Favourite Airfix Figures

[goat major]

Right I'm bored - favourite Airix figures - (1) Those that are actually good (2) Those that are so shit they are great.

1. British Commando officer with pistol. He's seriously cool
2,. Mk 1 British Para touching his toes and waving a piece of toast in the air at the same time

[MarshalNey]

1/72 French Waterloo Artty gun holding cannonball where is willy is(hilarious)
1/72 French Waterloo infantryman standing on one foot with holding his musket in the air. (bad)

In fact I preferred the French Artilerymen marching poses with muskets over shoulder....

[Slugbalancer]

The Afrikakorps gunner sitting on the 28mm AT gun was always a favourite of mine, unreal but good.

[Paul]

1) The WW2 US Marine crouching ushering people forward.
2) The WW2 German bawling his eyes out.

[Zenbadger]

1) British Commandos canoe, I converted one into a fishing float once.
2) Any of the musket butt bludgeon poses, absolutely unusable.

[Purple]

The hopping musket ear one you sent me earlier.
I want a unit of 20

[goat major]

20 ears ?

[Essex Boy]

1/72 French Waterloo Artty gun holding cannonball where is willy is(hilarious)
1/72 French Waterloo infantryman standing on one foot with holding his musket in the air. (bad)

In fact I preferred the French Artilerymen marching poses with muskets over shoulder....

Actually, the French gentleman standing on one foot makes a very passable march attack figure if you fix the raised foot to the base.

Really daft figures..........there are so many. Union infantry lying flat with a dislocated head? The British para shooting pigeons? Every horse with a separate base that Airfix ever made? I'm going to vote for a whole box, WWI Americans, because it contains the greatest number of completely useless figures.

Best figure is either the marching British Grenadier, the marching French Waterloo infantryman or, the marching Waterloo Frenchman in the artillery box. I think perhaps the latter.

[tim.w]

In terms of 1/32

Best:
Aussie with slung rifle - he was always my senior officer as a kid (to be fair all the Aussies are brilliant)
US GI firing carbine - I have a pirated make one that my Grandad helped make a better base for. Its a special figure to me.
British para with Bren, coupled with either Lee Enfield pose

Worst:
German sub mahine gunner. Always falls over. The German infantry are generally not great except the grenade thrower, firing rife and officer.
Most of the British support crew
8th Army Bren gunner having a seizure

[BaronVonWreckedoften]

I always used to wonder why there was no Union infantryman advancing with horizontal musket, like there was in the Confederate set, or no lying down/crawling Confederates.

I lost track of which 1/72 sets they had released, and especially which they had upgraded and/or used the earlier 1/32 sets to improve; eg I often used to wonder if they'd remade the US Marines set and would sneak a peak inside a box of the 1/72 figures from time to time.....but no, still the same crappy 1960s figures rather than the much better 1/32 set they made in the 1970s/1980s. Sometimes I used to wake up having dreamed that they had made things like a WW2 German heavy weapons set (but they didn't.....I don't think); but they did make a "British Support Troops" box, didn't they? Or did they?

And then, when they finally did upgrade a set (eg British infantry for N W Europe) they were spindly, crappy, wrongly equipped blokes in daft poses. Either that, or the different sets from the same period - eg Napoleonics - were a different scale/size (eg French and British Line infantry compared to Imperial Guard infantry and Prussian Landwehr; or British hussars riding horses that would have kicked the shite out of those being ridden by the cuirassiers).

I do remember a series in Almark magazine (whose head office was just round the corner from my house) that showed you how to create all kinds of AWI figures from not just the Washington's Army and British Grenadier sets, but the Napoleonic French infantry, US Cavalry and various others, too. I reckon that's what started me off. I made all of them, and then came home from school one day to find my mother had thrown them all away because the next door neighbour had upset her.