap piece of Masonite that measured 48" (121,92cm) x 38.5" (97,79cm) for the top and some odd-sized panels of 1" Styrofoam. All that was needed was something to frame the whole thing with. For that I went to the hardware store and bought a couple of lengths of that fake lumber stuff that's precut to resemble dimensional lumber. The 1"x2" material was just fine and after cutting to the desired length, was glued and nailed to the 1x2's. With the frame in place, I glued the Styrofoam panels to the top with Elmer's Wood Glue (also something I already had on hand). Sorry - there's no photos of that step.
Ed
Way back in 2012 I blogged the building of this bookshelf display to use for my space toys. It's gotten a lot of mileage over the years and I really enjoy photographing toys on it.
However, I wanted a larger diorama base that looked more like the moon than Mars. It's great having different colored diorama bases but a gray-tone Moonscape is more in keeping with a lot of my space toys. To that end I had been saving artwork of the Moon for years now, much of which was conceptual art showing what exploring and colonizing that little gray ball in space might be like.
Over the next ten(ish) installments I'll be covering the building of my new Moonscape diorama base.
Ed
This past 100 posts have been both a lot of work and a bit of a challenge. While trying to sort out the various figure sets offered by Forces of Valor / Unimax, they always seemed to throw me a curve ball. New sets - ones which are not listed in any of their literature - kept popping up out of the blue. Case-in-point is the set I now have on order and am waiting for. After looking at the photos in fleaBay it appears to have a piece - yup just one itsy bitsy detail piece - that hasn't appeared in any other set I know of! Had to order it! In addition was their chaotic, off-the-wall, haphazard packaging and set numbering decisions, making it difficult at times to sort out what it is they made and when they made it.
Overall though, the products inside the packing were pretty good. The biggest discrepancy people seem to point out are the hands. If you look at the figures, those guys have some big hands!! Other than that, what you got for the price when bought brand new back in the day, was a quality set at a great price.
So far, the series has covered 20 figure sets over 100 posts. Of that, seven sets were ones that I had unopened out in The Cave or bought new off of fleaBay. The remainder were ascertained from fleaBay sales, FOV flyers, and the back panel of the set boxes. Those are the ones I had to pull figures and accessories from my tote bins. Back in the day I had already bought nearly every set they made, tossed the boxes (no photos), and threw the pieces in several tote bins.
Ed
Here's a couple of the bins I used. The top one held all of the loose figures and bases while the bottom held some of the detail and terrain pieces - there originally was a third tote bin with more detail pieces.
I relied on fleaBay for pictures of the set packaging and contents. Whenever I determined what went into a set, I would pull from these bins and photograph the contents. Unfortunately, box photos usually aren't able to show the 'smalls' - the tiny detail pieces every set contained - so those were omitted from many of the posts.
As you can see there are still a bunch of left over figures and accessories from when I bought two or more of the same set to flesh out the army (plus a few job lots purchased when I was short a figure or accessory).
Here's the last of the figures that came with my MPC Royal Canadian Mounted Police 'set' and the last post for this mini-series. MPC had also made winter-themed playsets that included these older style figures along with skis and poles that would look great when paired with these figures. That would make a great Yukon Territory fantasy playset. Add to that the Ideal tin-litho RCMP streetfront and you'd have one heckuva setup!
Ed
