Favorites :: Vintage Ads :: 132 Pieces! Two Complete Armies! Historical Action at a Scale You Won't Believe!

For those wondering if these things actually existed, and if so, what they really looked like, well, you're in luck. For, back in the days of 4-Color yore, enticed by that great Russ Heath art on the majority of these ads, I managed to con my folks into letting me mail in my hard earned allowance and aluminum can recycling money on a couple of these enticing offers. Including this one...

And after several months of agonized waiting, this junk arrived.

Pfeh. Not quite what six year old me had imagined. Double pfeh. It's not that the ad lied, mind you. Everything promised was there, just not quite to scale as imagined. And for someone used to the stuff Marx was putting out (Battleground, Comanche Pass, Fort Apache and Navarone playsets), it should come as a surprise to no one that the majority of these wound up as melted slag, victim of my Mattel Godzilla and a handy Zippo. Speaking of scale...

The only other Lucky Product Inc. set I managed to order and receive was the Revolutionary War playset. Again, not quite the scale I was expecting, which is never mentioned in any of these ads, 'natch. Officially, they're HO scale, which, in layman's terms, is really, really, really tiny. Anyhoo, despite the size and a lot of defective mold work, these were kinda fun -- at least they weren't flat. And after some digging, I managed to unearth the right coffee can that held what has survived since the summer of 1976.

Now, sharp eyes will quickly note these two opposing armies consisted of the exact same figures (-- with horse and rider counting as two separate figures), with the exact same sculpts, with the only difference being the color. Also scattered among these figures were some Cowboys and Indians that I couldn't quite place with any comic book ad:

But after some more digging, I found out they were most probably a premium from the long gone Post cereal, Sugar Coated Rice Krinkles.

And we'll polish this post off with a great parody ad from the comic mag, What The -- ?: