If there is any kind of toy that requires you to have an imagination, it’s a stick. That’s what we had and we were darn happy with it, dagnabberit. But if we’re talking “action” figures, then you’re going to need a pretty big imagination to spend hours playing with a single-colored, completely unposeable, static-as-crap Cowboy and/or Indian. Yes, I know, it’s probably politically correct to say Native American, but you’re going to have to deal with it because these are cowboys and Indians. And I spent a lot of time having them kill each other. A billion years later, suddenly you realize that there has never been a good super-poseable 1/12-scale Cowboys and Indians line.
The kid version of me shakes his head that it still hasn’t come around. The closest we’ve come lately is the Lone Ranger and Tonto figures that NECA put out based on the movie. So, kind of like that, except with a wider scope and more figures. That’s all I need; just a nice generic line, much like Plan B’s military line. That was essentially an update of the military version of those little green army men, so what we need is a version of that for Cowboys and Indians.
Well, hell, we need that again for military figures, but one bridge at a time, colonel.
I don’t need a deep history or bios or even names for the figures. I think we can all do that for ourselves, and I’m much more concerned with “types” for a line like this than I am in a concrete world. I just need some different kinds of gunslingers duded-up with guns and rifles of all kinds, in authentic-looking Wild West wear, and Indians of different tribes, with their arrows and rifles and tomahawks. And the best part is it doesn’t have to be just black and white good versus bad — there can be good cowboys and bad cowboys, good Indians and bad Indians. There would be the opportunity to build a nice world since, technically, every single figure would be an army builder; all you’d have to do would be to swap around heads and come up with infinite iterations of the concept.
Actually, taking it one step further than just heads, I think the biggest plus to something like this would be coming up with a way to have them swappable at the waist as well, so you can take the modular aspect of swappable heads even further. Since there’s a similarity to them by their very nature, a good way to build an even larger group of cowboys and Indians — and guarantee even more sales — would be allowing one to craft his own version based on his own tastes. For instance, you can buy an all-black gunslinger and an all-white one, but you can also buy another set and swap, so you’ve got one wearing white pants and a black vest and coat, and then the other way around. That would definitely make me buy four instead of two.
In addition to simple clothing swappability, this would be a great way to squeeze in some slight variations of figures that should have been made but haven’t. Maybe a slightly larger cowboy-type with an eye patch that could pass for Rooster Cogburn. Maybe a tall and slender dude with a poncho that could pass for “the man with no name.” Sure, it wouldn’t be exact, but archetypes are archetypes for a reason.
Maybe there could be an Indian with a single tear sliding down his face who can’t stand it when we litter. Who knows! If we’re lucky, we can eventually put together our own Village People.
We’ve spent a lot of time in the last 40 years or so being super-specific with toys, giving them names and factions and intimate back-stories, and that’s great and has produced some superb mythologies and awesome toys, but sometimes there’s a purity in the generic: ninjas and knights and army men and plain cowboys and Indians.
