Backyard Battalions Figure – Clothing styles – painting uniform reference
Late 70s / early 80s Stranger Things (Netflix) with some ‘Nam cast offs (bandana, water bottles and binoculars etc) series made 2015 onwards but set 1982/3 onwards. Image source for clothing reference IMDB.
Interestingly Reis O’Brien who designed Backyard Battalion figures used to work as a Creative Director at Funko Pop!
1977 USA (1979 – 1980s UK) The Red Hand Gang
A few clips on YouTube including the catchy ear worm theme tune and end credits – I enjoyed this as a 70s 80s kid so have ordered this on DVD. Nostalgia fest.
80s Films – Stand By Me
Copyright / Guardian and credited agencies – Reference screenshot of Guardian interview showing character costumes, a film made in the 1980s but set in America in 1959.
Image Wikimedia origin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanuts
I am also influenced or inspired by the 1950s 1960s world and cartoon strip featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy and The Peanuts Gang drawn by Charles Schulz
Baseball caps here in Peanuts really were worn for Baseball rather than now as standard American headgear.
Peanuts was drawn from 1950 through to 2000 but staying set pretty much sometime in their childhood somewhere in the 1950s and 1960s.
https://schulzmuseum.org/70-years-of-peanuts-online/
My white and black outline cartoon strip paint scheme was interesting but fiddly.
All of these War Games are of course going on in these kids heads as ‘pretend’.
The most imaginative ‘Kid’ of them all in Peanuts was the multiple role playing Snoopy the Beagle, in his role as a WW1 Flying ace (“Curse you Red Barron!”), Boy Scout Leader, French Foreign Legionnaire … or Happy Days Fonz style street lothario Joe Cool.
Backyard Battalion figures are clearly not British kids, otherwise I would paint them in a more 1940s style of my late Dad’s wartime and postwar ‘Cowboy and Injuns’ type Wide Games.
I have recently reread Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners …. as good as when I read and watched the TV series as a youngster.
I also read the 1920s 1930s based Richmal Crompton’s Just William or William and The Outlaws books, including the 1970s redesign of front covers with more modern boy clothes that I remember.
The only time or period feature that I can see on the Backyard Battalion figures (though not the playset) are the medic’s juice cartons?
“Ruben Rausing first created a product in 1963 that consisted of a box that would be used for containing liquids, more specifically, milk. His creation was named the Tetra Brik … The juice box was officially incorporated into the U.S. market in 1980” – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_box
Other firms Apple and Eve and Minute Maid introduced the rectangular juice ‘bricks‘ 1982/83. Bendy straws came later! The joy of single use plastic …
Blog posted by Mark Man Of TIN 5th May 2024
Scouting Wide Games for the Tabletop and Garden 