One of the joys of childhood was receiving a bag or bucket full of these little green men. They were simply the best toy in existence while I was growing up. They were cheap, simple, and best of all, easily replaced. You could spend hours playing with hundreds of these things in the back yard, setting up your own little invasion of Poland. No one ever cried when they lost one, because you had ten others just like it, and for just a little more than the cost of a candy bar (an amount easily moochable from mom and dad) you could bike down to the local Circle K and pick up another bag. The other great selling point of these was that they matured with you. As you grew older the uses for your vast divisions of little plastic men grew as well. Got a magnifying glass in that stupid science kit your aunt sent you for your birthday? Great, it's Sargent Major Flambe and the Burning Brigade. Things grew more interesting when you found dad's lighter. Suddenly you could remold that low-crawling trooper into something that could stand and point his gun at another soldier without looking like he had a fused spine. As you got a little older these men became the perfect targets for slingshots and b-b guns... Want to see how destructive your chemistry set can become? Just use your bucket o' test subjects!
Yes those little green army men were the perfect toy, and every now and the even I pick up a bag (when I can find them). Some call it regression, I call it voodoo on my ex-drill Sargent. | 
